Sensible Advice Women Taught Me

 

You start dying slowly,

If you forget how to empathize

If you don’t practice compassion,

Don’t cherish friendship,

If you forget what gratitude is,

 

You start dying slowly when you kill

Your love of adventure, your wish for experience

Growth, authenticity, wide-eyed vulnerability

You start dying slowly when you forget your youth

 

How to play, let go, and celebrate

You start dying as you forget romance

Walking everyday the same path

Keeping to yourself, wearing the same thoughts

 

You die slowly if you forget to mediate, appreciate

Socialize, help others, feel passionate about others

Empower, mentor, support, idealize

If you don’t stand for something you believe in

 

If you do not go after a dream

Of living for something completely

How can you even say you have lived?

 

If you do not allow yourself room for failure

At least a million times in your lifetime

Don’t pretend you have lived, don’t even try

 

Because compassion, gratitude, empathy and forgiveness

Is what makes us human, sweet hearted and sentient.

 

 

Before I loved, I Knew Nothing

 

Before I loved you, I loved myself
But myself was never sufficient, never transcendent
Only a bit of dust and thought, transient

Before I loved you, I loved the world
But the world changes so fast, dear
It has rooms full of ashes, can you see them

In the city and the digital corridors
They are abandoned nearly as soon
As they begin to open the doors

Before I loved you, I loved the universe
More than any one human being, I think
Love is not something inconceivably alien

But in retrospect, the most intimate notion
For in attention, spreading it, I am bathing
In a kind of glow, for all that is plentiful and gifts

That appease me wherever I go
And it’s a kind-hearted gratitude and compassion
That enables me to stop loving myself too much

Because my heart only has room for everything
Before I loved you, I loved the idea of love
But you taught me another perspective

And sometimes, love owns a new perspective
Because it’s love that transforms us into
Somebody better, and that is why

After I love you, I’m able to love you more
Than when we were together
Surprising its then, how love comes around.

For you

 

I have craved the taste of your skin
For what feels like centuries, and I am
The evolutionary urge of sunbeams permeating
Soul and brain and movement
I am human being, hungry for immortality

Your lovely body is my youth’s rite
I pace hungry for the cherishing of a lifetime
Your hot heart, nearly too precious to hold
How can I serve you better, my dear?
I have worked starving just to have you

By my side, for a few mortal years
And I am a puma on the barren of
The rough anonymity that separates our lives
I’ve been a hunter and a digital firebird
Just to get a few inches closer to your life
I have desired through life-plans of ambition

And I have been silent to the failures
That must be endure, just for a few moments of bliss
I have felt the light that rises in your smile
And in your delicate form, I have felt

The lessons of history and sacrifice
The language of aroma, the stuff of hope.

After 100 Sonnets

I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.
~ Audrey Hepburn

i

My ugly love, when you are so beautiful
to me it’s not enough for my mouth
whose kisses routinely bathe you

in an inventory of whispers, love-cries
with tenderness for however long
nature allows, you allow, fate allows
flower by flower, I would choose you
again and again, my loving angel

ii

Your body’s fragrance is my
shadow’s energy, your humid flesh
the channel of my dreams

if also for our child, who forgot to incarnate?
my truthful love, so sincere and honest
with armpits like the smell of wheat
and breasts as impetuous as a stormy sea
and eyes like wildfire, cutting me

iii

Into sweet obedience, I could not imagine
that I could have built a house of
sweetness without your splendor

and how you love cherries, your cheeks
an Asian wispy elven secret of youth
my soul-engaging love, I have to remind myself
we are getting older together in
beloved months, we sometimes forget the details

iv

Of why nothing mattered or had a name
except each other, we were made for this
an alchemy of spirits, while our shared beauty

allowed us to endure poverty
with gifts as plentiful as sparking
moments of gratitude that went on forever
like lessons learned from wise calming friends
and lovers that felt like they were

v

Gifts from the gods, plump-wide-eyed
spiritual dreams of some strange mineral belonging
we walk naked through the golden church

of our earthy love, as if we learned to be
one body, one shared soul wearing
clothes of separate bodies, laughing minds.

LIKE INTIMATE POLLEN

I need the light of your Energy
The ceiling of my heart listens
To your words, devouring hope

Each day I soak up your faith
Like a candle listening to leafless rain
And my windows ache

For your lovely Dawn
And I feel your breeze
On my skin like feather-kisses

There is not a drop of hate anymore
For life is the fire of peace
It burns like a heart moving into

The cold, my blood circulates
Around your soul, like a life
Ready to be born, conquering the world
An ancient way of being and believing.

The Female One Who Put Things in Order

Your body is as firm as bread Edible since you came out of The oven of life, to ovulate Four hundred times, scant opportunity To be a mother, I remind you The gravity of your attractiveness Is the taste of …

Legends of Extinct Life

I pressed your dawns
Smooth open like marble
Touching your secret tunnels

Like the moisture of gold
with night-eyes hungered
For the fragrance

Of other strange worlds
I left the waters of childhood
For the earth-last lust

Of the home-star, Sol
The wind interrogated me
With the fire-blue sense

Of the open skies
I kissed the stone like
Autumn gardens

And hinted at the blooms
Of the clothes of our roots
The thicket of passion

Where ferocious intelligence
Seared a road across the impossible
I pushed sunsets until

The earths shock
My opportunity was a brief
Window of selfish centuries

Foam covered mornings
Which fled as fast as finite things
As the hips of your dark

Familiar clay fell back into the earth
I understood love, only
By the filter of time’s volcanoes

The moist half-open darkness
Of the brutal law of stars
Like a floating haiku
Of drifting kissing potential.

Photography Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Fairyland-426265846

Treatise on Sol

I remember the gifts from the Earth
Insensible as golden clay
Delicious as emerald Spring

So we go there, where nothing is waiting
One in five stars has an Earth
But my home is a living ruby

Of humanity’s journey through history
A magical thorn of slow winters
Shadows of silent waters

Bouquets of fields-flowers dancing in the wind
My home is Sol, friendly palace
Of crazy roots, dreaming forests

Intelligent Cities, helpful beings
I remember the gifts from the Earth
Her love that rocked me like

The source of blood and carnations
The rock and salad of my foundations
Yellow moments of beloved Autumns

Everything was so alive there
The fragrant luminous Moon
The sea-circle cluster of buds

And wildlife with the wild speed of whiteness
Wonders soft, as the burning of wood with music
And Beautiful women and children

With new measures like swans and lilies
And crystal computers with the hunger to improve
We sniffed the hot twilight of summers
And craved the savage harvests of the future.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/The-Earth-57352441

So that our sleep might answer all the sky’s starry questions

Love is a bewildered nest
Branded by comfort
Time propagating in the shared darkness
I untangle my confusions here
Unlearning solitude

Like a secret creature in the fire
The day’s net has extinguished
All goodbyes, all labors unfulfilled
In the slow bedroom of the moon
Breathing with the gentleness of gold

Touching lasts a lifetime with you
Simply a pulse of a long slow-river
Our blood mixes, we become
One celebrated organism, one unit
A family where your hands move

Autumn on the march, thriving
Like a crazy woman sings
To the evening vines, the salad-tulips
We bend towards our nocturnal bodies
Rejoicing like an ultramarine couple

Steam-breath coming from our joys
And blue frost clogging up the mirror
We are a four-sided constellation of light
From some distant star, and we are home
Love is a bewildered nest, full

Of eyes like the dearest diamonds
And the wine, the ruby-juice
The sap of our decades of care:
That never got drank completely.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/–410025029

Magnetic transience of our blooms

If your eyes were not the
color of lightning, of a day full
of loving hope, this world of
faces, work, play, politics

If you were not the chief grace
of my little years, amber weeks
golden months, clogged with
moments of clasping anticipation

I would have gone mad long ago –
If, my dearest, you had not come
into my life like sand, trees, rain
everything is so alive that is to

live with you, eat with you, move with you
if our arms, legs, noses did not touch
each night in our beloved sleep
your life and my life would not

be so good, so happy, and now
I can see everything that lives
and loves in you, so easily, held-in
as the water that shatters the

restless rock; the breeze that caresses
the most ancient fires, you were there
and we drop into the future in
blue salt, falling in sea-circles of
another world, of permanent tenderness.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/War-of-roses-408847420

A Would-Be Love Sonnet

If I die before love, strike me
With the purity of footsteps of karma
That in the next life, my holy force
Will flash the incredible whispers
With poetry, and warm affection
Since, in Love I’ll die a second time
To myself, once so selfish and conceited
I will serve my kin, as is ancient custom
Wooed by joys so terrible, biological imperatives
And then I shall say, ‘Whoever loved like we did’
And I shall boast, with irrevocable delight
Those roses I shall burry in eternal months
And with the light that endures, with the love
That consumes all the fruit, new lives will be made
To love again, with burning hearts, subtle flower-kisses.

The You of a Secret Kiss, Like Stolen Bread

Someone said they had a word
For music of feeling, for longing
Sparse as the stripped light of youth

You are my bamboo grove
On a late afternoon, where I feel nothing
You are as a mouth struck opal

A divine surrender to infinity
Someone said they had a word
For longing, pure and simple

From the gulfs of crazy waves in rain
There is such stillness and movement
In my being, when I think of you

I believe your moist hands are
Like some indefinable South, some symbolic
Fragrance I cannot quite remember

Tangerine moisture and liquorish lush flavor
Some sensual spirituality for which
Invades my obscurity, like life to the artist

Like femininity to the protesting solitude
Of a monk, scholar, orator of surrealism
Someone said they had a word

For the breathless state of strange desire
Before sweetness, before thorns, before union.

Dreams of your Photographs

Sweetheart, you are my river in paradise
I understand that destiny, more than anything
Is how we come together, like when you
Take your nature walks – I am transported
To the inner places you have been

Our nomadic beauty could wander the world
Because love cannot always fly
Without resting, I am such a place
Where you can be freely, without expectation
Or obligation, A calm root where you can belong

There is no formula of clay in our lives
But when our minds and bodies come together
You are the turquoise piece that fits in me
Like a gem to my stone, like a bud to my stem
And I yearn for your like mineral wishes

Emerald-longing, as sweet as the earth
We open celestial capsules in our minutes shared
Hours that caress us from afar, the spiritual wonder
Of so much discovery, you bring me alive
As if I’ve been invisible to every gift, before you.