Beyond the Bedroom

       
So I wonder why
it gets
this way, when there’s talk of nothing
but maybe and days
that seem to last
forever without touching,
without seeking
and seeing, and clutching at snatched moments
of instant satiation. And I cannot tell you it’s different
to the basest things
offered by creation,
for there are few
noble reasons,
I feel need to be near to you. There are few moments
where anything is due but general,
mutual
appreciation
of beauty
and pleasure,
of fate and desire,
of lovers, and liars, and of
this tiny furnace,
that seems ever
to burn in me.

Shut your eyes now.
Do you not see what is bare
and ugly truth?
It is all for want of having you,
and for bitterness when I do not.
It is all for a watched
kitchen clock that has never
struck past eight. It is all for the nights you were hours
late or never there,
for a watched phone that didn’t ring,
and the love songs you promised
but didn’t sing, if indeed
they were ever written…

…suddenly it looks very fitting,
(in its jumps and starts),
that pulling away, you should seem to me
not whole,
but as several
glowing
parts.