I notice you immediately

‘Cause you smell like reckless danger

Mixed with narcissism and whisky

And that’s my favorite scent.



You’re a skilled trickster

A magician

A snake charmer

And within six seconds, I’m begging you to bite me

Double-dog daring your fangs to slice into my vulnerability.



And so you do.



I say this makes me sexy and powerful, but really—

It slays me so subtly that I miss my own slow-motion death.



Your venom slips deep, deep, then deeper,

Making me lose my shit.



I breathe you in

And I lose my shit.



This is not love.



This is fucked up,

This is fucking,

But, this is not love.



My dark darling, you’ve burned me to the ground again.



We dive too deep, consumed with passionate pain

Revealing everything

Hiding everything

Hurting each other is half the fun.



A fierce game of Russian roulette

A relentless power struggle

My bleeding heart splits open—

But, hurting each other is half the fun.



My dark darling, you’ve burned me to the ground again.



Thrilling games like these have a price:

A thousand dollars per second

To prostitute my tender heart

To your hungry soul.



Within weeks, I’m sucked dry as a desert,

As your sparkling fangs scan for a new, juicy prey.

I’m exhausted and empty,

As you leave me behind, a shattered survivor of your recklessness.



I’m done.



My dark darling, I loved you because I hated myself.



I’m done.



But, I thank you for burning me down,

Because I came back from that fiery death

To fly into the fierce winds of freedom

And soar.



Yes, I’m learning to love myself

So I can soar.



Goodbye dark darling,

You’re but a terrible nightmare.

It’s my time now,

And I plan to fucking soar!

Author: Sarah Harvey

Most Like an Arch This Marriage

By John Ciardi


Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds

and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.

Mass made idea, and idea held in place.

A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.


Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean

into a strength. Two fallings become firm.

Two joined abeyances become a term

naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.


Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,

what’s strong and separate falters. All I do

at piling stone on stone apart from you

is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss


I am no more than upright and unset.

It is by falling in and in we make

the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake,

in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

Let Me Love You One Day At A Time


Let me love you one day at a time, and please love me that very same way. We may never learn all there is to know about love, but every day together will teach us a little more about ourselves and the special kind of happiness we can bring to each other. One of the best things you've helped me learn is that love starts with being honest, speaking straight from how we really feel. I like how we've opened doors, and windows of our lives and invited each other to come in, look around and get aquainted. The more I'm with you, the more at home I feel. Let me love you one day at a time.

Why talk about "always" and say things we're not sure we mean, when we can talk about today and mean exactly what we say. Let's think of each sunrise as a fresh start, a brand new beginning... and try to fill each day with as much love as it can hold. I know you're not always going to be exactly the same person Sunday thru Saturday, January thru December, and neither am I. We both need laughing times and crying times... and time for every mood in between. The important thing is that you can be the kind of you that feels most natural and that I can be my most favorite kind of me. That's what makes us so comfortable together... it's also what keeps us from taking too much for granted. Let me love you one day at a time.

Let's not wonder how long love will last but how beautiful we can make it grow. Let's give our best to each other but, let's never expect miracles of our love. There's no need to... the reality of you and me is better than all the impossible dreams and fantasies I've ever imagined. Being with you is feeling proud, blessed, grateful for each hour we share. Let me love you, not according to any how-to-book, or by someone else's set of rules... but simply for who you are and how you are with me. And please love me, not for what I might be molded into, but for what I am here and now. Don't expect me to be someone all good and all giving, someone who could never disappoint you... someone to right to be real and too perfect to be me. I'm just as human as anyone I know... and very thankful that you are too. Let's try to remember that love means keeping in touch with each other's thoughts and feelings... listening not just to words, but to the emotions behind them... seeing, not just the smiles and frowns but the hurt and pleasures that cause them.

Let me love you one day at a time, starting today. Let's have the courage to try to change whatever needs changing about us, and wisdom to know what should never be changed. Believing in ourselves and in our ability to handle whatever tomorrow brings... and trusting that this love we share will continue to grow stronger as the future years unfold... One Beautiful Day At A Time.

The Hunter's Song At Nightfall
~Goethe



My rifle cocked, in savage calm
I prowl the moorland here,
Your face before me everywhere,
Your vivid face, my dear.

You strolled, I'm sure, a sweeter field
In sweeter calm today.
No thought of me, or such a thought
As girls can shrug away.

No thought of one who, vexed and glum,
Has all the world to track.
The roads go east, the roads go west,
But not a road goes back.

And yet to think of you...such peace
Around me settles soon
As if I'm puzzled how my gaze
Were spellbound on the moon. :moonstars:

Love Poems to God, II, 22

You are the future,

the red sky before sunrise

over the fields of time.

You are the cock's crow when night is done,

you are the dew and the bells of matins,

maiden, stranger, mother, death.

You create yourself in ever-changing shapes

that rise from the stuff of our days---

unsung, unmourned, undescribed,

like a forest we never knew.

You are the deep innerness of all things,

the last word that can never be spoken.

To each of us you reveal yourself

differently:

to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a

ship.

--Rainier Maria Rilke

The Tailor

Listening to the silent words, spoken yet not
The tailor pauses--a tender thought playing to his lips
His hands traveling--reaching skyward toward the worn patches of colored hue
His fingers opening--as the dainty embellishment's, and textures flow through
Behold the tapestry of loving tears, he feels it

Feeling the gentle embrace, touching yet not
The tailor pauses--a tender thought playing to his lips
His ears drinking--reaching skyward the fabric swirls and collides against his skin
His skin absorbing--as the silken strands tickle and echo
Behold the tapestry of loving tears, he hears it

The tailor stands within the tapestry
As he pauses a tender thought plays to his lips
Smiling, he gently enfolds himself
The tailor knows his work is secure
For the threads woven in love are unbreakable.

Make tomorrow's dawn the brightest moment of today.
In that--Tears of love are shed.

-Lyrical (a random poet I know)

SEA-CHANGE~
Genevieve Taggard





You are no more, but sunken in a sea
Sheer into dream, ten thousand leagues, you fell;
And now you lie green-golden, while a bell
Swings with the tide, my heart; and all is well
Till I look down, and wavering, the spell-
Your loveliness - returns. There in the sea,
Where you lie amber-pale and coral-cool,
You are most loved, most lost, most beautiful.

You Learn
 

MAN AND SEA~🐋~
Charles Baudelaire



Man, a free man, always loves the sea
and in its endlessly unrolling surge
will contemplate his soul as in a glass
where gulfs as bitter gape within his mind.

Into this image of himself he dives,
his arms and eyes wide open and his heart
sometimes diverted from its own dead march
by the tides of that untamable complaint.

How grim their combat, and yet how discreet
-who has sounded to its depths the human heart?
and who has plucked its riches from the sea?
-so jealously they guard their secrets, both!

Countless the ages past and still to come
in which they wage their unrelenting war
for sheer delight in carnage and in death,
implacable brothers and eternal foes.

I Have Found What You Are Like - e.e. cummings


i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned

newfragile yellows

lurch and.press

-in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirring of birds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have (almost when hugeness will shut
quietly) almost,
your kiss

of likely hearts
 

“For love is a celestial harmony
Of likely hearts compos'd of stars' concent,
Which join together in sweet sympathy,
To work each other's joy and true content,
Which they have harbour'd since their first descent
Out of their heavenly bowers, where they did see
And know each other here belov'd to be.”
― Edmund Spenser, Fowre Hymnes

“How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”

― W.H. Auden

http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/CathedralRock.JPG

The minute I heard my first love story,


I started looking for you, not knowing

how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,

they're in each other all along.



[From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks]

The Summons.

I can not bow to woo thee
With honey words and flower kisses
And the dew of sweet half-truths
Fallen on the grass of old quaint love-tales
Of broidered days foredone.
Nor in the murmurous twilight
May I sit below thee,
Worshiping in whispers
Tremulous as far-heard bells.
All these things have I known once
And passed
In that gay youth I had but yester-year.
And that is gone
As the shadow of wind.
Nay, I can not woo thee thus;
But as I am ever swept upward
To the centre of all truth
So must I bear thee with me
Rapt into this great involving flame,
Calling ever from the midst thereof,
"Follow! Follow!"
And in the glory of our meeting
Shall the power be reborn.
And together in the midst of this power
Must we, each outstriving each,
Cry eternally:
"I come, go thou yet further."
And again, "Follow,"
For we may not tarry.

- Ezra Pound

"When the sweet glance of my true love caught my eyes,

Like alchemy, it transformed my copper-like soul.

I searched for Him with a thousand hands,

He stretched out His arms and clutched my feet"

[From Thief of Sleep
by Shahram Shiva]

A Touch, A Tear, A Tempest


“Tomorrow came
with the illusion of today
even more fleeting than yesterday

it came
like it always comes

and went
like it’s always gone

like a favorite song
in its final seconds

Tomorrow came and left
leaving nothing
nothing...
but a familiar
lingering
sense of loss behind.”

― Sanober Khan