A Handful of Poetry

APOTHEOSIS

The forge suffuses me,
Imbues me with strength.
The heat radiates outward,
Drawing on the
Center,
While little cataclysms,
Chain reactions,
Are born, erupt, and are reborn.

She whispered to me,
From years and miles ago.
Graced with a magnetic presence,
That I dare not ignore for fear
Of being pulled apart.
She is power,
Raw and uncontained,
Enshrined and beautiful,
And she does not dance.

Rain beats down on her head,
Her dark locks
Cascade,
Like angry mountain streams,
Into the bosom of a valley.
She shrieks, bared chest to the wind
Challenging the storm,
And emerging the victor.

Zeus bows his head in deference.
Satisfied, she turns
And rekindles the forge.


The Forge

Her legs are
Like molten gold,
White hot, poured over marble,
Sculpted so perfectly,
It is painful to the eyes, to the touch,
Incendiary to the nerves.

Her fingers skitter up his back, sinking into the skin
As if seeking the bone buried beneath,
Like divers searching
For Atlantis.

He prowls, predatory,
Pupils dilated, mouth slightly open,
Jaw muscles poised to snap shut,
To tear away flesh or
To leave marks of his need
In the soft, white of her throat.
The first tracks through pristine snow.

They writhe and roll,
All hips and limbs,
Sweat and succor.
A chaotic mass of flesh and sinew,
Flashes of movement:
An arched back, muscle tensing along the larynx
As she cries out, arms seizing her, releasing,
Capturing.

They crash together, no rhythm,
No senses, no awareness
But for the tides that push and pull
At them, the innumerable
Pleasures,
The urgent, heedless desire.

She tenses beneath him, relaxes,
Calls him names he has
Ached to hear, screamed or whispered,
And her eyes flutter open
At the height of it all,
Drink him in, and burn him,
Everything but his need for her,
To dust.

THE DANCER

I have often dreamed of you,
Dancing on the surface
Of the water,
Like the picture of
Luna,
Garbed in white gossamer strands.
With eyes that burn
Like incandescent stars,
And alabaster skin
Bathed in moonlight.

I watched from the shore,
As you pirouetted
Atop the waves
Toes rising above the roiling
Crests, as if they rose and fell for you,
Bowing at your whim,
And I found myself lost
In the song
That spilled from the air,
The tune you hummed,
While you dipped and leaped,
So utterly adrift
In your own music,
As to never know I was there.

I return, night after night,
Sneaking away from
The world,
From these fitful worries
That plague my waking hours,
To stand and watch you,
And wonder if that kind of bliss,
Is forever beyond my reach.
I have stood in silence, and in song,
For more years than I have lived,
And kept this place secret,
Sacred,
A gift you have shared with me,
And no other.

That, alone, is worth all the worry.

PLAYING GOD

I want to create you with words,
To build you from
The meaningless symbols set to white canvas,
To mold your senses with letters
And fire your synapses with soundless writing.

I want to make you,
The way mankind was molded from clay,
Taken from the very earth on which
He dwells,
So that you might exist elsewhere,
In all the worlds of imagining,
Immortal as the written word,
As the language,

Because you are no more
Than a conjuration,
An idea placed in flesh and blood,
Not by the hands of some Allfather,
Nor the endless, catastrophic
Upheaval of biology.

I have created you,
Or an ideal you,
From the skin
And hair and bone
That walks in and out of my mind
And transposed something else,
Something wonderful to me.

In time, I'm sure,
The illusion will shatter,
These thoughts, these
Sinister fantasies,
Will erode like so many stones
In the wind,
And I will see you
For who you are,

More than words placed neatly on a page,
More than I am capable of creating.