Is Love Maddening or Are We Already Mad?
What did my soul discern that common sense couldn’t overrule in turn?
I met him by the park, dressed in corduroy and heartbreak. He smiled at me twice and I blinked both times, cursing my feet for landing me there. His expression was slick, his emotions were meek, couldn’t think of an explanation, I reveled in his hesitation and smiled. I welcomed him and threw our strife in the past where they’d form a stack sheathed in thorns and black, crushed by an anvil so they wouldn’t later attack. I knew you’d be back, that’s why yesterday I was calm, I told him months later when he asked.
To swim in shadows, I would not recommend
“Loving you has meant walking blind. If you’d asked me this last year I’d have said that to swim in shadows, I would not recommend. Find yourself a sturdy, trustworthy bed. Wait out the night and walk again at dawn when sunshine and the sounds of life can show off their brawn. Now I say: close your eyes and go out into the darkness with the assurance that you won’t fall.
I want to recall the many ways in which I have known you. The first breath from your mouth that I tasted. The supple skin, flecked and flushed as a furnace in a winter that’s tired of splinters digging into its spleen. Those hidden wounds I want to massage from your muscles, extract, and throw into a bin. The wave to your hair, playing checkers with despair and winning at every odd affair. The light in you that no distance could subdue. The upturned mouth like a sorcerer and a wolf locking jaws. I want to bite into those lips after you caress me with one look, one stare, out of those hooded brown eyes that mix and tango with starlight and everything in the world that is warm, that is kind.
You are good at summoning me from my moods with a mighty splat, tickling me from behind with a peck to my cheek when there are no words of consolation and little feels the same and I want a getaway to the furthest ends of the day. ‘Weep into me, laugh not far from my ear’, your soft eyes seem to relay, ‘I want to hear and understand what your silence has to say’. I should have known when we met that you were a surprise that starts with intent and ends with regret. The good kind. The one where you know you wouldn’t change the deck or the cards or the hands that you played because the good by far outweighs the pain.
Before I had you, I wanted to know who you’d been; what wonders had marked your skin; what horrible sights kept you for a second aghast during the night; what wrung the last moisture from your lungs as you cried; what brought on that secretive smile; what sincerity within you was impossible to defile; and every ground your feet had kissed, I could not resist. I wanted to know who you were from the second that I saw you. Those eyes, that smile. There was a question in that smile that I badly wanted to answer.
You may be too young for me, my long lashed thief of peace. But you’re a torment who’s ravages I will not run from until these feelings desist. I’m floating, waiting for your hand to set me to rest, waiting for your embrace to stop the hammering in this insolent chest.
What was it about you? What did my soul discern that common sense couldn’t overrule in turn?
Is it you that I’ve been looking for?”
