A Lesson Learned and a Painful Goodbye

A karmic debt will always be repaid 100 fold.

It was a terse, painful, goodbye, your words stung more than I can ever express, but the affair will always be as I remember it, though the memory is half blurred as if by dream and happenstance.

Lips wet with whisky and wild desire, your heart drumming me toward an ocean of oblivion, your mouth on my mouth until the outside world dissolves in mist and my body knows nothing but the rush of blood in our veins.

Drunken mad, delirious, bliss; in your cup I yield to you my soul and drink your kiss.

I suck your tongue and listen as your heart calls out to me in iambic syllables. I compose sonnets to the rhythmic meter of its beating.

The Warrior Woman's Surrender

Like Hippolyta to Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, I have surrendered to the path of soul consciousness chosen for me by fate. I'd evaded so long, denied its existence, refused and refused and refused all who attempted entry. Until fate delivered him to my doorstep and Cupid set his arrows afire.

He was the most beautiful, wild, thing I'd ever encountered. He will be difficult to forget.

"Wild Nights--Wild Nights!"

Wild nights - Wild nights! (269)

By Emily Dickinson
 

Wild nights - Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile - the winds -

To a Heart in port -

Done with the Compass -

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -

Ah - the Sea!

Might I but moor - tonight -

In thee!

Our Two Hands Applaud, and This Is No Sin

Two Hands
By Anne Sexton

From the sea came a hand,
ignorant as a penny,
troubled with the salt of its mother,
mute with the silence of the fishes,
quick with the altars of the tides,
and God reached out of His mouth
and called it man.
Up came the other hand
and God called it woman.
The hands applauded
And this was no sin.
It was as it was meant to be.
I see them roaming the streets:
Levi complaining about his mattress,
Sarah studying a beetle,
Mandrake holding his coffee mug,
Sally playing the drum at a football game,
John closing the eyes of the dying woman,
and some who are in prison,
even the prison of their bodies,
as Christ was prisoned in His body
until the triumph came.

Unwind hands,
you angel webs,
unwind like the coil of a jumping jack,
cup together and let yourselves fill up with sun
and applaud, world,
applaud.

Our Poetic Moment

And the day would come
When I would be your poem
You write your words
upon my body
flame sun tongue
drive these syllables into me

And you penetrate me
with the force of
the word

the force of
nouns and verbs

Bajo tu clara sombra

by Octavio Paz

 
Un cuerpo, un cuerpo solo, un sólo cuerpo
un cuerpo como día derramado
y noche devorada;
la luz de unos cabellos
que no apaciguan nunca
la sombra de mi tacto;
una garganta, un vientre que amanece
como el mar que se enciende
cuando toca la frente de la aurora;
unos tobillos, puentes del verano;
unos muslos nocturnos que se hunden
en la música verde de la tarde;
un pecho que se alza
y arrasa las espumas;
un cuello, sólo un cuello,
unas manos tan sólo,
unas palabras lentas que descienden
como arena caída en otra arena....

Esto que se me escapa,
agua y delicia obscura,
mar naciendo o muriendo;
estos labios y dientes,
estos ojos hambrientos,
me desnudan de mí
y su furiosa gracia me levanta
hasta los quietos cielos
donde vibra el instante;
la cima de los besos,
la plenitud del mundo y de sus formas.

What of hearts and minds?

Never give all the Heart

By William Butler Yeats
 

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.

O come be my tiger

The Tyger

By William Blake

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

"10 Things I Hate About You"

1. Your eyes that draw me in like two magnets and leave me utterly lost in a sea of blue
2. Your boyish smile that beguiles me into believing anything and everything you say to me, no matter how outlandish or cliché
3. Your teeth that gleam with fearful symmetry, like a tiger stalking prey
4. Your voice that sings my name in unspoken syllables.
5. Your arms that hold me weightless against the grain of the universe
6. Your ambivalence that leaves an icy rime around my heart
7. Your distancing rhetoric; a confusing amalgam of fear and uncertainty
8. My desire to give you anything and everything you want no matter that my heart says, "hold on, hold on."
9. My inability to say "no."
10. Your kisses that scorch my flesh with a promise of possibility and a vision of what could be/might have been