So many fleeting thought go unposted...

Here are the few recent leaves that fell, rather than scattered to the moments without pen, without paper, without desire, or left to the carlessness of a man-boys charge...

Scotch

Flames lick and laugh
tickling with thick smoke
the belly and bowels
as slanting bars burn
casting colors of
gold and red warmth against
the room’s pale walls.

Lantern, furnace,
ruddy and rheumy,
bright blank eyes
stare off through
the dull gray fog of age
and ages, remembering
the ruins and barrooms
where once,
or never,
or always,
a lighter step had waltzed.

Desire, in 3 Movements, E Minor

I dream of you in the sacred space between twilights. Your smile haunts my nights and your absence is the stalking specter of my nightmares. I toss and turn, churning and twisting, the sheets, breathless and panting I silently cry out for you, as your unspoken name echoes deafly and I fall back into turbid slumber.

You, glowing, a woman, with power and presence in your every move and intonation. Innocence tempered by experience, your knowing eyes, brilliant insights exposed behind the flash of your smile, behind full lips smirking in perpetual bloom, ripe with humor dipped in tart ironic cynicism. To run my fingers through the ravens’ mane of hair, feel your hot pale skin in the cup of my palm, to let the tips of my fingers dance...

Forever. You. Days and weeks, terms, eventually leading to miles, and years, you, forever. Burned into my memory, now, into my heart, as the sacred, the holy, that my profane, in awe, could never approach.
Goodbye, and thank you, for the photo I never took, but will always, always keep.