AFTER LOVE AND FEAR

After love and fear, there’s pride;

After tears, the night;

After all the words are gone,

A chair with just one light.

After memories, the dream

That you will come home safe;

After sleep, another day

Of waiting for my life.

After hope, the happiness

Of thinking of your love;

After moments of despair

A stone no thought can move.

After all the sacrifice,

The hunger and the pain,

The passions and the promises,

The losses and the gains,

There’s nothing but my love for you,

Which waits upon the wind?

To bring you from the barricades

That now you must defend.

DO NOT LOVE ME YET

Do not love me yet, for I

Am still a slender moon,

A scimitar about the heart

Too sharp to touch too soon.

Before I’m touched I need to grow

More full in golden light;

I need to smile upon my earth

And rule some patch of night.

I need to know what roads and fields

Lie in my domain

And dull my brand new ecstasies

With sophomoric pain.

I need the love of some blank boy

As cold and dark as me,

That we might grope in ignorance

And fear of what might be.

And then, when I’m a silver bowl

And know what I can hold,

Then, then, perhaps, we could try love

If you are not too old

you & I

You're still the same as you've ever been

In my mind's eye, though far removed

From yourself the very image of you;

That I know not the man, nor need to know,

By whose arrow we two shall victim be;

And suffer as much as he alone hath suffered

At the expense of night's ink, all wrapped in darkness,

Which in words, who hath eyes enough to see,

Where uncertain scope of things most abound,

Is yet by one single ray of light revealed,

Whereupon I myself from myself should hide.

So I, my promise, hath kept, not by words,

But by false pretense to make believe it,

What exists not but in self-created illusion,

Unknown, unseen secret of invisible world;

For words oft deceive us, bereaved of light,

When with me thy much quoted tale is writ,

I think not on thee, more or less than mine,

While in such thoughts I spend time with thee,

Love! how divided we live, but together die!