Standoff

If I go near that flame
Scorching inside my finger tips
I will let it consume me
Lick my skin into scars
Crumbling down to the earth
Leeching into its soil

Already a wounded phoenix
Having tasted the ash on my tongue
Volcanic
Noxiously sweet
Subsequently spat out with disgust
At what love can become

Silence plays on my lips
Still drawn to the overwhelming heat
That can succumb me in its gentle breath
Sheds my skin in one graceful motion
My nakedness complete
My relief unbearable.

Mineral Deposit

Folk music
Poetry
Rivers without banks…

Lyrically reading to you
During our three day love fests
My masterful intensity melting
Into puddles of sentiment

“I will love you always” dropping from my lips
The wine of words that are neither lie
Nor surrender
Toasting to love’s ever-changing definition
Knowing how it can turn acerbic
Or sour into distant memories
That somehow sweeten as they age

Nostalgia is a budding curiosity
Pertaining to a past that is nothing
If not irrelevant
Excepting the friendships that have blossomed
And the roots that were exhumed

En La Bureau

My eyes look down at a relic, in a drawer, a tightly closed drawer. It wasn’t really open all those years… just sort of ajar. Careless hands rifling through all the delicate pieces inside. I never bothered to stop them—observing them instead, coolly, from my distance, from the thousand mile stretch between my eyes and heart.

You know I won’t resist temptation; some days I think you count on it. “Don’t water it down,” is the constant admonishment to myself. Bury the truth in a metaphor—it’s only another form of silence.

Whispers seem slight, but they rend the dark.

After the drawer slams shut, an echo ripples through my mind-- a name. The same one I catch on the wind when I’m alone. The first of many gifts from my mother…

“It means beloved… and there isn’t anyone moreso…” the girl clenching my heart said to me. Later, she reached her mouth down and ever so daintily tore into its flesh. Chewy, delicious, refreshing… it tasted like tarragon pulsing on her tongue. How can she smile at me with my soul dripping down her cheeks like burning candle wax?

I miss the cataclysmic jolts of love rushing at me in morphing images of artistic mélange. Half of me craves to feel the depth of my passion erupting again; the other half remembers that it only leads to death by paper cuts.

Right now the scales sit in perfect balance. Breathlessly, I wait for the beautiful stranger who will come tip them.