Love as Smolder

Wanting to morn a body that never was

See a life as a seed as if extrapolated emotions could bear weight

Like the fruit from a branch severed in a hurricane’s wind

Imagined like fleshy pulp bitten and savored

The remorse of a tongue rounding the apple’s sweetness

Lingering into a crush of fiber compressed

That if what one feels is present is painted into a portrait

The hue becomes history like editorial discretion

Fading into the bar lights like tip toeing midnights

Slinking from a bedroom shared and witnessing

The mattress to the left remain sparse with vapid energies

Conjuring a woman into a pillow to wrap an arm

As if the flowers upon her back were a garden of spring’s germination

Into summer’s bloom for autumn’s baleful grip harvesting sorrow

Time wrestles like earnings of authenticity rooting

To have but weeks knowing how deeply certain plants burrow for water

Finding the vast reservoirs of contemplative minds converging

To appear so and obliterate so abruptly from one end and potentially holding out

On the other ruptures the levee into a cascade of seasons parading

Like every day cycles from winter into winter

Blips where the only life growing are memories

Do nothing plants rehearsing a story until reality fades behind tainted petals

Masking a thorn-maze of tendrils shredding progression into halts of blood

Wanting to try to pass beyond the thickness

Seeing ghosts of mermaids that never existed slurped under shorelines

Staring at the water’s gleam praying for her to surface in the languid moonlight

Soliloquies of write gather until the madness collects any lingering entitlement to speak

Regurgitated like a mother bird into her offspring’s maw

The sickness sets that there is no place else to go but swallow

The worm has been chewed in sufficient iteration to transpose character and flaws

So that life becomes an idea contingent of time’s grip slipping in the disproportional power

Of love’s lament: one to live in the fire, one to walk away each seeing a blaze

As passion, as disaster, as smoldering, as extinguished

Reading thermometers by the warmth of one’s hand and not the embers