Reclaiming Desire

I don’t know what to achieve with romance.
I guess it’ll just rot away.
I no longer chase it like I once did.
I guess I’ll just give it away.
I’m happier now than I used to be
to be unbound from the chain that leads wandering eyes.
The world is composed of many colors,
but my mind annexes the black and white
because there was a day when I wasn’t serious enough
and the retinal rods withdrew their perception of light and shadow
so that all I saw was color when the sun flashed.

Never again will I be lost without perception of form.
Though life is now a rough sketch to me,
I would rather be blind of the energy of the cosmos
than to not know what is dark and what is bright.

It’s the moment when naked becomes nude
and love becomes hormones and neuron receptors,
when a person is viewed objectively
as a sole variable in a long equation.
A hand within my hand embarks on a wild journey
upstream, up the smooth side of lower arm’s sensation current
stopping over my face where I kiss it and cherish it with grace
because grace is what it calls for.
Fingers beside my lips, I was hungry like you are, once before,
but now desire has left my fingertips,
and they’re cold,
and the sensitivity is gone.

You are beautiful. That you know.
Your hair flows like the night sky,
and I am that shade of blue that you cover with your arms and breasts and feminine frame.
It’s you.
It’s you that gets their attention
with your eyes that reflect two perfect moons.
My eyes reflect rays only for the toil below the African sun,
and these people don’t want to work no more.

I drive steel into the side of the earth, a sign of greatness.
I’ll never be jobless another day.
Like old John Henry, the labor might kill me,
but a cool glass of water will make my happy end.

Your fresh mild wind is breathed upon
the back of my neck, and I wonder,
“What is it about a woman’s essence
that briefly makes a man idiotic?”

I forced the land to give up her flowers, and here they now are yours
until they wither away like an old memory
that I didn’t want to die.

And I come to stand tightly at your behind holding your shoulders twixt my hands while pressing lightly against your lower spine as I try to depict for you my epiphany that shows directly before your eyes
(naked is nude, and perception is colorless).
I am intrigued. Your powers of inspiration fascinate me. Yet, what of love?
You tilt your head up to sky, and I fall forward onto your mouth.

Do I love you? I don’t know.
Does the smile I display mean love?
or does a certainty of heart?
though possibly distracted by rambling thought
because I’ve never defined love before.

Leave me beautiful angel!
You are beautiful in all your warm delight.
Take all your ruby and gold of sunrise
to where you can be endowed with more exceptionalness.
That’s what should be done right?
You are livelier than me.
Yet you turn your back on the world to attend to my heart.
I don’t want you to leave. “But I know you should,”
says the voice of logic.
What is a man put in this world for other than to learn
that this world’s champions don’t work at all?
and that machines are better men than a working man could ever be?
So, what?
What do I have to offer?
Why do you entertain me with kind words of updraft
that lift me up into the heavens
when I am the spike pounded with the hammer and passed over by the weight of one-hundred luxury trains?

And at the moment, we’re holding each other’s waist,
and your voice teases my humor
that must be found somewhere near my heart,

and fade!
That bizarre dreamland is no more.
Your lips and entity are not pressed firmly into mine.
I am a rock that witnessed a million years
and has nothing to say today.
But I see you,
and you hug me,
and I think that I should give women a chance
and not die alone.
Your eyes guided me along the university street side,
and the perfume (maybe it wasn’t an artificial fragrance, but just the natural smell of your skin in close proximity)
made my hard composure soften a bit
and made me not so manly and brutish.
But only with you when I saw you that day did a recent woman speak to me as if she knew me,
and I wished suddenly that you could know me more and more.
You captured my eyes with your mouth that joked and played with me,
and I marveled at how
a woman like a flower with rose hips and petal lips
would grow to respond to the seasonal song of a weed in mid-August.

I remember missing you
after declaring, “Time moves by and washes clean the slate.”
I was afraid that it was destined to be true.
Another girl came to me,
who I had known longer,
and I couldn’t want her like I once did.
But here you are,
seasons from that one night
that you were the moongirl and I was your Aztec devoted who wrote to you works of figurative literation.
Here you are, hugging me, holding me after months without being held.
You speak to me of your days as if I am your close friend.
All the heartless studying is obsolete for one moment...
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...
All the heartless studying is obsolete for one moment…
…
…
and my lips get dry, and my mouth unlooses its faucets of salivation,
and I swallow more frequently and stare into space
and can’t hear a voice in this land where I don’t belong.
Hug me again
like hills hug the valleys
and take the valleys into themselves
shielding them away from tillers
so that they can always be easy prairies.
I’ll miss you and will want to see you again
whenever I think that my fingertips are embracing a new summer.
I miss your voice now
like sweet bliss
that I’ve tasted and now am recalling
as to never forget its flavor.

Time alone records all histories
and from every point of view.
The cycle of daydream has been reinstated by the girl with the Latin rose blended into her softly caramelized complexion.
Desire has been made new
in me.