Leap years. Thoughts that will never
learn to fly. A chance
that will be reborn as pride
if time so decides.

I recognized you by the taste
of your lips - too sweet to be true.
I know there will come
a time when the eyes will forget
how to cry.

What I will have left of you is a tear
turned into amber,
a silent future, a cursed era.
There will be neither shadow
nor light anymore.

There will be no more silent breath,
suffering word, fog that fawns
on my bare knees.
Tomorrow we will wake up
on the other side of loneliness -
where forests burn,
where freedom becomes torment.

I tried to admit to a life
I did not commit. However, fate,
this incurable hypochondriac,
wanted to sentence me
to a lifetime of memory.

Beyond the barricades of memories,
grace, harnessed to heaven,
echoes back to me; somewhere inside
there are sleepless tears I will never
understand. I can't dream in a way
that would make the earth
kneel before me.

I dare not look in such a way
that the sky departs forever
into the unknown.
Time will forever remain a desert island.

Love is non-mechanical
it doesn’t crank, pinion
or always work dependably.

In cavalier moments, I thought I knew
something of how it all works—
it’s apertures and shafts—
its grinds and reciprocations.

I’d judge it’s motions
work its levers, judge its spins,
and address its slippery angles.

You could call me obsessive
but obsessive people don’t
obsess this much.

You could call me compulsive
but the compulsive aren't
this compulsive.

All I can do is poise, balance
or swipe a little black credit card.
It’s the only magic I have.

I can’t turn bread into wine
or fish into water.

I can’t make the blind walk,
the deaf to see or the lame to
taste again.

God reserves some miracles,
keeps them as close to the vest
as cards.

Jugglers work the circus,
mimes thrash to communicate,
and tightrope walkers fall.
.
.
Songs for this:
Viva la vida by Cold Play
When There Is Love by Karen Sokolof Javitch
The Rainbow Connection by Sarah McLachlan
.
.
How about a Christmas playlist! Because Christmas is in 10 days!
https://daweb.us/xmas/Christmas_29mp3

The night has
settled.

Unsettled questions
swim in the dark,
crashing against
the walls.

The silver moon
spills softly on
the white sheets.

Empty corners
bleed into the heavy
air.

Unspoken secrets
decay in the carton.

Silence has come
with absolution.

The violent grief
of the lonely hour
shall abandon the
sails too.

And adrift would
be my belongings,
swirling into the
dark currents,
crashing against
the doors and the
windows,
knocking on my
dreams, my thoughts,
and more.

And where shall I
be,
when the dust
has settled,
and the shipwreck
has become part of
her abandonment?

Every piece of
her being
sowed in the
dust of this cunning
planet.

No one to see
for what she has
now become,
no one to remember
her name,
or mine.

Pin her upon bulletin boards
like some poster of a prize to possess             the crowd
putters past the perfect picture,
eyes across her breast
eyes averted from her breath:
for the smell reminds them she is not dead
she is something more she is their darkest moment she is aliv—
forget forget forget

They tied her with string, dulling pain
with sweet words, promises
of wealth
decay.
Maybe with time comes the slow death
of love, the dissolving
of once-revered offerings upon the shrine
of the meaning of "human"
on SALE. Gaze! Gaze upon
her line-marks of your so-called
respect slashing into her,
bands of red sash upon her pillars                      you, YOUR
hands suffocate,
deface that sweet taste of her crumbling of hash marks counting the days until the object falls to waste, discarded to die.
Years and years, again and again.
New posters, new pictures, new crowds.

forget forget forget

To Liz Arnold

Her slicing eye carved all
through me as she spoke

stories of marriage, cancer,
poems never to be written,

of garden stones and cocktails,
of **** coffee house parties.

What did she think of me,
more boy than man, sitting

in her worn maroon chair,
telling her of country miles,

of listless marriage, of nights
wide and deep and strange,

of the river bed of the heart,
& poems never to be written?

Liz stared intently, her eyes
dissecting; I never did know.

How neatly a cat sleeps,
Sleeps with its paws and its posture,
Sleeps with its wicked claws,
And with its unfeeling blood,
Sleeps with ALL the rings a series
Of burnt circles which have formed
The odd geology of its sand-colored tail.

I should like to sleep like a cat,
With all the fur of time,
With a tongue rough as flint,
With the dry *** of fire and
After speaking to no one,
Stretch myself over the world,
Over roofs and landscapes,
With a passionate desire
To hunt the rats in my dreams.

I have seen how the cat asleep
Would undulate, how the night flowed
Through it like dark water and at times,
It was going to fall or possibly
Plunge into the bare deserted snowdrifts.

Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
Like a tiger's great-grandfather,
And would leap in the darkness over
Rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.

Sleep, sleep cat of the night with
Episcopal ceremony and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams
Control the obscurity
Of our slumbering prowess
With your relentless HEART
And the great ruff of your tail.

So that you will hear me
my words
sometimes grow thin
as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.

Necklace, drunken bell
for your hands smooth as grapes.

And I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy.

It climbs the same way on damp walls.
You are to blame for this cruel sport.
They are fleeing from my dark lair.
You fill everything, you fill everything.

Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,
and they are more used to my sadness than you are.

Now I want them to say what I want to say to you
to make you hear as I want you to hear me.

The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.
Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.
You listen to other voices in my painful voice.

Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.
Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.
Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.

But my words become stained with your love.
You occupy everything, you occupy everything.

I am making them into an endless necklace
for your white hands, smooth as grapes.

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a ******
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.