we danced with the heat of a thousand suns rising

It's as simple and as difficult as giving it everything.

Wake, the parting of water, this design of ripples they are making. This pattern on pattern made in the shock waves of uncompleted mourning.

--Gail Jones, Five Bells

What are words but little islands of lies? Little islands of pretenses and pretends. The coward's retreat, the scholar's beloved contract with passivity. They serve only as the run-up to activity, a preparation or declaration or mitigation of something that remains imaginary until it leads to action. Words, and words alone. More words, and more still. And for what?

Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

--John Keats

and softly, and slowly, and completely, and naturally, and forcefully, and spectacularly, and otherworldly, and authentically, and generously, and understandingly, and realistically, and thoroughly, and riskily, and daily, and healthily, and extraordinarily, and altruistically, and inclusively, and unashamedly, and somewhere as close to as long as we can.

2007 #2.

It bothers me that I know your number by heart, and yet I haven't called and neither have you, and I haven't written and neither have you, and I plan ways to leave your books at your front door without a message, in a plastic bag so they don't feel too lost, beside the door because in front would seem like a happy delivery.

And I wonder whether you are leaving me like I left him, quietly and brutally, to prepare yourself for the distances, the silences and the love affairs. How else does one operate on the heart, but with instruments that slice.

It bothers me that I would know where to find you tonight
With foam upon your cupid's bow in the dim and dusty light.
Filling the lack in your gut, filling up the lack,
Since you don't know I'm back in town, you don't know I'm back.