Lovelorn

Lovelorn

Oh child of Lower East Side
Attending Snick meetings
In the orange Manhattan haze
Trotskyite fledgling
Wandering tenement halls
Like a new born babe
Wonder at every manhole
As steam rises from grates
Walking angelically
Through graffiti subway tunnels
Lower East side blues
Seeps salsa rhythms
Through fortified walls
Bright eyed moonchild
Surveys dreamscapes
Aglow with love light
Sauntering through neighborhood
Fate drops ceramic pot nemesis
Inches from peering eyes
Gazing at death from a stones throw

In the housing project interlude
Setting out across island city
Visions of wheat fields
Beyond the cement wilderness
Where love is elusive
Like a unicorn
A myth, which hides
Behind walls of lust
Arrives at Cloisters
No closer to liberation
From fortress urbania
Emerges into womanhood
Storm front gathers
Clouds of desolation
Line the horizon
Falls in love with long haired Jesus hippie
So bewildered by love
A virgin in wonderland
Her dancer’s body objectified
In night club desperation
Shining knight lifts the veil
From frightened eyes
Too clouded with tears to see
Archetypal male
Descends like Icarus
Betroths reluctant bride
First sign of womb life
Sends her on greyhound bus
Across bulging continent
To meet him in Hollywood
Her pregnant with child
Passes through twilight sadness
Lands in magic kingdom
Where innocence lies wounded
And celluloid fantasies
Melt like plastic
Into hardened reality
Births boy in tinsel town
First leg of a journey
Of weeping sorrow  
Love child emerges
Into her all embracing arms

Gypsy wandering
To swampy mire
Of magnolia blossoms
Stranded in cow pastures
Alone with herself
In primitive solitude
Night a swarming sea
Alive with pain
Intruder violates sacred sanctum
As she feigns it her husband
Eyes closed in surrender
Out of the midnight oblivion
With connubial consort
Second boy emerges
And then a daughter of the moon
Her world suffused in sorrow
Her stigmata aches in holy suffering
Universe collapses to pin point void
Passage to hospital sanctuary
Like comet pulled inexorably to sun
Golden flashes of flaming hurt
Shooting stars of hope
Fade into velvet night

Slow ascent from Hades
Rising into sunlit vistas
Chance encounter in limbo
Romantic illusions sparked
In inebriated ballroom dialogue
Opium magic casts spell
On misty eyed pair
Tentative touches melt like butter
Into torrid love

Days spent drenched in intimacy
Drinking in each other like wine
So brave and unaware
Years unfold in idyllic bliss
Following the roads to pastoral paradise
Bucolic journeys of the heart and mind
Swimming forest streams like otters
Dalliances in delighted desire
Words of love whispered on windy hilltops
Walking in sacred silence
Under cathedral pines
Years reel by like a romantic movie
In which the key to love opens any door
Leading to labyrinth passion
As infinite as time and space

Darkness enfolds mountaintop
As the mammogram portends
An omen of mortality
Hangs over our heaven
Like a pall of smog raining death
Reprieve granted with surgical excising
Demon exorcised
Thread of life stretches beyond
Carried out on stretcher
Her first words
“Did you miss your class?”
Down turned face
When I affirm her fear

Two souls never yoked
In matrimonial union
Her decades dream
Realized under oaks
Sipping from the same glass
Our sharing deeper than words
My tears barely restrained
Hesitating utterance
Intuitive prophesy of divorce
As I say “I do”
Her smile competes with the sun
For radiant joy
Our lips pressed in the ecstatic moment
Golden scripture of eternity
Blesses the moment with euphoria
If not the future
A tarot oracle
We never consulted
Year races by like a zephyr
Blowing headlong into schism
Turbulence invades peace
Like a disturbance in the jet stream
With abrupt collision
Two streams cascade
Over levees too weak
To contain our yearning
With me left to dangle
In lovelorn solitude
Amongst the ruins of love