Weekly Poems: A Love Sonnet and More

ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING, PLEASE

Once more, with feeling, please! I've had enough
Of lubricated passion come and gone!
Years and years and years and years of stuff
Squirting, squirting, squirt – and then it's done!
With feeling, please! Companionship, affection,
Shared pain, shared joy, shared silences, shared thoughts.
Not ecstasy fast moving towards rejection,
Frantic with the fear of time and loss.
Slow down, life! Slow down, and be content
Just to be awhile, and let love grow
Or not, as seedlings by the wind are sent
To find their bit of fertile earth, or no.
Let there be no ecstasy until
The plant has been well tended by the will.

HOLD ME TO YOUR WILLING HEART

Hold me to your willing heart
And let me - help me - weep
That I of need might fall apart
And then at last might sleep.

Let the truth slice into me
That I might finally bleed
And purge myself of agony
I cannot now concede.

For I have bound myself in light
That I might live in joy,
And cannot - will not - let the night
My bonds of love destroy.

And yet I know if I would gain
The peace for which I pray,
I must allow the floods of pain
To wash my love away.

YOUR FEAR IS NOT SURPRISING

Your fear is not surprising.
It's always ended badly:
Fury, betrayals, recriminations.
Then, for days and weeks and months
An agony worse than grief
Because you also feel like such a fool.

Love is like diving or rock climbing:
Spectacular, but your heart sticks in your mouth
Every moment you're there.
There's an ease in not caring,
A looseness in the belly.
Then, as love approaches, a knot tightens like a snake.

Being alone and free is like looking in from outside:
People give and get affection,
Are seized by extraordinary happiness and pain,
Live in prison and in heaven,
Deal with the necessity of working on what must be worked out,
While you watch them as if they were on TV.

Life is full of love and difficulty.
Its riches cannot be gotten at except through choice.
You must enter it by loving this person or that person,
And people inevitably fall short of your hopes.
But to live and not love, and not be loved,
Is like spending your entire life alone in your room.

CAN'T YOU SEE? DON'T YOU CARE

Can't you see? Don't you care
I want to die?
Don't you listen? Can't you hear
My silent cry?

Won't you turn? Can't you hold
Me to your heart?
Are you afraid of what might follow
Once you start?

Would you rather not believe
I'm in such pain
That all your sense and good advice
Must be in vain?

Would you rather tell yourself
I'll be OK,
And all this adolescent angst
Will go away?

Ah! Would I also swim across
This lake alone!
But if you cannot swim with me,
I know I'll drown.

PROVERBS OF A NERD

--The evil I do people seem to like; it's the good that's often turd and bones.

--If I think, I'm probably not.

--Do unto me as you would have liked to do unto others.

--God grant me the courage to pester women who will never like me,
The serenity to reject women who are desperate enough to be interested in me,
And the density to ignore the inference.

YOU'LL HAVE TO WOO YOUR WIFE AGAIN

You'll have to woo your wife again,
And then again, and then again,
As many times as there are times
A well-worn silence tells you when.

You'll have to play the lover new,
All hot to touch and squeeze and kiss,
All shivery with ecstasy
Unbuttoning the buds of bliss.

You'll have to re-seduce a flesh
Familiar as your own raw nude
With praise and passionate displays
Of need and joy and gratitude.

For you not need give up for life
The pure and simple gift of lust.
A marriage does as marriage is:
The play of pleasure, love, and trust.

LOVE REDEEMS THE PASSIONS OF THE MOMENT

Love redeems the passions of the moment
Underneath the qualms that quell the sea.
All the queries that have room to comment
Know quite well how good it is to be!
Love allows the rivers to run freely,
The tides to turn without the least regret,
The mountains to give way to time, sincerely
Pleased with what the eons will forget.
Love turns every moment to forever,
And every thing to unintended song,
And makes a worship out of all endeavor,
And through its suffering, undoes all wrong.
Bear witness, then, in love, that you might bear
To be, with neither purpose nor despair.