A Few Short Words

The sun’s glare tears through the orchard’s canopy,

dapples grass and leaves.

A first budding presumption of nature

hangs fragile from a lowly bough.

Quiet expectation,

nervous anticipation,

unknowable excitement,

percolate and permeate its juvenile core.

As sun and moon play catch and kiss,

celestial chase of aeons,

presumption steadies,

and nature’s bud grows, more sure

of its place in the world.

The chase continues

but the pace slows.

Our bud, ripe and red,

no longer juvenile,

but strong and lush,

rocks and readies

for the fall of age,

and leaps.

The distant world rushes forward,

eager to greet, anxious to meet

nature’s daring presumption,

who unprepared, is battered and bruised

by the world’s callus enthusiasm,

thuds and rolls,

stops and lolls.

A last vestige of nature’s presumption

sits fragile on the leafy ground.

Peaceful degradation,

slow degeneration,

last disintegration,

permeate and percolate its senile core.

The world rots away

as sun and moon

catch and kiss and play.

The night moves so fast

but they stay the same.

Always the same.

That’s the thing

about people,

they only change

the skin they’re in,

not the frame.

I lost my favourite jacket,

the one you gave me

in the cold.

‘It looks better on you.’

You said it smiling,

that was warmth enough.

All I have left of you

was stitched in its seams

and worn across my shoulders.

Now all I have left of you

can’t keep me warm.

‘Drama queen,’ she says

and smirks in that way

that means more

than the words she uses.

Sometimes I catch her

looking at me,

as she does,

with just a hint

of mischievous mystery,

and I wonder,

as I often find myself doing,

what goes on behind

those gorgeous green eyes.

When I was younger man

I made castles built of sand

and cried when they got wet.

I watched and wept

as my dreams turned to mud,

my crenelations crumpled

and my ramparts ran to ruin.

I wallowed, worn and wary,

wondering what if?

But now I stand on surer soil

and I’ve built a better building

from more meaningful materials

with dreams that don’t destruct

at the sucking of the sand.

How is it that you keep me

so completely in your thrall?

With so few many sentences,

with so few words at all.

When even from such distances

the silence seems to speak.

I hear your voice inside my head

and feel my knees grow weak.

You’ve become my favourite moments

even when you aren’t around.

I don’t think you understand,

that your impact’s been profound.

I know I’ve never felt this way,

or felt anything at all,

when even from such distance

I’m completely in your thrall.

There’s a mystery in her eyes

I want to solve, to see dissolve.

I want her eyes to look at me

the way I see her smile

snap like lightning

across her face

and illuminate all around her.

It’s so hard to leave

when you’re lying there,

almost bare, supine, divine,

with soft warm thighs

and deep wide eyes.

Lips that part invitingly,

inviting me to stay a while,

to kiss your smile

and tour the contours of your skin.

To draw you in with eager hands.

To feel you, hold you,

let my arms enfold you.

To mend the schism

wrought by my decision

to get up and out of bed today

instead of stay

and play with you,

a game of words

that leaves me breathless,

strips me speechless,

submersed in the sublime,

removed from time,

panting, warm,

and satisfied.

Hands that seek and find with ease,

a thing thought lost, some inner peace.

Lips that search the midnight dark

and meeting generate a spark.

Enough to power all the world,

or so it seems, for when unfurled,

this peaceful, placid passion,

while not demure within it’s fashion,

is still somehow so relaxing,

a gentle love that is not taxing.

Even let me dare to say,

that when this paring has its way,

the world will see it’s for their taking,

a universe that they are making,

of hands that search

and lips that seek,

of minds that match

and hearts once meek,

rejuvenated by each other.

One simple thing,

the perfect lover.

It resonates in the silent, shared,

pared-back comfort of company,

in the affluence of affection

of an arm around my waist

and fingers laced to hands

so sweetly sewn together,

palm to palm, so calm whenever

they chance to find the other.

There are pictures in a gallery

I curate in my mind,

they’re made from words

and hung with twine,

and in these perfect pictures,

I can see that you are mine.

A radiant array of rhetoric,

carefully composed,

clad in colored consonants

that leave my heart exposed.

A simple skirt of syllables

that sits on slender hips

and slowly draws the eye

from waist,

to chest,

to lips.

A portraiture of poetry,

hung on haiku hair.

Laconic, lilting, lyricism,

like sonnets made from air.

I can tell you the moment,

the first time I fell,

when my stomach jumped

and my heart skipped,

when I felt my shell

crack, crumble and fall away.

I can tell you the moment,

though it happens again

a dozen times a day

and each time like falling,

caught by the thought of you.

There are traps

recessed inside my mind

that spring upon me suddenly

with steel-intentioned teeth

and gnash against my pride,

but do not kill so much

as mutilate my self esteem,

to make it seem like my wellbeing

were some woodland creature,

worn down and wounded,

wailing and writhing,

waiting for redemption.

She laughs at me

in the simplest of ways,

no guile nor malice.

She laughs the way

a light illuminates.

She’s incandescent

in her joy

and I fall for her.

In the midnight susurrations of my city

I discovered the reason I’m not real.

I perched on the night’s sill,

trying to believe there was more

than worn out words

and misshapen meaning

scrawled in erasable ink.

While the emptiness of my hands

holds so much promise,

I listen to the ocean

in the cup of my palm,

dreaming of something more

than memories, the sting of salt

and the dying echoes of skylarks past.