--LIKE IS MORE INTERESTING THAN LOVE

Silk

 

What I remember is how your laughter was like silk
the way silk sheets feel on bare skin
slippery and sensual
buttery without the grease
All these years later I can still hear it
as I lay back and close my eyes
at times when I need it most
 

 

From the Corner of My Room

I reach through blue ether and you are there,

quick as lightning or an inadvertent blink,
such soft and warm hands accepting mine,
asking if I’m all right,
asking if it’s true that a man so bold could really just be a nine year-old instead--
trapped inside a husk, a honeycomb,
a dried out hornet’s nest clinging to an eave by a thread, dangling from the corner of my room--
and for the first time in a million years,
I feel safe,
safe through words alone,
silence finally defeated,
floating like an empty boat
across a small squat lake
while winter waterfowl taps secret code into
a shelf of unlikely ice
that has overtaken
what was once a body of water
where mermaids swam
and secrets rose to the surface,
not asking for answers or absolution,
but simply reasonable cause,
a means of searching what one may
or may not
think is there,
whether it is known to anyone

who might have once been there.