On My Weakness For Used Ballpoints
Though pens return with chewed-up cracks and dents
and caps are gnarled and in quite dire straits,
my smitten core does not at all resent
the charming marks his pearly whites create.
That he should choose my tools for use despite
the space stretched in between our seats, suggests
that my impression has been made and might
mean he reciprocates. But still, my breasts
aren’t clicky-tops, no grips bedeck
my base: I’m not the plastic frame he wants,
just the pencil case. And though my neck
won’t twist for him and I’ll stay nonchalant,
my heart will ceaselessly be his to mill,
to grind and chew until the ink should spill.
Forecast: Marriage, with children and a 32% chance of divorce
Significant: in love we do regress
to mediocrity, that cozy beast.
By thirty-eight, a marriage under stress
with 1.1 small children at the least.
The only deviation from the norm
available, is known and standardized;
a confidence whose curve decides the form
of a life’s story to be realized.
Degrees of sullied freedom haunting me
because one less than two is only one:
my other half, determined company.
From this, a life decided, can I run?
My life’s decisions owe to time and chance.
Our only hope is for covariance.
Corkscrew Sonnet
We have our drink (a fizzy pink champagne),
We have our haunts along the downtown docks;
We have our deep, dark, elegiac talks,
Our moments of that chocolate-bitter pain.
And still it seems so much more must remain!
Another thousand sunset-starkened walks
The feckless harbour romancing the rocks.
Sweet lips, with rosy, alcoholic stain,
Speak softly of a grasped eternity –
But no. With times and places we’re still cursed.
The minutes massacre our symmetry -
By them, our immortality dispersed
As human tears are lost to the black sea;
As, stretched too thin, a bubble’s sure to burst.
Sonnet V
Be gone, and let me think awhile tonight.
Be silent, I don’t have the will to spar,
Nor to stand against you and love’s dread might,
Only to wish you other than you are.
Alone now, though victory brings no relief:
This silence, borne from shouting, remains stark,
And despite my reasons and noble belief
‘what if’ and ‘if only’ whisper from the dark.
But I remind myself of this failure’s scheme:
The crush of our conflict gave neither hope
Nor joy, but rather a shattered dream
That we could find meaning beyond our scope.
Such loss and decay ultimately shows
This and I, a Sarajevo Rose.
