Anymore

The view from your bed
was not quite as peaceful as had seemed, in my reveries.
The leafless trees, dead.
The air, dry.
Your grasp feeling different.
Home is not in your arms
anymore.

The answer to my question

I'm slipping away from you.
That old familiar feeling of my heart detaching,
unwinding itself from your grasp,
and smelling freedom.
I've learned how to live without you. It hardly leaves a sting now.
It used to be a slice.
Cold, and deep, splitting.
It's liberating to find answers now,
the discovery of mixed-up questioning, festering beneath.
I know now.
My heart, my personality does not belong under your control
or in a foreign land.
I'm going home now.
Relieved.

Love

Crazy to love someone so far away. Crazy to continue this splattered, scattered, nonsensical affair. Crazy to continue.
The madness, oh, the madness.
Let go. Hold on. Draw close. Release.
I release you. You wrap me back in.
Drawing me, drawing me.
You allow me to leave. I break, but you linger,
lingering, pausing.
We are no longer in control of this.
It has taken its own shape and formed a life of its own,
with its own personality.
Capricious and moody,
but planted,
rooted.
Still rising, climbing, wrapping around
your heart and mine.

Give and take

Today driftwood piles were washed up
and the outline of the shore pushed itself higher up on the beach.
Like a bully, the moon-guided waves made their way forward, oblivious to the sand's feeble attempts to stop the water's reach through hopeful barriers of sand.
Every morning, a new world.
A seascape with entirely different architecture,
no two same designs ever erected.
Choppy sand, footprints melding into lumpy hills.
Crashing water, a surprising roar, followed by the purest clarity.
When the ocean is silent, it envelops the surrounding air
its absence, painful in its peace.
Plovers race out, their tiny talons sinking in the hungry substrate,
the silent surroundings their first opportunity to seek food.
Fickle and greedy, the water re-forms itself
reappearing with a vengeance
it picks up a pile of driftwood
sweeping the beach
giving and taking.

Poetry

These words are spilling out of me. They are
saving me.
In the obsidian places of my mind, which lately, overrun the incandescent thoughts,
free verse, an anthology of greats,
are holding me together.
Once you become attuned, it's amazing how you find it
poetry, everywhere.
My favorite songs speak to me in their simple expression.
The unexplainable becomes less opaque when the form to express it is not as
governed.
I am saved by a compilation, near my bed. I read it and am connected with others who found a new salvation
by simply writing how they feel.
Words coalesce, sentences form
throughout the day.
And sitting, pausing, they are released. I am freed.
As I escape, the dark is washed, ebony strands drip. Ochre falls. My mind comes together,
whole.
Light, silvery, pure, replaces.
Heals.

First Kiss

He makes her a meal.
Pork, potatoes.
They flirt, lapse into a long conversation on the couch. The fire crackles.
Red wine turns into white, as they sip through their stories. Mix, pink, it becomes in their bellies.
Fuzzy, the room swirls. She doesn't want to leave, he would ask that she stay.
Pulls herself away, sways toward the door. A jacket is produced from the closet. He helps her slip it on.
It reaches to her knees.
He fills up a water container, in case she becomes parched on the drive home. Better judgement would force her to stay.
But the wine is pink now, mixed.
He helps her zip up the coat. A gesture, so tender, and perhaps the most romantic in her life. He is still a stranger, though less than before.
Outside, the cold air, she clutches the water container. Nervous now.
Embrace. Long. Slight turn of the heads, a meeting.
Lips introducing themselves, tongues, mouths.
Butterflies, heart vessels working, veins filling. Indescribable synapses firing. Un-nameable hormones and fluids injecting. Happiness is chemically produced. Endorphins settling.
They pull away, finally, though both would prefer to stay. The moon is almost overhead.
Something passes between them.
It remains and gets comfortable.

Fears

I fear I won't love again--this kind of love, even if I lived where I belong. The place where dry grasses and oaks absorb me. Vineyards, voluptuous grapes, black cattle with white faces, surround me.
Rocky peaks, the shiny ocean, careless parties, and connections enclose me. Memories, a soft shelter that took me from a girl
to a woman.
Formed me.
The very air holds me. Surrounds me and reassures me,
"If I took you from that, to this, what could you become?"
But you, you alone,
broke me.
And yet, you still hold my laughter.
You changed the very shape of my heart. You redefined my possibilities. You are still the question
to my future.