Unrequited Love

I miss you like clouds miss water …

                        Your soothing voice resonating in bittersweet memory

                                                Low and almost guttural, your speech calls to me

                                                                        Almost as much as your touch – devilish and tender –

All at once

These memories turn thoughts to fire once again

                        Fire that was never quenched by your water

                                                Never dulled by your intense presence or soft words

                                                                        But those same words set you adrift, floating away

On the lake

                        Nearly as smooth as your words

                                                But too glassy to accommodate your stare

                        And when you stared into my blue eyes

with those golden flecked earthen discs

I melted.

                        Like snow under sudden heat

                                                Like peach vanilla from my Papa’s ice cream mixer

                        Your voice’s trembling was matched

                                                By the tremors of my frame as I followed your gaze.

So now – what to do?

                        The will is weak

                        No more patience to seek

                                                Every relationship incomplete

                                                Twisty vortex to everyone that I meet

                                                                        My mind searches for escape in alternate realities

                                                                        As twisted tyrants and gossips distort my eventualities

                                    Until one day, when maybe, no longer seeking your presence, I will find

                                    Some way to cope with the reality, never rosy in my sphere, towards love once again inclined.          

Not Whole: A Poem About Numbers

Not whole,

Misunderstood,

Embattled,

Controlled,

Wasting away …

            In this series

            Of fives

            Behind which

            The two through eights

            Play.

                                    What to do

                                    But try to fix?

                                    And meddle

                                    And TWIST

                                    And subvert

                                    And move

                                               The ‘immovable’ from Five to Six …

                                                Seven Tethered to the Eight

                                                Because she cannot

                                                Climb very easily alone;

                                                She rolls.

                                                She comes in on horseback

                                                Or her highness, the eight,

                                                must be ROLLED up the hill.

                                                                        And, as always,

                                                                        Almost against her will

                                                                        The Nine shows up

                                                                        To a spectacle of

                                                                        Numbers gone wrong

                                                                        Through sloth and waste,

                                                                        Inefficiency and haste

                                                                        She sweeps the ashes, still combustible,

                                                                        And jars them, till numbers become capable.