Category: Poems
Last Chances Are Seldom That
(Sappy love poems with a good line here n there. 🙂
LAST CHANCES ARE SELDOM THAT
Betimes, I weary of this life, even my own name.
Far horizons sing more clearly every day
Tho I long for them no more.
The trick of the light
Turned to a trickling
After rising oceans
Stole the land I stood upon.
This place is only an awakening
I play at touch while longing for a full contact event.
I flirt when I long to fall & be fallen upon.
I bring forth this love like a treasure found in the junkdrawer.
So long pushed aside looking for a real thing.
There is only potential to be made of
Skin & tactile surface
These imply anticipation, a discovery of imagination…
All I need would be/could be given into Love
I am willing now, to release & relearn
To go public with private passions…
Bring me to the Gate, O Love,
I weigh the latch in hand & lift it free.
∉
I could care less of being found beautiful
I am as you imagined me
Finally, in the state of knowing it so.
The thoughts of others so long imagined
No longer slow me down
Or turn me away.
They travel over me as water over stone
Giving off rainbows.
A quicksilver moment
The prophecies predicted you
But left out so much –
You’re married
You’re committed
You’re entangled
You’re a stranger, really.
These are not up to my undoing.
We are close by circumstance only
Who started it anyway?
So unlike me, yet it must have been.
I am an ever-opening heart.
I am the last to love, an unmarked trail
Full of my own footprints,
Far too familiar from following alone.
∉
The light has changed. I’m in another era
From that last bumbling home.
There’s a mystery as to what could be discovered,
The farthest indelible vista
Of the lover I see reflecting in your eyes.
I feel an impish sense of grace
A dance of infinity energy
Love animates my bones, adds a sparkle here & there
Smooths my skin, manifesting like silvering rain,
I will find you; I will sing you onto the waters where I walk
Upon your thoughts
I am always ahead of you…waiting
∉
The trips & triggers of clandestine love
Surround me, a deepening mystery
Of which I shall not speak.
A white flash of light in closed eyes
Turns my sleeping head to you
I walk with my heart in both hands
This simple single offering to you.
∉
Come to me
Remove the layers of obligation
Like overheating wool
Your heart is stiff with scars
I will make whole.
Offer me but a passing glance
A ticklish whimsy
My heart will do the rest
Take me at my words, this austere truth
Gone lush with longing
Only this: to feel you skin to skin
Like air in secret places
Cooling fevers of unknown origins.
It’s not that I’ve kept myself
For anyone, I’ve just kept myself
Because I didn’t know you were here to share this with.
Your hands stay at your sides
When I will them “touch me.”
Your body stays separate
When I will it to melt into mine.
∉
Let’s redefine all boundaries
Bridge all separations
Because we’re made from love for love…
I can’t be shy about us any more
I love your smile; I beg your touch
I wait your arms returning around me.
I look at you
And there isn’t a “no” to be heard.
∉
Last Chances & Random Rhymes
The lights are all off
Moonlight through the window,
Strange Venetian stripes
Make you exotic.
Words will not say this
Like your hands on my skin
Chilled & heating both
Speaking cell to cell
A communication nonpareil.
I need a man with long arms
Willing eyes – see past this skin
To the heart ablaze within.
Take me now, I’ll last forever
The end of time never so near
As when we kiss & match our bodies,
These beginnings opening fissures.
No word so pure as touch
Escapes this pen
Time has melted from the clock
Held tight to you again.
∉
I promised to clean house
But I am writing poems
About backing into love
Since we cannot meet face to face.
There has to be a way
Around or through
I refuse to take this underground
When all I can see is your sky to fly into.
∈
The Most Dangerous Words
Are those unsaid
They hide like thorns in greenleaves
They are unkind, unkempt,
Blackened by Truth.
I brawl & bawl & break open
As they pierce me.
Something is bleeding here.
All I ask for is a heaven
To rest in.
A sigh to rest upon.
A love to press into
To wrap myself around
All I have is reaching fingers
When we have to draw apart.
My eyes would fill with you
And not these tears
But love is a
Never-ending ending.
∉
There is an alarm going off in my heart
Like that insistent reminder charm
Messages await.
But this is written in blood & fire
I die to hit the “send” key –
Releasing our love to the world.
I have made up a story
I am pretending your regard
I’m playing at becoming your fantasy.
Even at my fabulous age –
Desirable, warm, funny, talented…
The crest of love forgotten:
The Love of A Life again…
“Ping!”
Oh, there it is again
It’s such a short message I want to say
To just one of the eight billion of us here,
“I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Footfalls
Gently, so gently do I touch love
The petal of a flower
With a tendency to curl into protection
Most tenderly I offer a wish, a promise, a longing
Turned into yearning, if I gaze too long upon it.
I am firm. Resolute. I will not disturb this seedling
Except to offer the water of my prayers.
——————————–
Who knows where our perceptions may bring us?
To what tall doors opening
Into adventure or amorous murmurs?
I am familiar with this dance; the steps never leave.
I am not like her; not frail, nor sickly
I am an ocean after you have tended a mountain rill…
There are mysterious depths here, a rush of saline
A holy path to follow to fulfillment
But I see you patting love down as you would a stray kitten
While I am the panther, curled upon plateaus of rock.
When it is time, we shall meet on terms of strength
In skies filled with wind,
We will open wings & fly
Be where you need to be for now
I have our future well in hand.
————————
I am daydreaming about being in love. What is happening here? What am I doing? What stray magic has padded in like a cat, curling its tail around my heart?
So much is going so well, why not? Why deprive myself of a dream when being awake might bring the same thing? why else are we placed in each other’s path, except to love & become the Beloved?
Yet I know nothing; love drives out all knowledge. What went before is erased, a film laid over the past to be rewritten, reworked, resumed at another chord.
Don’t listen to me. It is nothing, this tiny blossom, delicate as a wish…a sturdy mountain flower bright in color against a desert sea of sky.
I will tell none but you & my journal of this. Shh. Like oiling the tin man, this nourishes my heart. Unfolding an origami uncovers all the wrinkles; new patterns display, thoughts of never knowing this again are smoothed away. How does this happen except as a miracle patterned upon the sacred in life?
There is nothing here but a whisper about to become a song…a melody drawing a bow across heartstrings long bundled in silk.
O Lord.
Carol
The Collective of Silence
THE COLLECTIVE OF STILLNESS
There’s not far to go before the land starts insisting
I am alive in every place I stand
The telepathy of clouds
Drawing my face to the sky
The valley bows to my feet
The Rock People watching.
——-
I am listening as hard as I can to the Silence
My ears so still (no cilia vibrating)
No sound save Eternity
Settling in for the long run.
——
Earth whispers to me of immortality
Longing to be a poem
It tells me to take it everywhere
That water-meadow in Wisconsin
Chesapeake Bay largesse
The stone-poems of rock nearby
An unchanging safety
Waiting to claim all flesh
I am immortal as I can be in this moment
The activation of love in a grain of sand.
———
The spare skeleton remains; a lace & calcium poem
Yellow-white teeth resembling long-bone toes
I will be blanched
Gnawed by coyote cubs, dragged, growling, to dens
Sung into sunrise: danced on four legs
——–
Roadside flowers
Visible only en masse
A color smudging the landscape
Wreathing no arches
Serving as Butterfly’s foothold
Nectar in a bitter landscape.
——–
Aging to Perfection…
Mortality / Schmortality
Third person me
She walks with the confidence
Of a big-breasted woman
35 a dim echo as its double approaches
No long gray tresses here,
But short, sharp spikes
For the divine connection.
Thick around her center
Description: Rubenesque
Undefined by Twiggy-standards
A short, Italian fireplug of female
Passions wrapped in brain & heart;
Sharp-tongued, less than tolerant…
Strong hands, a wrinkly smile
Entering her eyes first.
She’s tasted risk & lived on love
Fearless, present; a solid woman
Ready for the next act
The third trimester of
Maiden, mother, crone.
Age Happens
Long after youth has fled the parade
Life lengthens beyond
Childhood
Adolescence
Adulthood
An unerring arrival (never expected)
It takes up residence
In spots, in strangely-shaped vein whorls.
It’s a celebration & a culmination
A triumph & a terror –
Not that it will end poorly,
But that it may not be well-accomplished.
The Divine Miss B
Age is the last factor of life
Positive on the balance sheet
But only after you’ve gotten past
All other negotiations.
At first, it was a nuisance
I asked for laugh wrinkles, but this?
Ridiculous!
The 50’s slipped by
The 60’s kind of danced along
Now, here I stand at 70:
The threshold of being Born Again
Having it finally, my way.
Being able to ignore the life-beast
Or take it to bed,
Suck it dry:
I rise triumphant!
My birthday hides in September
I have tried, am trying, to pay my debts
To be faithful to the oligarchs
Who file their nails at my door
Yawning as they await their monthly checks.
I have a Final Solution for you all…
It might be the best payment I can come up with…
When I am dead, someone scatter my ashes
In front of the banks.
Hooks On Heaven
SET MY HOOKS ON HEAVEN’S RIM
Prayer over prayer, I climb
Searching in wonder for whomever therein dwells
Lords & ladies?
Saints, angels…
Crossing rainbows latticed of beliefs
Buttressed by Faith
This is harder than I thought:
Escaping humanity
While wearing a skinsuit!
GOD’S BEARD
I’ve never lacked fortitude or fortune
Promised God in every encounter
I examine each for divine traces
Sometimes finding only one gray hair.
8 A.M./FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH
The hot, fierce light of New Mexico
Seasoned by overcast
To a blend of blessing-cool
A morning to sit outside
Traffic blowing by in purposeful wind
Life catching its breath
For one more day on Planet Earth
TRUE/FALSE
Who can trust wisdom anymore?
That of the ages is pop-stuff now
Our minds are far beyond the tenets
Deep in personal responsibility
Dig in, my Soul, find the
Traction of grace
Levity of blessing
Spores of holiness…
Follow the perfume of angels a-wing
Orient towards the Divine
It’s the scent of love
Fresh-baked & set
Upon an open windowsill
Of a morning.
CREATION (Two Views)
Father
I wonder if God donned an apron
Then set to shape the World.
Dusted His hands in flour & water
Before patting up the clay…
Could be He set us up along the
Fence ‘round Heaven
Walking down the line
Breathing out
Blowing us into the twice-blessed world.
I like that He clapped us up out of nothing
Cobbled up a world to home us
Blessed it blue & brown
Setting our souls a-wing into space-time.
Mother
Maybe a Mother made us
Searching the rag-bag pile
For scraps in red & yellow,
Tan & black…
Pulling these free &
Settling on a stool to
Fill a whimsy.
How lovingly she worked,
Symmetrical & shapely –
Imagine us, the source of Her delight
As we began our Song of Thanks…
Her affection captured, She
Fell to earnest Creation:
A world for us to dwell upon
Creatures to ride & roar & race
Greens to eat
God! She thought of everything!
Even water to get us clean again,
Brains to continue in personal conceivings,
Hearts to love…
Then up to bed She went
And in the morning, we were gone.
Dancin’ with my shadow
Dancing with my shadow
Down the middle of the street
With my headphones as antennae
And that Pentatonix beat
Tagged by madness, yes, and music
And my shadow twelve foot tall
All the drivers checking mirrors
Other walkers at a crawl
But I just can’t help it, darlin!
Wish that you could hear it too!
Cuz if this beat all grabbed your feet
Your arms would feel it, too…
So, if you see me on the corner
To the left or to the right
I’m just dancin’ with my shadow
N I may be here all night!
