love poems

moon

That night⎯ the night he came back.

Standing at the door,

saying he wanted to stay,

‘Could I? Please.’

Uncertain for a moment, I demurred,

but turned my back on him

under the moon.

That night was early summer

a scent of cow parsley in the air ⎯

the night I lost him.

But his return that night

was a reckoning,

a tally of the many nights before,

when I sought him

stretching my arms out towards his silence.

In the morning he’d be gone,

the damask

spread over us,

torn ⎯

So that night, under the moon

when I sent him

back into the dark,

a bird in the trees

somewhere,

ceased its song.

Untitled

half-lit glimpses of you,

like broken shards of mirror,

pierce my dreams

and hang like baubling sequins

in my thoughts.

a notion of you,

swimming far out in a blackened sea,

leaving our shape pressed into the sand,

spoor and sperm and sea and salt.

A voice calls out,

‘Beware your shadows’.

lights glint from the glass,

and I creep away,

we were

riding high on autumn winds;

sailing, thrashing, whip-tailed kites

mastered only by the strings of our conception.

Your silent savagery⎯

once soft as gentle tributaries

now a torrent of shards,

a thousand mirrors cannot own.

Antonio’s Triptych

i. Orsino’s yard

you have written out

this pact we signed,

designed by you,

like some stagey conceit,

a play within a play,

now diminished and consigned

to scraps of script ⎯

ii. ariel

I lost much then, not brave enough

to taunt my own end,

we wagered and you won on the thrill

of my submission,

while I hid

between moments

of service and content

iii. caliban

There is only one thing

now I want,

the breaking down

of your beauty,

the fragments of our love diseased,

the caves of your distance

lit with despair.