dum spiro spero

love lives in the in-between spaces,

between meandering phone calls

'just to catch up',

between two grey ticks turning blue,

a photo of the dog,

an update on the writing of a song,

a tidbit of silly gossip,

speaking just for the sake of it,

just to hear one another's voice,

for the undying love of it,

i simply cannot contain it.

despite it all —

the murmured doubt,

the whispered uncertainty,

the uncompromising distance —

from the fierce core of my being,

that sometimes unkindness

the two of us slow dancing in our little kitchen

to a scratchy record twirling about the deck

but four too many,

four that ensnared all the

sticky sinew of me,

muscle, tendril, and heart,

bonded into my being.

but now you are gone.

but for too long withered, crisp, wan.

so today, armed with secateurs,

‘off with her head’.

now bare, without ornament,

she shivers in the wind.

but soon verdant leaves will spring

instead lingering in a permanent deferral,

a forever what-if, a yeatsian centre unable to hold.

but now, i now endstop the ellipses and caesuras.

dragging ink from this pen across the whiteness,

i mould this once unformed thing into a something.

i commit myself to paper anew.

and along those pale grey lines,

such a small fragile thing,

more of porcelain

than flesh and sinew,

so much promise,

now forever unpromised.

then i breathed long and deep

whenever my mother called it 'making love'.

how she would casually recount to me

that their love synchronised their very bodies.

what a pretty myth, an idyllic fantasy,

the stuff of fluffy romance stories.

or so i thought.

words of secret hope

resonating on your lips,

your eyes alight,

smile writ large,

and i glimpsed a world

in which poetry

that were the dice to fall just so,

that the kindling catch,

that our waves meet,

a candid moment sweetly captured,

i was knotted thread,

a bare barbed chaos,

but you set your nimble fingers

to that slow arduous task,

loosening each individual knot,

and from that twisted thread,

i wish i could craft some elaborate poetry for you, my love,

to encapsulate you in pretty iambs or expressive trochees,

to venerate you in only the richest of rhetoric,

but such high technicalities have ever eluded me.

instead i am left with simple words and most bare devices.

but know, dearest, that within these unkempt sentences,

inexorable smiles, 

and simple laughter,

with you,

when enclosed in his embrace,

that clamour that is my constant

cruel companion,

taunting and tormenting,