WHAT IS TIME?

Prose Poem(For Jimmy)

Don't stare at me with my beard unshaved. Shamelessly the swans glide, wings on a formless lake.

Don't say you love me,let's not do it as birds do it, bees do it, the fleas are uneducated as they buzz above the water's edge.

Turn and love me if you say you will, as medicine haunts the bottle when it is empty, love hurts,never goes away, while we write prescriptions,antidotes for a better world and day.

Do I love you? Swivel, man, pivot yourself in your own darling as new,as if you had never cared. That question's absurd. If I'd have forecast doom on your diagnosis oh pal you'd certainly have heard. Swans mate for life at the water's edge.

With thanks or apologies even to Cole Porter.

Love songs to Strangers
(The Commitment Phobe?)

Just tell me what is it
The bridge into you? Strange
Fascinations of the unapproachable
Move mellifluously to eager
Encounter. What history,
What mystique, movement., moment
To why I am doing this
Under the lack lustre light?

You are your own woman, delicate
As interlaced icicles
Turning to the sun. Your fiddle
Tunes they ran-dan a merry dance
The stars silly,
The nude notion of nothing ventured
Nothing gained.

You turn the page
Of an ancient book, some spells to cast
Author authenticity
Against commitment phobia. This is.
We rescue each other from fear
Of our bodies, of impossibility
To say that if love means forever
It is but formed in the now.
This moment should be sweeter
Not dolly mixtures
Or prescribed fixtures
Of contact.

Love here means retention
Of memory. God I’ve a lot to learn
If love means forever and that against the stain
Of not falling. Nothing required
But the moment
Nothing expected.
If love returns a blossom then I’ve
A whole new life time in which to learn….

The attraction of the body
Is that no one owns it
Though we may long for it.