Old Soul Love Read online




  Pragma

  My grandmother

  and grandfather

  had the old soul love.

  It was truly your hand in mine,

  until the end of time.

  I watched her hug him,

  her aging arms

  wrapped around his

  barely breathing body as

  he took his last breaths.

  “Goodbye, Jack,

  I’ll never forget you.”

  I still find myself broken up about that moment.

  I wear his cologne

  out everywhere I go.

  I like to think I am

  keeping him alive

  a little longer for Grandma

  in this way,

  ordering his favorite tequila,

  embodying

  his gritty charisma.

  I aim for this love.

  It’s somewhere out there,

  and I know it.

  I am in the small

  and quiet army

  of hopeful romantics.

  The holding hands,

  deathbed kind of love.

  How could

  I forget her?

  First lovers

  might as well

  be a body part.

  We will always

  carry them.

  It is impossible

  to not be romantic

  with the world

  when we exist

  beneath a sun

  that constantly

  makes love

  to the horizon.

  If I shall die

  before her,

  I beg of you,

  whoever is in control—

  God, cosmos,

  nature, ocean—

  give my body

  to the sun

  so that every time

  it finds its way

  to her flesh

  she is never without

  the warmth

  of my love.

  I watched a girl

  in a sundress kiss

  another girl on a park bench,

  and just as the sunlight spilled

  perfectly onto

  their hair,

  I thought to myself,

  “How bravely beautiful it is,

  that sometimes

  the sea wants the city,

  even

  when it has been told its entire

  life it was

  meant for the shore.”

  I miss you

  even when you are

  beside me.

  I dream

  of your celestial body

  even when you are

  sleeping in my arms.

  The words I love you

  will never be enough.

  I suppose

  we’ll have to invent

  new ones.

  He thought,

  as the moonlight swam

  into the window and lit her

  shoulder blades,

  “There is nothing more beautiful

  than the way the universe is

  always chasing you.”

  My dearest, I cannot express this to you

  enough: there are not enough words

  in any language to measure you up,

  but I devote my life to doing the best

  that I can, weaving and spinning through

  gardens of poetry, trying to pluck

  the dearest verses, the darling reason,

  the highest sentiments, for you.

  You are simply what you are, and you

  exist in such perfection that forces me

  to never turn away, my eyes always

  pressed softly to the hue of you,

  my body begging and yearning for more,

  always more. You simply are.

  You are the smell of rain and the way

  it arouses my body in love; you are

  the golden blood of jazz and the sexy, serene

  sound of the sax sung to me whitely

  in the morning; you are every street name

  and sunrise and sunset I have missed

  because I was in bed with you, too foolish

  to leave but wise enough to stay and know

  the difference; you are every stone

  that has found a way to charm me, to drip

  my beautiful blood blue into its energy;

  you, my sweetness, are never without,

  you are everywhere I go and all that I do,

  it’s you, always you;

  you are everything, absolutely everything,

  and the sea.

  The universe

  wrote fiction

  in us;

  it’s called fear.

  If there

  is one thing

  I have learned

  in this world,

  from observation,

  from failure,

  from struggling

  to love

  the only self

  I will ever own,

  it’s that more

  than anything

  in this world

  people these days

  are so petrified,

  so terribly petrified,

  to just be natural.

  There are pieces

  in me

  that die

  when she leaves

  these blankets.

  I loved her

  not for the way

  she danced

  with my angels but

  for the way

  the sound

  of her name

  could silence

  my demons.

  One

  of the most flattering

  things I have come to know

  is when someone tells me,

  “I am in love with the way

  you see the world.”

  How sincerely beautiful

  it is for someone to simply

  say your eyes are art.

  I grew up listening to

  my father say my little brother’s

  name over and over and over

  into his newborn ears until

  he finally understood that

  name was his own.

  Now I am older, and some days

  I find myself whispering into

  your ears over and over and over,

  “I love you, I love you,”

  until you begin to understand

  that I am truly yours.

  confident

  in one’s own skin,

  in the end,

  all that truly

  matters.

  My grandfather told me

  to never be on time;

  it just shows you’re

  conforming and playing

  by their rules.

  He always said,

  “There is nothing worse

  than their rules, kid.”

  I remember him always,

  in the smell of his cologne bottle

  I reach for every morning,

  in the lifeless, lost smile

  now on my grandmother’s

  forgotten face.

  If I could, I would trade my bo
dy for his.

  Put me in the ground

  and crown my grandmother again.

  In foolish love she would

  stare at him,

  wide eyed and marvelous.

  While I smile wildly

  from the throat of my grave.

  My dear future

  I do not know you by name

  not by gender

  not by the sparkle in your earthy eyes

  or the smoothness of your inner thighs

  no, I do not

  and I don’t want to.

  Who knows the man I will become

  who knows the good I will do

  the good I won’t do

  what I will or will not have the strength for

  and what good is it to know?

  All that matters is potential

  and the double-barrel stare

  to see it through.

  What could be

  more brave and

  honorable than loving yourself

  no matter the cost,

  so that you can give that

  love away to others

  and become the change,

  the difference?

  And maybe

  in the end,

  we were all just humans,

  drunk on the idea

  that love,

  only love,

  could heal

  our brokenness.

  the answer

  will always be found

  in nature.

  no matter the question.

  I have found the people

  with the biggest hearts

  open themselves

  up to it all—

  sun and moon,

  ocean and meadow,

  gardens and birds,

  trees and mountains.

  the universe is always

  trying to tell us something.

  if only we would listen.

  we become better people

  when we do.

  I want sex

  so passionate

  the stars

  rip open the roof

  of our bedroom

  just to watch.

  My aim is not only

  to tell you I love you,

  to not only

  whisper sweet, lovely nothings

  in your eager ears,

  but rather to show you,

  my clenched fist unfurling

  out of its fearful, loveless past, my

  heart open in celestial bloom, you

  can have all of me.

  Every inch of marrow and flesh.

  I pushed away

  love I felt I didn’t deserve

  courted poetry

  down to the water

  instead

  in her white dress

  wrapped her arms

  around me

  like the sound

  of a piano breathing

  poetry will never break you

  I wrote into the stone

  poetry will never die

  I wrote again

  poetry is not jealous

  poetry just is

  it stands alone

  as this ancient thing

  this way of talking

  this way of being

  this way of healing

  when I die

  bury me among the pages

  I want my body

  to be drenched

  in all the words

  I never said

  but the ones that have always

  existed inside me.

  In the end,

  when

  our eyes

  find their

  infinite darkness,

  you will know that

  our bodies

  were tiny universes,

  and I love you

  with a thousand seas.

  There

  are maps

  through your bones

  and skin,

  to the way

  you’ve felt,

  and the way

  you’ve been.

  How truly

  terrible it is

  that those

  who are silent

  are often seen

  as empty.

  The root

  of my heaviness

  is quite simple:

  so much to love,

  so little time.

  We softly

  got lost

  in the things

  that would take

  us away

  and we never returned

  from them again.

  To us,

  that was each other.

  She buried

  her ears in the calm

  of his heartbeat,

  and in a matter of seconds

  fell terribly in love

  with the way her loneliness

  fell softly

  and suddenly

  asleep

  in his chest.

  It was the day I first saw you in that dress,

  black and red roses enveloped over body,

  your hair metallic and tossing as you twirled for me.

  “Does it look good, baby?”

  If only you knew. Often I am afraid to tell you.

  But in my own ways, I do.

  When spirit is just as beautiful as body,

  and body as spirit, it does something to a man,

  makes him question everything he has ever known,

  sends him to, say, a blank page,

  or a piano bench, or a canvas,

  hungry to make poetic sense of it,

  of the way it feels to look into

  the almond eyes of a woman

  and lose himself,

  his ego hovering

  and trembling above him,

  his hands better things,

  his heart an invitation.

  I find myself on the white blank page often,

  daydreaming to John Coltrane’s saxophone

  of that tender, romantic love

  that exists in absolute rarity,

  the kind that kisses both light and wound,

  both flesh and soul,

  and gives a man the courage

  to go beyond himself,

  to not listen to cock,

  rather the water of being,

  and take his woman

  by the hands

  and offer her the entire world.

  I want my woman to taste my love,

  truly taste it.

  I want to drench her to the bone

  in roses and poetry and kisses

  and colors unknown.

  Practice

  forgiveness,

  especially on

  yourself.

  I love our sun-diving hips,

  our moon-risen collarbones,

  the soft lightning

  from our fingertips,

  and the perfectly soothing sound

  of chanted thunder

  hiding within our whispered moans.

  It is a miracle to say the least,

  the way the universe

  clings to our human bodies

  as they feverishly make love.

  It was like watching

  the sun set

  over an exhausted horizon;

  seeing her fall softly

  asleep in my arms.

  Isn’t it an absolutely magica
l thing

  how magnificent and grand

  and diverse this world is,

  yet we can meet our significant

  other in a coffee shop

  or bookstore or bar?

  How incredibly lovely is this?

  Doesn’t it just make you want to

  get up each faithful morning,

  put on your favorite attire,

  spin the fitting jazz record,

  and walk out your door with

  the exquisite hope

  that your love

  may be waiting for you through

  some glass window reading

  some book dreaming of

  romance

  and the color lavender

  and the sacred skin

  of some other?

  We wait for this our entire lives.

  What a day to be alive.

  We are

  the scientists,

  trying to make sense

  of the stars

  inside us.

  Today I contemplate my tenderness,

  how much of it is left,

  if it went away softly into the night

  or if I have become an artist

  at suppressing it.

  I think I choose to be tender

  because tender does not ask questions.

  There is no doubt in being tender.

  One is simply tender because it is natural.

  Grandmother with her apron on smiling,

  stirring softly her special soup.

  Mother’s long fingernails sliding slowly

  across the small of my back.

  Every day I think of different ways to be tender,

  as if it is an art form and I can shape it

  into what I desire. So I do,

  and I will continue to.

  Without my tenderness I am without love.

  Without love I am without everything.

  The purpose of life

  isn’t just to

  be happy.

  The purpose of life,

  my love,

  is to feel.

  You must understand

  that your pain

  is essential.

  I have never blended in with

  masculine proud men,

  if I am honest.

  With them it’s always,

  “You don’t have the balls.”

  I have always been

  far too sensitive for that.

  With me it’s always been,

  “You don’t have the heart.”

  You ask me

  how I love you,

  and the reply

  will always remain

  the same.

  In the spaces