Future:

Your face came up

in mirror-image, spun out of a crystal ball

like a five-cent trick; only so real as I could make you.

Only so real as the hope I carried in my heart.

Lucky for you (and me)

I'd lugged at least your measure

in desire about for—oh—a decade or so

in the depths of that very same heart.

Beside it I kept a weak fatalism,

The kind that could be tossed off easy,

like a prayer with one half-open eye.

There would be no angels, sure, but I held out for you:

And now you're here. Real. I could kiss your eyes

but I'd scare you. I'd scare you.

I don't want you to hear the low roar of real silence,

it's rough tongue, how it wears the soul.

Know only my love. Know exuberance. And love me, and give me more,

and I will return it ten-fold.  

A cocoon of smoke,

All bright-colored,

The tails of dream-snakes, soft,

Tokens of nightmares, once alive,

That once wrenched the soul asleep,

Now brilliant, weaving themselves into a world apart:

There, we love, we live the lives we intend.

I can kiss your hands and tell you the looks we shared were sacred.

That nothing is trite or untrue.

If I could turn myself inside-out,

And, unencumbered by language, or flesh,

Draw a portrait of your face in me,

Impress upon you, like a flame,

The form of this intrepid love,

Something pure, yet uncheapened by words.

just a thought

As beset as I may be by ghosts of my past (both those subtle and perhaps less so), I cannot understand a fatalistic view of the world. Life is choice--yours, or another's--bounded by simple physical realities. And to be overcome by such realities is to live without nuance. But perhaps that is a privileged perspective.