12 Poems of Love, A Year in Verse : Intersections Between Love and Time.

12 Poems of Love: A Symbolic Register of Emotion

Poem: Parts and Wholes

How can line after line
Of empty verse
Book after book
Of hollow prose
Falter so greatly,
Be so irreparably incapable
As to diminish their entire form as useless.
Novels are but elongated versions of impotent prose, some fractured slivers of metaphor.
Poetry but a stylized version of melodramatic rhetoric, visceral in its incompetence.
What need does literature have in its entirety,
When those hooks cast from ashore
Can not capture in any sense
Her face, swimming, five inches across
Within which I can consummate my being
And undoubtedly confirm, it's the whole world
It's the entirety of everything.
Today I learned, within a single wave
And within those parted tides,
Some aberrations which unknowingly make it to shore to greet my legs
I have known the whole ocean.
Just as in her face, I have known everything that knowing has to offer.

Poem: Wetnurse

This rain which has barraged me
Often in disguise,
Eternal are it's forms, seen through various eyes.
Primordial sins perhaps remained
For which my birth was entertained
My birth so then, was incomplete
My birth so then forever, stained.

Darkest ink, depth cannot subdue
Has washed like water, my heart anew
Again I walk so forth inclined
Of oceans passed and rain behind
Waves before and trickles define
This multiple which has gripped my mind.

And then I see perhaps with eyes
Too glazed, confused, and sorrow-dyed
That are these cheeks truly alone?
Untouched by drops of sins atoned?
These eyes, they know no beauty's hold
Which Sold too often some foolish gold.

Perhaps the unity of all these years
Is if once,
I see
That upward curve, The small expression so brief of feeling, that it lifts, before it's said, mystifying this ancient head.

Upward lips which slightly curve, are you the unity of all these years?
Your parted lips which swallow whole, this rain which pours, this rain which tears.
And when those lips, converged to smile
My birth though stained, became worthwhile.

Poem: Kaiki Deshu

In order to impress her, or impression myself upon her
I became unique. I became the lost poet,
The tormented artist
The man of external joy and internal strife
All this I assumed, appropriated
Many I already was, but motivation came in the form of a row boat upon two parted seas.
Opening only to let through the most prestigious of passengers.
However, in attempting to be something,
the genuine is surpassed, overcome, undermined.
I became myself once again. The self I had partially misplaced.
But in becoming myself, I undermined myself.
In many cases I've heard, you find her but lose yourself.
I lost her and myself I think.
As love came, luck left.
And as my eyes diverted from one field to another, my whole harvest was spoiled.
These bitter plums I'm left to enjoy, away from myself, away from her.

Poem: Neruda

He said Even if you cut all the flowers, you cannot stop the spring from coming.
But if the garden of my pleasures
Is ravaged
And each plant with great care removed
With bare hands and some with tools
And the weeds overgrown and infesting
My palace, and grow over my fence
And insects which dominate as warlords
Tribal conflict reflected in mounds and hills
Ancient battlegrounds of dead grass and dead mice
Even then spring will come he said.
For you can bring all the world to its knees, and even then spring will come
But with even the slightest twitch, the slightest flick or fleeting glance
Love recedes into oblivion, never to be seen again.
I fall in and out of love, with the passing of moons and buses, or the wind in one way or another, a raindrop on my forehead or my cheek.
Yet even then my love is stronger than any bonds which spring can fathom.