Sonnet: The Death Knell of Love

Dreams when you sleep – nightmares when you rise –

A solar shadow casting out a shadow of sun;

Clouds are in the earth – not in the skies –

And pain is wrapped up in a ribbon of fun

That unravels, unrolls, purls and flows out,

Like a river of ruin, chirping with disaster,

Peeling the lips off of every smiling mouth,

And hacking at the legs that would try to run faster,

To escape, to reach – to embrace happiness,

Before that unhappy candle is snuffed into dark,

And the melody you believed assured you tenderness,

Reaches your ears as a coarse, ugly bark;

The scream of the banshee – the duellist’s lost glove –

Hollowness without comfort – the death knell of love

 

 

Poem: Sonnet On Despair

Caught in the pall of joy’s costly shadow,

Words reversed and erased, blot for blot,

Famine reigns over a once fertile meadow,

And the poet, delight-lorn, is densely distraught,

He feels hands where hands no longer linger;

Dreams are the places where the future rehearses,

Prophecies choke the larynx of the prophetic singer,

The nightmare of the present stored in history’s verses,

You start a fire – but you cannot start a fire –

Pain’s perfume pulses in smoking ashes

To be desired – and to feel desire –

All the caresses turn into rashes

When hope’s illuminated manuscript, seductively faded,

Leaves the child’s innocent heart, corrupted and jaded

 

Sonnet: To Plant a Kiss

To plant a kiss on that face untouched,

As yet uncarved by time’s cruel hands,

Would not satisfy me overmuch,

But ravish me with unspent hunger pangs,

For, to plant one kiss, is to beg another,

To moan and pine for a second trial,

To flush with love – yet lack a lover,

Pinioned on the crests of your vulpine smile,

But, should I plant a kiss – what seed is sown,

What fruit will these faint lips beget,

What stars unseen – what fields unmown –

What music unimagined – what dream unmet –

What taste untried – what milk unchurned –

Will these lips find in lips unreturned?

 

 

Poem: Two Love Sonnets

I.

If I hand you a chalice,

Will you drink of the wine pressed fresh from my heart?

A vintage free from taint or malice,

Though victim of Sadness’s envenomed dart,

Drink it up, my love, until exquisite inebriation,

Drives all coldness from your limbs,

And ignites the fires of your imagination,

Ensuring the prosperity of your most passionate whims!

Let me dapple your neck with crimson kisses,

So that your snowy skin may sip of the wine,

That inflames my days with unfulfilled blisses,

That I pray – I implore – will make you mine!

And as the liquor of my love pulses quick through your veins,

I know that, from my thoughts, you can ne’er be estranged.

 

II.

My days are enriched with the paint of your palette,

That enrobes me with colours too vivid to bear,

Let me tend to your wishes like a well-trained valet,

Whose only salary is the want of touching your hair,

Unwitting, you keep me slave to your spell,

That addicts me to the promise of your absent perfume,

Drawn secret from Aphrodite’s love-philtre well,

Infused with the mead and the milk of the moon,

My nights are spent on a hot-bed of yearning,

Yoking my dreams to an envisioned paradise,

Found in a topography, ancient men of learning,

Claim can only be sought in the expanse of your eyes,

So, I look into those orbs, and stare and I stare,

At the rapture unbounded I see awaiting me there.