If you could briefly hold my hand,
lead me to the gardens,
I will follow: steady, incremental,
like the wind gust before landfall.
To create a space to breathe,
I rely on beauty.
Free me from the forms.
And toss out alignment, too.
Music stays like a drowning man
clutching a rope.
Loneliness is prolonged
and acceptance seems random.
Granted by a nod from the tribe’s chiefs
or a lucky encounter at a bar, downtown,
with a conflicted, vexed beauty
angry at her boyfriend
over a heated debate
about the merits of a sentence
a famous critic had uttered.
I gather pictures of women
who look like you.
Your eyes glow, sing,
and their light is cozy.
But it’s not your eyes
I am after. Nor your lips.
Body nor mind. But
your presence, happiness,
solitude, anger, pride,
and above all your rare and short stays.
Daylight is sometimes majestic.
Capturing it can be deadly.
Even when a critic tears
poems to pieces and feeds them to a shredder,
the poems are better off.
He might have been enraged,
but he cared.
The windows don’t know how to deceive.
The rain rarely discriminates.
When it floods, water can’t be discreet.
Sweet secrets told to you atop
the mountains, in the rain,
on a shaky ride down at dark,
with zero visibility,
will evaporate like fog
by the time you hit the valley.
Poets whisper to the sun,
flirt with the dawn, cry with the poor,
uproot trees, set fires for long nights.
They befriend the sulfurous moon.
Despite hope’s illusion
to be barely alive,
it was dead at birth!
My desire for you is
poisonous, spills over.
If I were to hold your breasts
I may faint
but I know I won’t be awed
the next time.
I would rather obsess about your absence!
My passion is rich, warm as your skin,
flies high with eagles and runs
with hungry cheetahs.
The weight of a child’s joy
on his father’s heart.
