Free Verse
Jeweled
Crosses in Her Gothic Eyes
Tight, taut, and ticking—
a human time bomb, fuse lit,
match smoldering, gunpowder braced
for the inevitable—its identical to love
I thought as I pulled on my mask
and headed out the door into the wind
blowing down the long empty corridors
of the end of the year.
She was the bomb,
the fuse, the match,
the subtle explosion I felt inside
whenever she was near and putting
on a show for me just by standing still.
The sky is always empty when I am on the road
driving to her temple far out by the sea
where neptunes briny slaves lurk,
moist and sullen beneath the waves.
She greets me—a pharoah's daughter
full of mystery and magic,
born to the throne and never
even knowing it but I see,
I feel the serpent skin crawl
over me when I look in her face
and see epochs evolve and whole
civilizations rise and fall—
day turns to night and back
to dawn again in the time it takes
my vison to take her in and process
the universe of emotions I get
punched into me.
Ginger root, rose petal, epsom salt
kind of girl dancing, turning, spinning
in my head then twist and twirl—
a maelstrom swirl of smiles
and feminine wiles, infinite and
calculated to softly undo
the strings holding up my mask
until it falls to the floor, the bed,
the places where I used to think
I was a dead mouth sewn shut,
skin pulled tight on a face flawed
by a lifetime of chasing the illusion
of happiness until it bleeds.
Give the hurricane what it needs—
satisfy the storm while it feeds
on the things hidden inside the seeds
planted deep in dormant earth when
the sun is at its lowest point
and all seems lost.
Look at me, she said,
lifting up my mask so I could
see her expression—
aztec, mayan, toltec
high priestess of the hunt,
the kill, the harvest, the honeymoon,
spent in the beds of purple, high
in the mountains—air thin and
fog rolling out of the foothills
to engulf all in its path.
Dressed all in black,
a ninja geisha, well versed
in the nine thousand
nine hundred and ninety nine
oriental ways
to please a man using only
the elemental soft rays of a full moon
to illumine the poetry of
her body curved and still
in shadows slowly moving
across shifting sands out past
the obelisks of fate guarding
the gates of nevermourn.
Kicking off her boots,
landing in a pounce on my soul—
I had no choice—I had to submit—
I had to give in to the cosmic
force she exhaled into my mouth;
when she kissed me
the sweet minty taste that just
might fool you if you didn't know
where its source was.
The center of the galaxy,
the woman she just has to be,
the seductress of time,
a moving silhouette of love across
the heavens in a slow dance
that only ancient gods
had ever known before—
we came along and crawled
straight out of chaos.
She wrings hot sweet arpeggios
out of the raw loose string
of my life, battered and bruised
about to break, but then
she is there—she is radiant—
she is alive and changing
day by day into the woman
I knew, the woman I have
never seen before, the one
I have secretly followed
for centuries under brooding
and rain swept skies—
I recognized her the moment
we met by the unforgettable
sight of those glittering
jeweled crosses in her gothic eyes.
