Tag: love

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Mistress Secrets 

  

The mistress holds many secrets, 

not just the corporeal of clandestine sex.

 
She collects clues in nature’s trails 

in bleedings 

slathered like massaged love potion of entrusted lives. 

And trust there is–not to tell

while the other reveals: 

all sorrows and aches, disappointments and joys, dark desires and flighty fantasies. 

She swallows words with their heartbeats inside her body 

and emanates fumes of lust as interpretative salve. 

She is whore-preistess.

 
A mistress locks like a safe. 

Her world shutters in space 

like the smoke-stale, nylon-curtained windows of a cheap motel screening daylight. 

Her misty spell casts doubt and fear, longing and dread. 

Will she tell? 

She is harpy-savior.

 
She can tell–

how hungry he is for affection, how desperate she is for care. 

She recognizes the drift in the gaze that lids evanesce in the throes, 

orbs inward facing a racing heart of agonizing desire, painful pleasure’s release. 

She is spell-casting springtime.

 
She knows the cards that contain the house, 

which ones can be plucked without disturbing the structure, 

without crashing down the careful construction. 

Sentinel at gargoyled castle keeps, 

she is creator-dragon.

 
The vault she is has no combination. 

Her honesty and trustworthiness stare ironically into the abyss 

of human heart relation–re-kindling the rhythms of lie and sleep, 

walking and waking, 

truth and destined failure to hold neither an eternity nor a lifetime. 

She is prayer.

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Losing one more time


Let me wallow in the warmth of losing you one last time;

like sleep, let me wish for more.

Let me pumace dead skin of my heart layer by layer–

again, this time for sure.

Polished, it shines to the pulse of another now

though never too late

it is, but how

to let you slip past me in one more rhyme?

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In keeping

  
Walking away

into the folly of night

my eyes followed your heels

as they lifted and lightly pressed

against the notion that keeping is outside

when everyone knows losing means never having.

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What kind of love is it?

  
Unconditional love. Love unconditionally the gospel of everyone tells us. So simple. Just love for the sake of loving without expectation of return. Love is enough.

But we are also socially conditioned to believe that love is circumscribed to acceptable people and circumstances. Monogamy dictates love only to the betrothed, regardless of how many loving people a lov-er meets along the road of a long life. 

We categorize love: friendship, passion, God, country, children, siblings, spouses, lovers, flings, new cars, cats, gardening and pizza. We give time limits–for a lifetime, a season, a night.  So many names for so many kinds of loves–expensive ones (mistress or travel) to home grown ones (God, spirit, charity, and light).  We love the earth, the skies and the seas. We love. 

But we are so busy defining the type of love we are receiving and giving that we forget to just love and let love be the guide not the answer or the question. 

Analytical as I am, I fall prey to this downsizing and chopping love to bits. If I love being with an other, just talking and spending time, so much so that I can declare that I love that other for this compatability and gift we bestow of conversation and time, am I violating some unspoken laws or ethical codes if this person is promised to another for that other kind of love, the eternal everlasting one of ceremony and song? This I must always inventory.

A visitor came to town, someone from cyberspace, whom I have never met other than through x’s and o’s. I took it upon myself to be ambassador. The tour of some of my favorite cafes and nature spots yielded an instant bond and good time. I found a co-spirit in great conversation, shared interests and world views, a peace of just being. 

Flitting thoughts of expectations or produced impressions strafed this good time like WWII bombers overhead, periodic and impactful, enough to disrupt the flow with slight uneasiness. Am I giving the wrong impression–that I am interested in a relationships, fling, one-night stand? That I am interested? Don’t want to mislead.

Why not love what or who sits before me without figuring out the good or bad of it, hemming myself in measured patterns of behavior and select words?

My daily aim is to feel love not that way but freely–unfettered.  Not in exchange or as gift but connection. In some rare moments, even I am successful.

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Soon Day

  
A potpourri day of flying bits propelled by a plump sleep’s spell

like a witches incantation, eye of newt mixed with chicken broth,

a bought book long-sought no right-minded would buy on a no frills schedule–

and budget,

a leisurely dine on organic inspiration packaged in creativity’s cellophane–

a culinary conversion,

the bonding built on a daughter’s refined gustatory and intellectual tastes–

a car-ride, stool-side, angular conversation,

a juggle of pockets: dream, work, Rx, plan, execution, to-do, and vitamin D.

Promise pokes a gut-tickle brain as runners aglow recounting prayers of pause rush by. 

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In which we bow and break in bearing it

 
 
It’s five minutes before class begins and one student, a mousy girl who twitches occasionally and whispers answers to my questions after I respond to her half-mast upraised tentative hand that must be propped up by the other hand in order to give it any height, says, “I think no one’s here because of the shooting.”
 
The classroom is one third full, not unusual for the hour and time in the semester, about one third of the way through. 
 
I wanted to doff off her suggestion as somewhat silly or illogical to assure her, actually, but as is always the case in teaching college students–or any students–sensitivity is paramount, so I pause a complete second. But in drawing up my response, I immediately flash angrily, “No, probably not. Why wouldn’t they be used to this sort of news by now? After all, mass shootings happen every other day now. It’s just become the new normal.”
 
I immediately regret my callousness.
 
This student has confessed in her second essay written for this class that she suffers from epilepsy, a recent discovery that has left her to picking up pieces, rescuing remnants of her former life that held nothing but unfettered future, the worst day up until then being when an elementary school kid called her a mop-head. She told me her medication affects her memory, slows her.
 
When she confided in me, I thought of my daughter in college two states north from home. She suffers from a recent sport-inflicted concussion, confused and depressed, her mind sluggish and stalling–going on too long now. She fears. I fear.
 
******
Last week at the head of the classroom, I repeated the line from a prose poem assigned for that day, “In the end, we are alone in the house of the heart.” I then asked the students if they thought that was true. Some thought so. Most did not know.
 
I offered my story of watching a cancer patient die, slowly, how, after months of gathering her family around her, then one by one sending each off not to return to her as she got sicker, she hunkered down inside herself the last three weeks, doing the difficult work of dying. It certainly looked like no one could help her do it, that she had to do it alone. To further illustrate, I likened that aloneness to being elbowed in the diaphragm, down on the soccer field, fighting for air. All of the hovering bodies above you as you lie on the ground can do nothing for you–you don’t even see them–as you fight the pain and fear of never breathing, diving deeply inside yourself for that will to bear it, to survive or brave surrender.
 
I thought the dying example was illustrative, poignant. Some stared in reflection, some in emergency-broadcast-test-pattern mode, others in churning liquid emotion. One young man gripped his head in his hands, face hidden, staring down the sheen of the teflon coated desk.
 
My heart winced.

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Happy Birthday Leonard Cohen


Today Leonard Cohen is 81 years old. Any lover of poetry and song has to acknowledge his influence if not his overwhelming charm, intellect and insight, aside from his stamina. The man endures but his words linger. Almost every occasion recalls a Leonard Cohen lyric to me.

I first heard of him in story, reading about Joni Mitchell’s love life when I was everything Joni as a young teen. Legend has it that they were lovers, his appearance cited in ‘A Case of You’ (“Just before our love got lost you said, ‘I am as constant as a northern star,’ and I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness. Where’s that at. If you want me I’ll be in the bar.'”)

I had never heard his music, which I would not have understood or liked back then anyhow. I much later came upon his name when I heard one of his songs sung by Rufus Wainwright in the movie Shrek, not knowing it was his song. The lyrics moved me so at the time, a time of longing for me for some unknown missing piece I could not identify, could not silence the wind whistling through its gap.

Since then, I got to see him in concert at a lovely venue in Los Angeles with a long-time fan (and beloved), who opened my eyes to the man whose music I had heard and lyrics I had known most of my life. It was like coming home to witness this stylized crooner-sidechick act, the beat poet gone show-time while the words rang and rang and rang. His poetry attracted me like a siren with a bad smoking habit; I love the gruffness in his swagger and throat.

Happy birthday, Mr. Cohen. You know you’re immortal when….

there are 60 versions of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah,’ Ranked.  I still like number 3 the best, Wainwright’s version.

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Fugue

  

  
Sundays. 

In day-drifts I spend them in lengthy morning sheets, 

woven threads striping maypole my legs with yours.

Skills. 

You have them: attentive, unwavering, intent. 

Your strong gentleness fills our bed with symphonic hum, a vibrational fugue. 

I cry. 

Some tenderness tears at lost time, flaked off bits of skinned cycles round, 

a heart with no hands.

Touch: soft swept fingers warm atop cupped palms, like namaste hands, loose prayers. 

Your hands. 

The edges brush by bristled cheek, full flesh and heated like sun-baked summer squash.

Promises: unsaid, steady and willed. 

You cannot. 

Ties from September past, 

a dozen dozen or more in months melded to seamless years of you and you and you. 

And her. 

Until: always when, yet, but still, then again, for now, someday, and forgive me.

 
credit: thisisnickwhite.com

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Yet Another Ode to Dionysus: Sampling Under the Auspices of Research on a Saturday Afternoon

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I drove miles to meet, caught on the draft of highway 1,
Steeped knee deep in alder wooded cabinets stained in olive oil for
Caressed care of liquid pearl, grapey god’s velvet sip.
A dream of Athens, fleet footed baccanalia, you, my hedonistic loined lover of leaf and vine.
The sun.
Engineered glycolic canyons deep, your sugar mined for me
Wilts me weeping, drunk on pleasures
Deep, soil rich and dancing, your hooves in mine, herding your tethered Lust for wine–and me.

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