Quiet Rivers

I am not brilliant
in any two-minute way,
or in any explosive manner
you want to name.
I merely perceive my world
through my reactions to it;
the quality of my own mortifications,
the incongruous way speechlessness
takes over my senses
when beholding wonders,
the easy way words run into the meadows
to chase feelings and butterfly wings.
I write, moved, transported
elsewhere,
with found honesty,
when time and words conspire
to compress some semblance of beauty
into substance,
or sent spinning,
in place yet helter-skelter,
aware yet unawakened,
catatonic with unmitigated desire -
helplessly unmanned by what was withheld –
transfixed with unshed tears,
plunged into the oblivion of the unspoken
and the unseeing.
I am not brilliant; merely
consumed, in your absence.
Not insane, not I; merely aglow,
in your presence.
I merely wake, and awake reach
my world, in the texture
of your dialogue, and the resonance
you evoke as you delve into me.
Merely a man, in twilight,
and all my meadows behind,
and butterflies set free
before they were even caught,
and everything
that was never said
in all the years bled past.
A man, and lost time, in the shadow
of a woman.

Tags: butterflies in twilight, lost time

I bask warm when you speak;
my soul a drop away from the brim,
my heart that breathless instant
before it becomes
prey
running from the pack.

I inhale you to me, and I do not
want to breathe out
again,
even as I hold all thought at bay, away,
while thirst holds sway,
instantly fulfilled, immediately slaked,
by words that are no mirage,
by my sense of you.

I find my questions superfluous
as I am enfolded
in answers like arms needing no words;
what you say, what you leave
unspoken,
how you say it, how you fill
the spaces in-between,
takes me to the warmth, to rain,
when my senses can taste sweet grass
in the desert air, and not be
inundated.

I bask in the warm of these,
my whimsies,
where I can dance
through your dreams,
believing myself there, painting
my desire with your brushes, etching
the shadows of you
with unwearied fingers and hands and tongue,
and trusting self and I, safe
in your weavings.

I inhale sanctuary into me,
that short minute
between my day and yours,
among all the concerns that draw us away
even before hello,
and I do not want to breathe out again,
even as I do.

Tags: with you, without you