You’re right – love isn’t just a word

when wrought honestly, love is a life time

spent without expectation of return

love is forgiving when it hurts

letting go of bitterness even as it turns

into your favorite darkening flower

blooming her fragrance into hallways without doors

love is waiting when it hurts to stay still

chasing, without shoes, that fleeting shadow

burning in your chest, turning to pyre and soot

love is you, but love isn’t us

we are divided as a piece of glass

will separate storm from poets and beggars

I light the tree and think of all the years

wound around themselves until no beginning found

of the ache I carry as I would try to conquer thorns

deep in the felt, deep in the felt

of my soul, your soul, shared, changed, lost

we spin until disorientated, punctured producing blood

and there I am again, feeding grey quilled pigeons

with a hamburger before I quit meat and learned

the fear of dying and self preservation

you said “don’t feed them, it only makes them

bolder, sicker, they are after all, feral.”

But I can’t help it, their hungering eyes

the soft bob of rosy cheeks and side-ways

glance, knowing I could just as quickly

lash, hurt, turn inside out

a truce between starvation and freedom

a lot like us, watching November skies

Sagittarius searching for Gemini among

distant black unseen stars

I smell you in my own skin, the things

we never say when we feel pain

I speak out into opaque night, reaching

where fox shadows mirror and blur

owls fly silent as velvet overhead

and all I want is to see your face

and say I love you with all my being

even as I have no expectation, no rule

still, still, still

ever and always

you.

5 Replies to “Puncture”

  1. To love fully in the moment
    with no thought of the morrow
    of neither the length
    nor brevity of life
    an opening outside of time
    inhabiting a hologram
    past, present, and future
    memory, feeling, hopes and fears
    merged as one
    in that radical acceptance
    of what can and cannot be
    than that, no greater courage
    or more abandoned folly
    no greater joy and pain

  2. Most of this is a love poem. The rest … reads like someone with a constant broken heart.
    It’s truly beautiful.
    Especially these lines:
    “I light the tree and think of all the years
    wound around themselves until no beginning found
    of the ache I carry as I would try to conquer thorns
    deep in the felt, deep in the felt
    of my soul, your soul, shared, changed, lost”

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