Poetry | Relationships

Where Does All the Love Go

Where does all the love go? 
Is it like the wind, 
unrealized yet felt? 
Like chaff blown about and 
to what end would the tumble rest? 
Or like the lotus flower
that floats from water's edge? 

Could one consume it like holy communion
where wafer dissolves on the tongue? 
Or could one simply claim it with spoken words: 
"At last! This one is bone from my bone, 
and flesh from my flesh"? 

Where does all the love go 
if not to the one that it's intended for?

Painting by Claude Monet, c.1907

“To Make You Feel My Love” (cover) by Dave Fenley

Poetry | Relationships

Lilac Love

Lilac Love

Even if our next meeting is in passing, 

I want you to feel something, 

like a gentle breeze, scented   

of lilac lavender in bloom, 

like a coming up for air.    

Photo by Yganko

Poetry

The Writer

The Writer 
It's at night that my heart swells 
like deep waters and in the morn
I draw them out with my pen. 

It's a sweet unrest until, unexpectedly, 
it turns to experiment (or spectacle) like I'm some 
specimen where someone clangs with   
small instruments and custom keys to see what's 
really inside and it's like I'm on the brink 
of death by the mere thought that someone 
will see-- that I will see...  

Is someone laughing inside, watching me watch me? 

The dissection begins: Stick. Churn.    

Urgent: Can someone please clean this up? 
Quickly?  I say.  But what I really mean is 
Can someone put this back together the way it was?  

I wait, breathing heavy, then heavier 
because I know it cannot be done. 

I want to panic, but I know it won't get me 
anywhere.  So I scoop up the remains.  
I am sure I'll never be the shape and shades 
of before, and it frightens me.  

And yet
each time I write, 
it happens all over again: 
My seemingly whole self
becomes fragments, and pieces of me 
remold to new forms... I am not sure I am 

anymore complete than I was before it all began. 

Art by Miles Johnston
Poetry | Relationships

To Only Want You

To Only Want You 
We were a premonition, 
your fire (my earth),    
a warming lullaby of laughter 
and destroying me, 

to only want you.  To only love you 
in this lonely world of nothing else.  

You were the intensity of extremes—
a paradox I was not accustomed to.        

Memory is a strange thing.  

I feel no anger or regrets.  
If anything, I accept.  I accept that 
you and I were meant to meet, to exist 
and walk this earth at the same time in history, 
to share a common purpose… 
can I just say—

I miss you.  

What do I want?  
I want to feel alive again, even if 
it means to burn.

Art print by Aykut Aydogdu

Poetry

A Lost Star

I only have one wish and

pray you keep this promise:  

Let me not hear you speak my name,

for it coming from your voice would

send me into an interstellar oblivion,

spinning me out of control into years

I cannot recover.   

Photo by Killian Eon from Pexels

Poetry | Relationships

The Eternal Kiss

The Kiss

Today I feel you near, more than the days before,  

more than the days where I could touch you. 

Even though we walk different paths, in directions away

from the other, everything in my soul runs back to you—

only you.

We were made from the same fabric of sinews and tendons,

forever patterned and weaved in each other.

Our fleshly eyes got in the way, and yet,

all we had to do was close our eyes to know.

Everything in me fights to and from you, and at times

I feel so strongly that you do too, with me.

Sometimes I even hear your faint whisper,

“Let me go,”

and my answer is simply the same every time,

“I can’t.”       

Painting image of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1908-1909)

Poetry | Relationships

Soulmate

Our eyes met, and like a magic trick,

you touched me without touching me. 

Your eyes went on a deep journey to my soul

without fear you’d find your way back. 

That was your intention though: a one-way trip

never to return but to possess me—

my heart wrapped in your arterial fingerprints.   

To separate you from me would mean death—

And even then, I’m not sure Death is that powerful.  

Photo by Atharva Dharmadhikari on Unsplash

2
Poetry | Relationships

Optional Bicycle Parts

I know my grooves so well, 
mechanical flick back,
or prop up.  Whichever
you prefer.  I blend, hitched

in metals of you while 
you parade before eyes 
as ringmaster and call 
forth assistance at whim. 

Sometimes I ground, facedown
where I lick earth, brace up
the weight of you, and you
say [Just] eat and be thankful.  

Round mirrors, left and right, muse 
your beauty-- traction to 
feed covet eyes once... No!
Two glances-- Your favorite! 

Handlebar fringe tickles 
wind like a flirt-- so close
to arms' frame. Or basket 
of worthier catches 

with freshly caught dames.  Least 
from worn tires, I catch 
rubber's debris and road's 
stale crumbs from yesterday. 

My links teethe for oil, but 
you won't be disturbed. You 
pedal on because you 
trust nuts and bolts hold tight. 

As I untwine from your 
chainring, your hollow, steel
frame loses momentum 
and thuds out, "Betrayer!" 
As a poetry assignment for one of my English graduate courses, we had to write a poem in iambic trimeter quatrains.  Although the stanza/lines and syllable count adhere to the original form, I did not go back and check the iambic rhythm; for my own purposes, I stuck to the content of the poem rather than form.  This draft is vastly different from the first as I had started out with something else entirely different and am so grateful that my professor pushed me to improve this piece.       

Photo by Emily Huismann on Unsplash

Poetry | Relationships

“Hope II”

Our memories blanket me like a coat,

(vibrant and damp) with shades

of you suspended in time—

Was that a year ago or ten?

…

Now I remember.  It was neither.

It was 1907. 

…

Little did I know at the time I was

standing before our art— timeless,

captured, frozen—  

…

Visions are weightier than imagination. 

…

Love is a child: infantile yet grows.

The Prayers for it were lax, for why should

they have been fervent, as such Innocence should

survive. The Prayers were never for its safety. 

They were spoken Prophesy— Fated Destiny,

most cruel and beautiful when Death and Life and

Sensuality in the most purest sense would

exist side by side, suspended in equilibrium.

…

You are within my walls—

…

a familiar face and

a stranger— and both hurt—

…

Now mornings stream words of you

like a seamless prayer—a habit—

and I write them down because it was

between words and lines where we once

exchanged our hearts with one another— it’s

the only way I know how to find you again.     

This piece was written and inspired by two: 1) the painting Hope II by Gustav Klimt, which I had the pleasure of seeing the original in New York at the MOMA ten years ago; and 2) a man I met around the same time who showed me the truest form of love.  In conjunction with this poem, the spoken word of “Find Me” by Forest Blakk (which I happened upon just a couple of months ago) placed me back in time as I revisited what was a sealed up time capsule of wonderful memories and love.  One link here is most haunting and much felt when just listening to it along with reading the words; the other gives a visual that’s quite provoking and unforgettable— just like the love we once shared that has become a timeless piece of art in my Hall of Memories.

—Much love to you, JM, without regrets.  I am most thankful when I think of you.   

Forest Blakk’s “Find Me”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sMJzYnrC5k (lyrics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9sfAVOEVAQ (video)

Photo Painting is Hope II by Gustav Klimt (1907)

Poetry

Letting Go of a Little Girl’s Dream

She searches pink for jewelry keepers 

with a ballerina’s pirouette feature, 

possessing time with the pin drum. She hand-

cranks, and the tiny dancer’s wax-like face wanes 

in the distorted mirror that mocks at her, 

unfairest one of all: “Little girl,” as it were, 

“dreams of having little girls.” Her fixed stare breaks 

to shelved board games: the people pegs play fake                  

smiles on the cover of The Game of Life.

Six holes peg for family, pink and blue, wife

and husband. A baby’s coo wraps her fallow 

womb on unseen aisle before she shifts back now

to the dancer whose platform spring tilts and sticks–

“Girls” “Girls” “Girls” like a scratched prophecy. Transfixed, 

her eyes blur as she hears, “Something so broken 

can never be fixed” as the musak plays on.    

As a poetry assignment for one of my English graduate courses, we had to write heroic couplets (aabbcc end-rhyme), 16-22 lines of iambic pentameter.  The poem had to take place in a store; a toy store was one of those options.  At least three of the rhyming words had to have two syllables or more.  We had to compare the piped music in the store to something industrial for at least two lines.  We were given suggested words to use in the poem– fallow, indent, oil, and daffodil– of which I only used one.       

Note: As I strive to adhere to the strict guidelines of iambic pentameter, a true poet will see that I am still in the beginner stages of achieving such form, this being far from a final draft. 

Image from Google

2