Tercet 2

Lifetimes were spent between each breath;
Inhales and exhales
Of warm breath, against frosted air.

Between the Lines

I try to read between your lines,
And follow them as
They shape into loops and hooks,
Until I am a lost soul,
Wandering in your contradictions.

Do you hear the sound of your voice,
As you try to piece the words,
Lines, and phrases you've heard
Together,
Like a riddle gone madly wrong?

"Love should be...."
You try to clarify,
As if you do not already know.

The irony--
Is not lost on me.
The way you try to tell me
What love should be
According to teen magazines,
Episodes of Oprah,
And the ambivalent voices,
Of failed and failing relationships.

And as you fumble for fragments of quotes,
I sit along the opposite end of your bed,
With you spouting on and on,
About your so called "definition"
Of an ideal love.

And I,
I am drowning out your droning,
Strolling through my memories,
Where Love is not defined as anything,
But instances of us,
Laying gently upon a checkered blanket,
Fingers interlocked together,
Woven like the baskets by our ankles,
In an all too ideal patch of shade,
Underneath the Summer's gaze.

But then you ask me,
Waking me from my episode:
"Do you understand what I'm trying to say?"
With little strains against your voice
As you try to rationalize the irrational.
And I just nod non complacently,
Drifting away in my thoughts of you,
while you flare up again
At my lack of attention,
To your attempts to annotate
What our love should be.

#23.5

Our song plays softly,
While my heart breaks to the sounds,
Of our unkempt love.

#31

There is so much love,
In this broken heart of mine,
It terrifies me

#40

Shell against my ear,
I do not hear the ocean,
But your voice like waves.

Haiku 7.

can you remember
how I kissed away your tears,
when you loved me too?

Tercet.

I love you in shades of greys and blues,
In ochre tones of aging photographs...
And dissipating fogs of candle lit dreams.

I Have Fallen in Love with Sadness.

The moment Sadness and I first held hands,
We were not met with cheers or congratulations.
No, We did not shout to the world of our love affair.
We loved in silence.

And in silence our love grew.
And in silence she was beautiful.

Sadness is not beautiful in the contemporary sense.
She does not have gorgeous eyes or soft skin,
She does not have a thousand curves that can bring men to their knees,
The voice of an angel, or the smile of a goddess.

No, She is beautiful in a way that does not fade with age.

She is beautiful in the way she sings a song only my heart can understand,
The way she speaks in poems only my soul can interpret.

She is beautiful in the way she reads me like I am a novel she has read again and again,
Each sentence memorized a thousand times, and then a thousand times over.

She is beautiful in the way her silence rushes over me like a roaring wave,
And in the way she knows I long to be lost and pulled out into her sea.

I love her.
I love her because she is beautiful.

And she is beautiful, because I love her.

11:11

The night has frozen,
Forty nine shy of midnight,
And I wish for you.

My crooked heart.

I will always love her, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

Begging

I swear I was better once.
Please believe,
I can be him again.
I need you to believe,
So I can be.
So I can live.
I'm so tired of hiding.
Behind these damn walls.
Can you hear me?
Do you see me,
Trying to get out.
I swear I am.
These outstretched fingers.
I'm aching to be.
Please, save me.
Break down these walls.
Before I do.
I swear you can save me.
I swear.
__________________
This isn't poetry.