Temporal Anomalies and Mute Dedication

This is for you, with your intricate pinions
Your soulful intensity, walls, and intentions
This, my dear friend, is a poem that's true
This is my poem for you

This is the scent left behind on a pillow
So soft and so faint and so delicately mellow
This is the touch that still burns on the skin
This is desire worn thin

This is the clock, our old hollow enemy
Endlessly ticking and marching relentlessly
Posture like lovers, loving like friends
This is how time makes amends

This is a song, and then two, and then three
All of them sharing the same melody
Playing on repeat, and playing for two
While tangled, I lay against you

This is the clock again, far past its prime
Telling once more of the passing of time
Whispering to us that years have gone by
While seconds are felt in your eye

This is our twining, our trust, and our dreaming
Our careless caresses and languid mute scheming
This, my dear friend, is a poem that's true
And this is my poem for you

If Desires Were Pinpricks

If desires were pinpricks
  I would be covered in spots of red
 Bleeding freckles, washed in pain
Rinse under the cold water, in the rain
Rinse under the hot water and be burned by flame
  If desires were pinpricks
I would have the constellations in my skin
 And all the starry universe contained therein
A wound, small and red
However seemingly limited
  Can become gaping, a hole
  A window to my raw and bleeding soul
 If desires were pinpricks
Then pull the bandages across my eyes
  Place upon them each a coin
For passage into a new day
   And let these constellations be washed away

Artist: Caroline Jamhour

For Ryan, For Paul

You grew from the delicate child of steel into the Metal Man.  I have a memory of you, twisted into beautiful scarred shapes, with amazingly sublime curves and sudden sharp edges. You can be warped. Beaten and hammered. You can be so hot as to melt and burn. You can be cool, firm, strong.  Your most intricate details are equal to your most mutilated parts.  Your beauty is in your unique flaws.

Because of this, you cannot be broken.

Where does it go? I don't quite know.
Into the woods in a golden flow.
Up to the sky like a misting glow.
But where, oh where? I don't quite know.

Disparate voice, or disparate hand?
You could feel king of the sea and land.
You could take hold of that wisping strand.
Oh! For that unity, that would be grand.

Our Side of the Lake

The clock has stopped.
At least, it seems like it. We hope it has.
Time seems frozen, and all is quiet.
All except us,
whispering in the silence.
The sounds of the traffic cannot completely reach us here,
here next to a quiet lake with many roads across it.
Roads drawn long by the streetlights,
drawn by the moon,
drawn by the starlight.
The roads waver, and sway, never disappear.
But we stay here, on the dark side of the water.
This side is quieter, this side is sweeter.
This side affords us the luxury of not counting the minutes between light cycles,
And ignoring the chime of the crosswalk.
These things have time and purpose.
They are predictable as the impending dawn,
They keep asphalt Life on the move.
Stately and timely, go and stop.

But on our side, it is hushed.
We can only hear Time distantly.
Our side of the lake has grass and trees.
Benches are barely discernable in the blackness,
and the path is only a black smear under our feet.
I know that down this smear lies the ticking of a clock,
and that soon we must be reminded of it.

But not yet.
Not yet.

We count the steps back to time reluctantly.
Each is accounted for with equally uncounted kisses.
Eight steps.
Ten steps.
Time is still on hold.
It awaits our approach back to the light before crashing into our awareness.
As we reach the road, flooded with that orange glow,
We become conscious of Time again,
and we must resist that overwhelming desire to flee back into the warp.
Run back into that silence and timelessness
that exists on our side of the lake.

Paradise

A thousand suns burn on your lips
Hotness around your mouth, down your neck, into
A tangle of hair,
Curled and smudged in the dark.
The dashboard gives off ghostly light
As we wrestle with time
Wrestle with motion
Wrestle with fast and slow and every speed in between
Sweetness like honey and whiskey burning my throat
Until I can
Barely
Speak
In throaty desperate tones
So I do not speak at all.
Why speak, when fingers and
Lips and
Divine breaths of air
Rushing endlessly past my prickling tingling skin
Speak volumes in only sensations
Words are meaningless
Compared to the senses
Your smudged hair like grey and black charcoal
Soft yet dramatic
Your eyes of distant flame
Dark and deeper than a philosopher's soul
Fingers and flesh and love
Running rivulets of lava down bare skin
Falling into eachother exhaustedly
Collapsing against sweat and cool breeze
Outlines against the backlight
Against the outside world looking in through the window
And whispering "hush, hush"

"Never disturb lovers at rest"

The wounded phoenix, in all his fire
Eyes of the red-scorched sun that consume all he sees
Flicking, tasting the air
Again and again he rises, again and again he falls
Battered from his youth, knowing nothing but flame
Unable to regenerate completely
Unable to rejoin what was broken
Yet unable in his pain to move upwards fully
He feels the majesty of flight
Then is toppled
He rejoices in the wind under his wings
Then plummets
The crash always preceded by unimagineable pleasure
He revels in the sensations
All the more aware of the immenent collapse

When the fall is inevitable
And he knows nothing else
Twisting, burning, furious, and passionate
Yet tender, gentle, and breathless
How can he stay away from those heights
The heights that he was so brutally pushed from
The heights that cause the downfall
His eyes flashing with flame
Burning with desire
Charging the cliff face to climb up to the sheer dive

And the wounded phoenix, flying
Only to plummet again

When the plummet is all he knows
The rush is equally desired and feared
And soon he will fly again