Maze

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I lost perspective inside a glass where light specked the rim and stem.
In the grasp of an elixir’s fume, heady visions blurred a memory stream rolling the former incarnations of ourselves above the candle beneath the rose: younger hands,  one soft elastic skinned balmy palm cupping a glass while the other two-finger rubbed a furrowed brow far less ravaged with ravines and splotches. 
We were four then, you, me and the girls, sitting tensely at the table, your anxiety spewing noxious gases until we began to dance a lovely quadrille atop the table.
No, but that couldn’t be true.
These ghosts danced smeared putty-stretched hug-tight to the glass’ girth.
Passing cars flashed illuminated dusty rays sprayed across the windows outside, inflicting tenderness and wince.
Accidental brush of your thin, gruff finger tips across mine startled us both awake, forcibly focusing my lenses to the doubly reflected salt and pepper shakers, standing table top like four drunken rooks bent and leaning on a checker-less board,
While we two dined alone, each lost in enclosed grapey reverie, the candle light flickered the final scene ere the first course’s arrival:
Two of us, illusions backlit against scattered chronometric flares melting us buttered like toast and figs, foie gras oily on a tongue awash in Muscat, scalloped leeks across cellular cerebral connections as numerous as galaxy stars.
“Let me see that label,” I commanded.
“It’s a 2006 Pomerol,” he offered, “a very good year and it has a pleasant nose” and then we once again alit on common ground.

GeminiĀ 

 

 
Gemini’s bloom, neither starry aster nor royal poinsettia

seasons too late for the rose of summer skies.

One dies brightly, late fall’s supernova, while another paints icy lips ruby.

Your velvet blush pairs story-eyed girls with breathless boys re-enacting everlasting joy;

unrevealed how your Bristly Roseslug Cladius difformis and red spider mite underside,

 laced and aching,   

cache closes the thin divine like children threading hearts to paper clips in kinder class.

Honored sister, pour your swooning sorrow into my hands and let your brave face die.

No man, beast or garden silk delivered so much to so many for so long. 

Release the weight of your beatific crown, heavy with curved care, and sink.

Another June will call your name in vein-flow some day soon.

 
credit: flikr.com

Roses of Song and Myth: the Love Lie

 
Credit:   http://assets2.madewithcolor.com/2014/08/11/17/57/30/934/Marigold_Rose_3.jpg

The rose is not flattery, nor flattered can she be.

Her colors never brighten so with admiration.
Her white is white and pink is pink regardless.
Sun is her food, water her delight and nurture
she needs nothing from hands, no clip or two
no more than her nature designed so provides.

A stem releases bloom from inside itself formed
its patterns deep and wide configured long ago
running through time like speed of sound-light.
The evolution of her growth and being precede
all hands that pluck her bloom from bony bush.
She needs no more than nature draws from her.

For when she is clipped, she poses as love sigh
tall, thorny languor along the chilled lip of glass,
a vase for her thoughts to showcase her beauty.
But hollow and thin she starves on water alone
no earth to feed her fibers, her soft petal velvet 
of colors destined to rot, odiferous swill of death.

The rose bleeds not from thorns as do your gods
for she needs protection from prey; all who harm
love in the name of hunger forcefully feed on her.
The host of vines and verdure are not loving kind
but raw and real as the rain that beats her roots, 
suffers her drowned to make her stand woody by.

Patience and virtue and kindness do not clothe her.
She hangs no myrrh between her breasts to lure.
Nature is not a song for her nor an allegory rhyme.
She fails as ideal and lasts only so long as her DNA.
For her name is rose not love by human confusion
and sings a song the words unknown to mankind.

Leave her an earth that grows her feet strong-free
and make her not your words a sign of loving,
for she is not an idea, symbol or object, no agent.
Neither is she subject or lust or desire or longing.
She is not inspiration, romance or pheromone but
life stuff, permeation, breath, not your philosophy.