Love Solstice

Since it has been a little over a year now since my friend Tom, the editor at Barnwood International Poetry Mag first published this poem, I thought this was a good time to re-post it and share it here too because damn... I am so right here inside what this poem is speaking to right now. :(


Love Solstice


After her smile fades
a bee sleeps in my mouth.
The sunset has no teeth.
Lips are frozen;
a window thick with frost,
all night, the cold finds lost needles.
Widower in the wind,
horny fleas construct their brothel
on the wing of a flightless dove.

Breathing is a fierce storm
when the sky is full
of wet eyelids,
the language of torn dead leaves,
like the scurry of mice
around the feet
of a cold weathered monument.
Her loss is a suffering
that will never be carved
on the subterranean stone.

In the absence of flowers,
a bewildered man,
even the fault line shake
of morning wake
does nothing but loosen
the frail balance of growth.
A single seed,
endosperm cap weakened
to permit radicle emergence,
drowns in a rush
of Spring rain,
never to root in soil;
the echo of sad voice
despoiled by time and tears.

Waving at my shadow
on concrete,
a gaunt gray man,
lacking contour waves back.
That lonely walking dove
one eyes the sun
seeking nothing but warmth,
a voice, a seed to split.
We are blinded,
unable to find the threshold,
her name,
only a memory on my mouth.