Regret

Don’t get me wrong –

I’m happy I’m here, drifting in your arms-chest-neck as we whisper our love (for fear of overzealous adults); I am happy, yet somehow it seems that I was happier still months back, when I was lost in wistful contemplation of this very summer afternoon; then, when outside it had raged anemic, and Desire had not known where to exhaust herself.  Your

Phantasm then had seemed yet more vigorously alive, real, stirring with animation, and your lips had been heavily pregnant. And

I had been happier still, lying with you on the silver screen of my feverish famished imagination, than I am now, with the merely-satisfied present: where the minutes fall heavy and mute from totalitarian clocks. I

Had been convinced, then, that I should explode on meeting you – thus released convulsively from the thrusting, expanding tension straining against the confines of my skull; that my eyes should melt from the heat of your presence, from seeing you in a place other than the marshes of my facile dreams; and yet:

Here I am, and here you are, and

I am adrift in impotent poetry.

Impoverished senses of mine; incompetent! Incapable of keeping up with the battering-ram of your presence, choose this virile hour to turn dull and philistine. Oh, that I shall peer upon this day down the looking-glass of Idle Recollection, seated upon the stale and mildly uncomfortable armchair of Nostalgia, and berate myself bitterly for not:

Pressing you harder to my breast, that a sliver of you

May diffuse into me, and for not

Entwining inextricably with your

Arms-legs-neck, that

A solitary flutter of your

Eyelashes against my right cheek

Forever beats

As a butterfly against the confines of

My stomach, and for not

Losing my fingers and resolve in your Tagore-scented hair.

Chrysopoeia

My love is pewter.

Given to base grunting, and rude
And crude
Expressions of vulgar desire.
Bite the stannic apple.

Part your
Hair and whisper in your creamy ear
Forbidden nothings.
Watch you squirm and undulate
Under the influence
Of Scandal™ (that mutable aphrodisiac).

Laying the slushy foundation for the
Oncoming bloom of
Flowers of consummated passion.

Nurture with a caressing word.

Until the ancient madness that courses through
Our veins comes to a head:
Waters the lakegarden, exhausts itself.

And out of the dirt, beauty.
Out of the mud, a quivering lotus.

Almost immediately despising its roots --
A saint rising on verdure nobility of birth above
the condescended huddled filthy masses.

Pure, friable, innocent, prodigal.

The urgency eases cataclysmically into a benign, golden mood, and
The alchemy is complete.