I wonder if poetics will continue to embrace us in the new year. I miss the churning vileness of inspired blood on the page. I seem to spew only marshmallows recently. The sweetness perhaps does not become me. Perhaps its the mellowness of sand and sea, the lack of troubled wind disturbing both these forces of nature, idle within me.

May you always have peace in your life, and raging wars in your poetry, world.

May you always have some warm arms you trust enclosed around your dreaming form.

May the sunlight of mornings after never burn away the stars you held in sleep.

240 days

Dubai,

December 20^th, 2010

When you leave, I sleep alone.

But the curve of a back is made for two, to align breath

and knees, perhaps the singular hook of a toe against heel, these rumpled sheets

and the chalk outline of a phantom embrace I feel. It is difficult to sleep,

with or without you. Hands seek pillows to hide, exposed lips thirsty for

the minute words only cotton and a moon can hear.

Sometimes the silence of this room is loud and clear,

a litany of death knells to usher in moments when my heartbeat, thudding

on, is reminiscent of arms pulsating heat,

their palpitations a beat a  lullaby

the heaviness of your face in my neck, in search of answers to keep

the hands roving midriffs, the shifts in conscious departures, as

delirium seeps,

oblivion, the realm of anotherness and otherness and togetherness tumble

into rising music instruments of our fatigue,

I can see eyelashes in the dark, I can listen to poems in the movement

of our shared recess, this abyss of you and me, this sleep.

How human it is, this discovery, this secret I weep,

I know you,

I know you better in dreams than in all the potent coffees of lucid mornings after.