Vain Imaginings

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In the chaos of the quiet,
when I think I am alone and yet,

I am united in strife and discord
with manic multitudes,
and the world does not go away,
I think about love, and you.
I think about love.


Is that which swells within me,
love... eager to be poured?
That which I've ached to do,
for so many unfulfilled years
of someone else's
misdirected loveless appetite.


I do not begrudge
the honesty of not knowing;
when in their own anxious hearts,
wanting to forcibly give
what they knew not I needed,
they selfishly gave what they,
themselves needed release from.


I have tried to fashion it,
as if to form and fabricate
love into being;
to tangibly exist for
my own selfish purpose,
which is to give to you.


I am constrained
to be released of it,
but prevailing more
in vain imaginings
of building castles
at tempest's edge
with desiccated sand.


And yet I know that
like sere, thirsty sand,
love is uncontainable;
not given to conformity,
but ever shifting to accommodate;
to reconcile each to the other,
and all to itself.
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The Silence Between Heartbeats


Before you,
mine was an equilibrious life,
positively charged with negative currents
of discordant din and familiar havoc,
aimlessly energized by fits of enthusiasm,
casually strolling pell-mell toward the mark
of a not so much wiser but anxious goal-giver;
proceeding in haste, to fulfill my intentions
of tortuous journeys from heartbeat to heartbeat,
with not so much pause as to notice who goes there;
until as it happened by fortunate prelude,
an undisturbed moment of a quieter life,
in the silence between heartbeats.

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With you,
to rhythmically tenor my life,
a delicate finger was laid to my pulse,
your vigorous effort to order and rhyme
a more tranquil confusion, deceptively cogent,
more so as whispers to challenge the violence,
of overly-patient present day intellects,
rather than protest which placates the contrast
of passion and apathy from heartbeat to heartbeat;
the comings and goings from somewhere to nowhere;
tyrannical vanity holds tight the reins,
maintaining a slow down to a quieter life,
in the silence between heartbeats.

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Without you;
despite the hope that I ever breathe on,
I nonetheless bleed the choreographed tears
of lovers whose dance was hastily halted
by arrogant whores and the impotence of will,
which then fell to the floor for sadists to sport,
as journalists who queue to delight in disasters;
you think me absent since you can not see me,
alone as we are from heartbeat to heartbeat,
though memories serve for as long as they haunt,
such is the interlude of not being with you.
I know you there still in the quieter life,
the silence between heartbeats.

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