Wake or Sleep

Thrust as one desperate cry for love

out of the shapeless eons past,

all from a whim this conflagration spread

and will continue to burn till this forest of eternity

is ash. Never will it be ash.

That is what the stars seem to say, at least.

That is the promise that is hidden in the lover’s voice.

You want to know why there are shadows

moving in and out of this poem?

It is because all lovers desire a private space

to make love, and then rest.

Sleep here if you like.

Or wake, if you are sleeping.

Eternally

Await, but secretly, the perfect refuge

of the lover’s embrace. Here, where Time

swallows its judgments and goes about

its business with quiet, ironical repose,

there is no room for space—our bodies

must possess one another and everything else,

every minutia of truth must be discovered

with an infinitude of kisses—here a kiss

from the blue sky, there a kiss up from the earth.

We are children hanging on to the edge of innocence.

We weep tears that become the morning dew.

Our bodies are the instruments through which

our love plays the music of our souls.

Within you, without you, it doesn’t matter.
I know you now, eternally.

Antediluvian Depths

My shadow struck the earth and shattered

into a million butterflies at dawn.

Darkness immersed itself in an ocean of light

and found treasures there

that reflected back the stars.

I have wept such that my tears have risen up

in a cloud of mist that veiled me

shielded me from the eyes

of those whose cups I would fill

and make drunk on the sweet nectar of my song.

The cloud lifts, and, now with

the grace of a once-hidden beauty revealed,

my voice takes over where my tears left off.

Whose tears are these that mix with my own?

This question hangs like the sun—a vision

unattainable by the eyes—over my head,

and my every breath tells a story that began

in the antediluvian depths, where love met hate

and day met night, and made peace with one another
before creating life.