#romantic poem

It must be wonderful. And beautiful, truly breathtaking. To live in a cottage somewhere, on a beach or maybe the hills, anywhere with an open, clean sky. A cat curled up in my lap, or perhaps a dog that rests it’s chin on my foot. I have walls and walls of mounted books and a rickety ladder to reach them. And someone to hold that rickety ladder steady, so I don’t fall and break my neck. To have a person of my own, a lover, who brings me warm milk when I’m too immersed in a book. Someone I can pour all my love onto, rain it upon him, engulf him, because that’s what i believe i am made to do. I am made to love. To be loved. i have so much of it, in excess really, it’s too much, pouring out and out of my being for someone i haven’t even met yet. i exist to spread love, and experience love, dive in it, submerge in it, drown in it, and when i come up for air i breathe love and exhale love and inhale love. That’s what my existence revolves around, that’s what humanity revolves around, and i want quiet hugs and someone i can loop my arm with and someone who will kiss the top of my head and make me fall asleep when i write into the crack of morning. At dusk when we get off work, we take a detour in the little car that we own and for reasons unknown end up somehwere on a rooftop and it’s perfect because he has a guitar or a ukelele or a goddamn french horn because i really wouldn’t care because all music is music and all music is feelings and all music for us would just be love. And maybe I’d start humming in the awful way i do, and it’s not perfect, not his notes and certainly not mine, but it is what it is, and what it is: is love. i want steamy coffees that are too bitter to drink and chocolate cakes that have spoonfuls missing from the sides, a messy kitchen countertop covered in flour which i joke to be cocaine and someone laughs and flicks me on the forehead and we go sleep under the same covers, a cat purring at my feet or perhaps a dog at the foot of the bed waiting for attention. It’s all love, and that’s what I’m born to do and feel and give and take.

It’s all love and it’s all that is worth in this world, in this life, in this heart. It is all that the universe has to offer, take it.

It’s such a shame that we don’t talk anymore. A terrible waste of love, I say.

To my darling,

Would it be that the only thing
that binds us now
is our inevitable death,
at least it will prove right
the soothsayers, saying
we would have something
that lasts.

—
16-5-2022, M.A. Tempels ©

I wish I could complicate things;
Psychoanalyze the deep aches
To oblivion; cut the strings
That tear at my heart till it breaks
Again, so my soul awakes
Again, to say I can’t obscure what’s true;
Favoring layman’s terms:

I still love you.

—
15-5-2022, M.A. Tempels ©

You,

Sought solely
With the eye unspoken; blind
To light, yet in
Darkness, omniscient,
As black is the canvas
Of veracity.

Here, flow
The colours of the
Soul, awoken,
Shift-shaping nebulae to images
Exemplifying constrained
Desire;

All swallowed in fearful
Ferocity
By maw of mind, and shards
Of heart, broken; glass needles; my
Fanged cognizance.

The serpent cannot
Dream
The priory,
Therefore, it cannot
Drag its relics down dark mire
Where, coiled, the timeless truth
Stays out of view.

Where solely a blinded eye
May see, I seek fire,
To watch it flicker and dance
Till it shapes
You.

—
13-5-2022, M.A. Tempels

Infatuated sighs; a tethered heart
Allowed a confession’s wordless lean way;
Its vision too grand to crudely impart
In breath put to speech; in attempts to say:

“I will love you forever and a day.”

This, I do know: you have suffused me whole;
In ways that I first must learn to convey
The voice that spills directly from this soul,
Unexpectedly born on a quaint evening stroll.

—
11-5-2022, M.A. Tempels ©

I wake up awash in titillation,
Your sweetly animalistic fragrance
Suffuses me still, and
My heart paces
As I cling to oneiric
Creation.

I wake up trailing
Soft linens — your hair,
Toward
A crumpled duvet — your shoulder;
All the worried while my heart begs:

“Hold her”;

Nothing matters more than
Keeping you there
Where I can still have you; love you…

A kiss in the aether, there’s
Nothing I can do:

I wake up.

—
10-5-2022, M.A. Tempels ©

7-5-2022, “… a Shakespearean sonnet about a lilac girl.”