There's Something Happening Here

where are you
you should be here by now

remember the things you told me
i remember every line, every word, every phrase

i know its 'not love, yet'
i know the 'timing is wrong'

but it hurts like love
and this time without you is hard

VOID

You....

You can smile at your reflection in a window or a spoon and I'll smile at you.

Your eyes are pretty, flat on the underside and curved above like cathedral windows, and they look like they've seen too much and may be the color of jade but aren't jaded.

You struggle with the notion of forgiveness for those who have hurt you. Most of those lines are from wicked crooked grins and a quick wit.

You thought for sure you were bound for hell and bravely bared your teeth until you learned "sin" comes from the Greek word meaning "missed the mark," and that nobody else could tell you the destination of your soul.

The way you smell reminds me of winter, kind of musty and black leather and old patched coats. Residual camphor and cedar of dark old closets. Constant dark burgundy lipstick, a wild mane of dark black hair, and a butterfly tattoo on your shoulder. Black clothes, always.

You say it hides stains best

Bedroom Chatter

Getting up in my bed
now empty of your presence
I find evidence
Of the most intimate kind
That says that you were here...

A Butterfly

.....And on her Left Shoulder
A Butterfly.....

Her Return

With the dazzling glory of the sun

Today, after many days, she came.

All calm and patience did I lose

Not all her shyness did she restrain

Fruity- sweet and sticky - Thin bare twigs tangled amind the bluest sky - The jerky pain of hair caught too tight - A tiny bird with stilled wings glued to the tendrils of a webby cloud - A huge lump of packed down exultation, struggling to be born, then suddenly soaring free, free - Oh! so free and in such ecatacy!!

They lay together on their clothes for hours. keeping each other warm, with skin against skin, smiling foolishly at each other amazed at finding each other, innocent of transgression, enmeshed in the deliciousness of all kinds of discoveries..

Your Body is a Wonderland.

I am leaning on the sofa, she is sitting on the floor, the small table between us. It seems to be absolution simply to listen to her. But I know that if she touches me my shame will be exposed, she'll see in my eyes the terrible things that have marked me/.

A last shudder of strangeness, last flash of fear before longing pushes its blade into me, up to the hilt. Skinned alive, my hand reaches for her hesitantly....

Now impossibly she is placing her cheek - soft - sun warmed peach - against my cold palm.

I begin to trace every line, her lengths, and shapes, and realize suddenly that she's perfectly still, her hands clenched and I'm appalled by my stupidity, my longing humilates her. Then I realize that she is totally concentrated, pinioned under my tongue, that she's giving me the most extragavant permisson to roam the surface of her. Only after I explore her this way, so slowly, an animal outlining territory, does she burst into touch.

I'm paralayzed in the cave her hair makes. Then my hands move to feel her slim waist and suddenly I know how she would bend after a shower, twisting her hair into a wet turban, feel the shape of her back would make, leaning over. I like an oar balanced in its arc above the water, dripping silver. I hear her voice but not her words, so soft, the noise of her whole body is in my ears.

I am deafened by the buzzing drone of her body, the power lines of blood, blue threads under her skin. Cables of tendons; the forests of bone in her wreist and feet. Each time she stops speaking, in each long pause, I renew the pressure of my grasp. I feel her slowly going heavy. How beautiful the blood's pull towards trust, the warm weight of the sleeper entering her orbit, pulling towards me, fragrant, heavy and still as apples in a bowl and oh ! so beautiful the serene calmness of her look as she meanders in the gardens of sleep.

It's not the stillness of something broken but of absolute rest......


When I drift off to sleep I dream of her - young, glistening smooth as marble, sugary wet with sunlight. I feel the sun melting over my skin.

I wake as if I've been dug out of the dream and lifted into the world, a floating exhaustion. My muscles ache from stretching into her, as I lie in sunlight across the bed.

Every cell in my body has been replaced, suffused with peace........

The Man in The Long Black Coat: Going, Going Gone.....

Like a Beast in the pen I'm cut off
From my friends, freedom, the sun
But the hunters are gaining ground
I've nowhere else to run.

- Boris Pasternak Nobel Prize.

She was a good woman and nothing was her fault. They were all good women. They were women with a mission to him, to serve him, straighten him out, to get his oh-so-many talents working in one direction, to help him make a fresh start that would get him clear of all the fresh starts he had made before.

He had encouraged her as he encouraged all of them. He had stood beside them at the patient’s bedside as if he were not himself the patient but a member of the healing team.

" So what shall we do about this poor chap that will get him up and functioning again?

The only difference was he had never believed in the remedy.. Never ever...

She lay face down, exhausted and possibly asleep. She had cleaned the flat. As prisoners clean cells and the bereaved tend tombs. She had scoured the surface of a world she couldn't alter.

Other people might tell him he was too hard on himself. Women said it to him often. How he mustn't hold himself responsible for both halves of every relationship that had collapsed on him. But he knew better. He knew the distance between himself and everything else.

In those days he was still the unequalled expert on his own incurability.

His disease: falling in love head over heels every time.

He touched her shoulders but she didn't stir, so he knew she was awake.

" I have to go" , he said as he began loading his junk into his long black coat, ritualistically as if setting off on a safari. his bent wallet, full of unpaid bills and cancelled credit cards; his passport mildewed with sweat and too much travel; the notebook and pencil he kept handy for penning gems of wisdom to himself for contemplation when he was sober and not under the influence.

He fished out a suitcase and began filling it with shirt's that she'd ironed for him.
" You said this time you weren't going back, that you'd served your time?"

"I have to go, there's nothing I can do, stay here, use the flat."

"If you just hadn't said all that stuff we'd have been fine. I’d have been happy just having an affair. You should see your letters and hear yourself in them."

He didn't look at her. He stooped over and picked up the suitcase.

"Just don't do it to anyone else", she said.

That was as far as her calm could stretch. She began sobbing and was sobbing when he left and she was still sobbing the next morning when she called her friend over and babbled out the whole story, yet defended him and his actions to the death.

She defends him still, a surfeit of loyalty to this day, even though her illusions are destroyed......
All that was left is ....

The eloquent silence, All that you hear at a hundred miles per hour is the ticking of the brain.

She moves in Mysterious Ways...

He had been walking for a couple of hours. In his search for seclusion , he had avoided the usual paths to the beach and preferred to go make his way cross country. Soon he could hear the roar of the ocean and he followed the sound ,

As he crested a dune, he suddenly saw the ocean . His heart leapt with joy at the sight of this vast, deserted beach. There was no one in sight as far as his eyes could see. Alone finally he said to himself.

He reclined on the sandy shore. Before him stretched the ocean, foaming, blue, limitless.. On both sides, as far as the eye could see, was a line of froth, flung onshore by the breaking waves, like a garland of bunched white blossoms deposited on the golden sand, a hair - ointment to adorn the earth's green tresses.


Foaming waves broke the blue surface of the water in a thousand places. Only a storm voilent enough to displace thousand of stars, swirling them against the azure backdrop of the sky, could match the sight of the water churning in the ocean..




He had no idea how long he remained on the seashore, gazing at the beauty of the ocean.At this moment, one segment of the blue water shone like molten gold n the gentle rays of the westerning sun. Then, the darkness descended upon the black waters, the whole horizion lit up with the last gloaming.

He rose to his feet with a sigh!! Time to head back he said to himself.

Why he sighed, I cannot say, for there is no telling what happy memories came to the shore as floatsam and jetsam in the ocean of his memory and evoked a sigh...



Rising he turned away from the ocean. on the sandy shore. At once he beheld an extraordinary appartion (or so it seemed to him later).

At the edge of the wave - resonant ocean, on the sandy shore, in the blurred glow of twilight, stood an exquisite female figure...
Her unbraided locks , cascaded down her back, and were swept across her face by the gentle breeze, her body glowed like a jewel, a picture framed by its backdrop.

Though partly obscured by the hair, her countenance glowed like moonlight glimpsed through a gap in the clouds.

She was a beauty..rather tall, but her limbs and bosom were full and well rounded, Like trees and vines in the rainy season, her body rippled with its own voluptousness. the fullness lending grace even to her tall figure. She seem to him to be In the full flush of youth, like a river surging against its bank.

She was dusky, her skin had the deep hue to molten gold, her locks cluttered about her dark, glowing forehead, like bees about the petals of a newly blossomed flower, her eyebrows arching up to her hair line beneath her cresent shaped brow,

Her eyes were limpid pools of contrasting emotions.. . their gaze was calm yet penetrating. Her glance would instantly make one feel that she had the power to look into one's most secret of hearts. The expression of those penetating eyes would change from moment to moment, now melting with tender affection, now full of sweet langour, as if the god of Love himself lay there dreaming. At times, her eyes would be dialated with desire and intoxivated with romance, and at other times, a hearless sidelong glance would dart from the corners of her eyes, like a flash of lightining.

Two ineffable elements irridated her countenance: the stamp of intelligence, and her self -esteem.

From her posture, the arch of her swan neck, it was clear to him that she was a queen among women..

Youthful vitality made her body restless, as a river in autumn ripples even without a breeze. from moment to moment, this restless energy revealed some new facet of her lovliness and he gazed, transfixed, at this ever evolving display of charm..

Suddenly encountering this divine figure in the midst of such a desolate part of the seashore, , his eyes bore a startled expression, while the young woman's gaze was serenity itself, and was that a touch of amusement he saw reflected in them.

There the two of them remained, on the wave resonant ocean's desolate shore, in the twilight glow,for a long time.

After the pregnant silence the young woman's voice was finally heard.

"O Traveller, have you lost your way? ,

Her voice struck chords in his heart.

The string of our heart's extraordinary instrument sometimes grow too slack to be tuned to harmony , try as one might. But at a single sound, at the musical note in the woman's voice, the dissonance is instantly rectified. All the strings fall into tune.

At such a moment , the journey of life seems to resemble a blissful stream of music. Her voice had just such an effect on him.

" O Traveller, have you lost your way"?

The sound of her the words entered his ears. What they meant , what reply he should offer, he did not know. The sound seemed to spread everywhere, bringing a shiver of joy; it seemed to fill the breeze and murmur through the leaves, falling away to blend with the ocean's booming sound.

The earth, girdled with the sea, was beautiful; beautiful too was the woman, and also the sound of her voice,
the hearts instrument began to resonate with the rhythm of harmony.

"Come with me". invited the maiden, when she received no reply to her question.

With these words, she walked away, she seemed to glide over the terrain like a white cloud wafted on the slow spring breeze, like a clockwork toy he followed this vision of beauty not looking or caring where he was going.

At a certain place where they had to skirt a small wood, the beautiful woman disappeared from his sight behind a clump of trees. Having trudged around the forested area, he found himself alone , there was no sign of the beautiful woman, anywhere. he looked down to see which way her footsteps went and suddenly he felt a cold shiver run down his spine, He moved back over the way which they had come to re check , but there was no doubt about it.

There were just one set of footprints leading from the shore to the clump of trees, and they were his... With invisible footsteps she had come into his life to illuminate it and then as suddenly and mysteriously disappeared..

"Was she a godess, a human being, or merely an illusion conjured up by his mind??

Frozen, immobile, he turned this question over and over in his mind ....uncomprehending....and alone again..

That moment of oblivion, ex stasis, two bodies joined in bliss, transformed.

The pleasure seems incomparable to anything.
Little deaths, they've been called.

I've gone spinning out of control, unaware of anything else but that explosion-- by far the most vulnerable point in existence.

Sometimes it feels like the soul flies away, circles above the trees like a bird, returns by gradations;

Breathe, breathe.

I wonder if it is a glimpse of the afterlife, the eternity we may all find if we seek truth and love. The energy generated and released during that peak of pleasure must be astounding. Open the floodgates.

The yin and yang, pearls from the sea, the earth, the curves of your body.