Sometimes, it is preferable to have the alone heat of a sweaty laptop in your hands, writing, nestled in your lap,

than to be sweaty and flushed with words in the lap of a hot writer, elsewhere.

The following is how I feel about moonlight. You get a silver star if you finish it. I wont bet on it! I will have to chop this rant in half, soon.

For you, the moon.
Iowa City, October 2011.

I love the dark.
The mental synapses can be illuminated in ways that
matter,
open are foreheads to the galaxies.
To the birds, the trees, the trash littering rivers,
imprint in sobriety the flower you couldn’t believe bloomed
there.
But,
but my physical body seeks
contrast,
pockets of spillage,
light leaking to haunt you.

 

Skip behind little flames.
Light a candle for all that you have lost.
Weep whenever you can.

Let him touch you where he wants,
the flicker of motion gives renewal, both
light and your bodies have much in common.

You can proclaim love,
hidden behind bobbing lanterns on a river if you wish a
postcard for the moment.

Let the humid summer night insects glow occasionally to
guide you.

The street corners are shade,
are temples of all your familiars. Undress as you should,
the skirt barely lifted by a breeze, his eyes burst with
recognition
premonition
a love story can be born in cracks of walls,
by alleys, hushed
voices their own galaxy.

The sun benevolent to his brown
face while a shadow protects all that
alabaster in her, and on
her, and in her spring,
the steps she takes,
a clothes line,
fluttering she is,
pinned
to it are her half-snapped photographs,
the woman is a phantom when you tighten your
chest to remember her, the dart
of her glances is all answers.

 
You know she was singing.

 
You send prayers to the light changes, for her
appearance, savior.

Think of sunsets.

All the many you promised yourself you’d stamp on your
inside
forever, while they slipped
to the necessary
housekeeping of the soul.
The sun dissolving into a palette without borders,
degrading into space,
now you can start.

 

In a poem about love in the dark,
one cannot but display the word,
lurk.
Yes, lurk around the hallways of his privacy.
Leave a glimmering part of yourself to mesh with his
interiors,
the walls he has are now only places where she has
existed,
no more than that.

 

Stare at the face of your child in perfect darkness,
you might still learn forever the contours.

 

Perhaps the way the window pane reflects his eyes is
answer,
in a slash of light errant.
There must be welcomed intrusion of
day, refracted
the way his eyes crinkle at the edges, reminds
you perhaps of your first love,
the one that was not and yet you are so full of being,
staring at a window, thinking of a tattooed woman
reading poetry to her last love.

 

His knee should be dipped in darkness,
his not giving bare the stripped body in
noon light but a fortress
of somber shadows to adorn it,
the way I could move like a ghost in your bed,
slithered vital
conversations, half a dream away.

 

I would rather, my love,
the infinite repose of soles in sand on
afternoons where kissing the sun
is possible, her molten lips simmering, warming
yours like that one grasped soft hand
under the sheets, asleep
in December.  You can
lick the sun, when
the world is behind us,
our day vanished, like another planet.

 

Give the physical body not
the laboring of midday excursions, where baring the self
is endemic, the loss of power.
Their faces bleached by the direct rays
and when they rest,
to breathe, they
sweat,
maybe silent.

 

For me, the languid talk of dew, the desert evening,
dark skin a mattress,
my fingers a scorpion.

 
The nurtured annotations on my scarred skin are mine.
For you,
the fantasy of shadows.

 

Words can be chosen to lighten
and
fasten all the loose ends lost by this fluid
dance in the dark I love.
And you could say anything to me.

I can listen
and even the bed sheets do, and that bottle of lavender,
the books steal your lines,
and our invisible sleep.

 

Cluster to one’s self in daylight, where
the face prepares for night.
Release of its alertness,
the jumbled colors have left the sunset to swim sepia
over your smile.

I can see your tongue peek
out, so very
faintly,
rumbling in my chest is awareness
of its taste.  You can
still see love, in enclosure, black.
Silver.
 

Grey
Yellow ripples
Moss green, color of rot
sometimes, are the brushed strokes of
nighttime.

 
Do not speak to me of your mistrust of darkness.

 

Look,
bathe in orange by the street lamp, restless
to throw its body
around yours, hard metal to all her curves, the hardness
within you,
eroding.

Find
the nearest wall,
pin a moment,
your feet firmly planted, the
night- suddenly, lava.

 

Consider existing in the night. Consider language.
That unwinding of
all that is responsible,
all those allowances-
please fall into yourself, you
have lost all the clocks they gave you.

 

Bury work,
that gnaws at your 2 pm hunger,
and the daily sandwich,
coffee a respite in that loop you may find yourself in,
but the night, well my love,
the night knows
how to have its differences.
A fingerprint.

Even you, touching my thigh absent mindedly
reading a gorgeous
book that isolates me, even you,
beautiful sleepy you,
aren’t here tomorrow.

 
Try living in the shadows, in the
backs of rooms perhaps,
letting poetry tell you in huddled stolen
stories, eyes sting
and wonder, all you
could ever need to muster
of a sudden understanding of the other,
and the smallness of physical separation,
and solitary exhaustion,
fall into a poem whose words can fit her hips, when she
sleeps.
Remember.

In the dark, some plants glow.

In the dark, plants can grow,
and music is made
by millions,
to save you. Try listening to the same music in
moonlight,
and keep only few
around,
note the sensation that you are altered, possibly
transfixed in one plateau, or suddenly
able to hold her hand, or
toss her on a bed, or
crawl up her navel,
smash sofa edges to the mercy of her stretched neck,
where only that
and music, is a planet that you own, a
home that can save you, the continuous burning of a
resurrected altar.
 

Every night, small awaiting of finitude,
dreams
little deaths of the daily I, who
are we, those passengers of tales we
ascribe to our inner, constant elusive of all your
hallways in the personal architecture,
giving the night only palor,
and ardor, and fervor to claim
the word “shadows” beyond the etymology of
mere parlance of the word
Sunlight.

The night
and its dark is separate
cellular matter, a
universe, the rules once attempted, now
a drifting planet
where you are creator, and yet also the murdered by dawn,
conquered.
 
Give me the cool of your language at dawn.
The half profile of you,
sentences tumbling at discreet intervals, my
parted sides contained by the way your eyes are a mirror.
Touch me,
I can see you.
For me, give me the nights you could not sleep,
and not the mornings after,
not
the days where death openly saunters,
mocking our expressions,
our dry eyes unblinking,
squinting,
parched for the possibility of water on the moon.