Put Away

You only want to touch me after dark.
Night time holds affection captive
And I’m only familiar in half light.

Nobody knows you steal kisses
When stop lights and street lamps turn on.
My convex shapes blend and bend into your eclipse.

I return though,
Your front porch has become something silent I cross
In the few seconds it takes for you to open your front door.

I accept your hesitant touch,
The hurried way you make love to me,
Momentary sparks in the darkness.
Tracing and retracing the the nations of your skin,
The desert of your back,
The sharp stone cliffs of your hands..
The fields of grass stretching off into sighing plains
when the stubble of your cheek brushes the smoothness of mine
Almost by accident.

I kindle these fragments of quick light
So when I return
And climb into bed pulling the covers up over my loneliness,
I can retrace the feeling of sunrises on my skin.
The golden way it lit lovers interlocking in sleep,
The moments I knew what it was to be endless.
I remember a time
you wouldn’t be ashamed to hold my hand in the day light.
You wouldn’t be afraid to say my name
in more than a whisper.

It’s 2am, the streets are empty,
Your house is cold.
Tonight I will leave your neighborhood un-haunted,
Tired of being a ghost.

Nothing Is That a Was Not Before

I saw something that made me sad today.
I wont, . . . No, I will not tell you.
Keeping the secret is keeping the beauty to me.
Keeping the emptiness.
Keeping the hollow ache, the one that makes it hurt to breathe.
And you somehow now feel special because you've kept it to your self.

When I started this I meant to tell you something,
Something about the uncertainty of missing you.
Fuck it. It's gone now, like so many lost thoughts I don't bother to write down anymore.
I meant to say that from missing you I buried myself in the damp, wet, earth.
I covered myself from the sun because it was like your love
And I lay there in the dark dreaming of your warmth.
But that's utter shit, isn't it?

It all is.
Maybe it always was.
But who am I trying to impress?
I cannot satisfy myself and that is the key,
The buzzing of the hive
That tells me I'm no good
And the voices are all my own.
They prick me, stinging venom.
I lie here uncomfortable
but hardly fatal,
Hardly in danger,
Hardly importend enough to matter.

Blue

I lost you somewhere between Jesus and the floor boards.
And these thin tissue paper words are just that.
Frail and transparent,
I hold them up to the moon to see their faint shades dancing listlessly
And I wonder vaguely what happened to us.

Was it the light that made us realize we no longer wanted this?
Should we of just continued by candle light and soft perfumes of night flowers?
Turning and speaking love poems on sheets of satin,
No, not that.
Anything but, is what we truly are.

We aren't exotic night birds.
We are simple.
Your ribs are shades of black and white
Devoid of color I trace them with failing fingers
Searching for the truth as solid as news print.
We haven't talked for weeks.
But in this moment there is only me and you
And blue collared cotton bleached by moonlight.
A new england farm house
Set alight by noiseless fire
(So quietly we burn).

We are drifting apart and it is already late.
And I'm wondering
If I should say goodbye,
Or make love to you one last time.