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Old Soul Love
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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