We’d Better Wait Another Week, Love

o deferred dream!     how you torture me;   time
entraps me despite all my resolve to dwell
within the moment   .  .  .   o Love,   o grand dream,
o feminine other,   complement mine,
my longing has dimmed for you not a whit,
yet by test and test and resolve,     patience
has grown.          what is a week in the long view?
and yet an hour in angry silence unmans,
whereas a day filled with words kind between
tempers belief that,   as with hell,   paradise
exists here betwixt us,   present as much
in this world as reputed to be in the next  . . .
o deferred dream! what sweet anticipation,
what hope dawns in your long tardy twilight!

David M Pitchford
28 March 2012

Many the Roads

I’ve been trying to write our love poem
all my life,   I confess.           many the roads,
many the deadends and restarts,   mistakes
paved this highway in shards of broken hearts
and shattered dreams;     but what lover worth love
quits or concedes the fight even though this
world clubs senseless the tender heart  . . . today
may see a bloody sunset and midnight
bring the bitter dregs of lonesome defeat,

yet the sun shall rise another day as long
as the heart lurches its beat.           oh,   such roads
my love,   such deep forests we both have tread
to reach this sun-blessed valley   —   yet we know
here,   too,   there shall be storms and sorrows.

David M Pitchford
27 March 2012

Reality Tried to Humble Us

and yet in a bubble bath
somewhere in east urbana
we massage each other,
scrub the mire of gone days,
filth of accumulated words
from each other’s soul
and reclaim love from the harsh
in that comfortable lounge
of the softer metaphor

David M Pitchford
27 March 2012

Despite the Sunlight

just too much sunlight today, she texts me:
heart all clouded and your absence a metric
fuck-ton millstone tied to my heart,   sinking
fast in the roiling waters of   .  .  .   absence
and I want your arms around me again
and now!          ten days?          isn’t that the precise
duration of eternity?          I’ll wait,
but you should know,     she tells me,     it’s killing
me under the longing of hours upon hours
and the hours each eternal in the gloom
despondent despite this harsh spring sun beating
down upon yellow daffodils and scarlet
tulips that hide leprechauns and pots of gold
worthless under this metric fuck-ton of absence.

David M Pitchford
22 March 2012

Mixed Metaphor Us

how many days have we loved, and how
many been apart?          impossible
familiarity   —   and yet we love
hot as comet trails falling into
each others’ inevitable pull,
gravitation of like to like, one
spark between back and forth   —   shared ion
tracking dual orbits to bond us

molecular in that gone night back
in Millennium  .  .  .  echo of heels tapping
against my heart’s door, homemade pie in hand
outstretched as offering in metaphor
and we falling in close like lovers
dropped from cosmic tarot into life

David M Pitchford
24 Feb 2012

Clear Blue Sky

there are times all the poetic language
flies out the window and the birds gather
to peck away their pretty seeds.          today
the sky is shining and the sun is blue,
high grass and green clouds and why flowers bloom
silver and gold goes beyond understanding
as the cell phone chimes another text message
and it’s the lover or the loved   —   who knows
which is which, and besides, they really are
interchangeable at this point, hardly
separable   —   avowals of the obvious
written in binary of yes-yes and no
shadow could remain with such light blazing
lemon-yellow in a sky written bold.

David M Pitchford
10 Jan 2012

A Day Less Sublime

rhymes kept slapping against my ears today
as though I were spelunking strafed by bats
in the mad cavern of platonic here-now.
but the butterfly net of my attention,
Liza, was inadequate to trapping,
capturing these bats to paste here in our
living scrapbook. so this poem, I’m sad
to report, is colored in with meager
words unrhymed and perhaps a little dull.

and that’s all okay, Liza, because it is
excellent and good to have dull days
with which to contrast our nights together
dancing in pirouettes through life, kissing
remembrance upon each others lips.

David M Pitchford
26 Dec 2011

In Light and Exuberance

we all want to be beautiful, Liza,
but so few know how; what does it really
mean to be beautiful?     since beauty resides
in the eye of the beholder, and by eye
we actually mean the faculty of
appreciation, then beauty is a
quality of the perceiver, Liza;
ergo, to be beautiful is to perceive
beauty. it is not in the light that we
show our beauty, but in the way we reflect
light back to the world, outward from ourselves
to those beauties akin and complementary
to our own.     Liza, your beauty is made
manifest in light and exuberance.

David M Pitchford
14 Dec 2011