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.