beloved, your finger
traces my shoulders draws me out of slumber brushed from my eyes.
eyes meet - like in the songs - flashbulb memories of when radios blare and your gentle hands
wrap my ears to filter noise.

inside joke: you are whispered keats in a library basement - asexual understanding of college student sex in the library basement.

fucking - they were fucking. we make love when your whispered - “i love you” finds my feet ready to kiss
the edge of the hangman’s stool.

making love is gentle hands,
tears wiped from eyes long before body locks opened for you - you, secret
keeper of so much more long, long before.

keats is but a silly memory, like car talks of eowyn and her faramir, turned hands, find hands, turning faces,
close; so close, we breathe each other’s air -

laughter is love. both full of breath and, somehow, breathless. love, i learned,
reminds you that you are not the fucking giving
tree, yet knows,

when your apples are all eaten,

when your branches made a home,
when your trunk becomes a sailing ship
to take the young boy home,

long classroom hours have taken everything -
rasping alto rising - crackling like a warped dusty record, over use leaves my voice just a shadow of a glorious self -
breathless, you say, like laughter.

still beautiful.

making love - is reading love’s favorite book - husband, the boy (affectionate) - you sit. eyes pensive, observing your animal mage, beloved of puppies. reminiscent of protagonists in this children’s story -

townsfolk called her crazy too, her philosopher soothed the wounds left from biting human words you know, always know, why i ask, i ask:
“what is love, then, if not a rescue, salvation, from madness?”