Three Poems

1.

Processing...Processing...The processing.

My love for you is a rotting flower
and a flower in bloom, a processing.

Negated passion makes the one path clear.
My choice is a singular attraction,
which is what you are and what I am too.

Processing...Processing...My love unfolds.
'tis like a summer day, 'tis what love is--
the process of choice being directed
to moments in a vector of timespace.

One night stands and other night stands I see
in the order of single decisions.

Processing...Processing...My lust and rage:
a slave to the processing with no choice.



7.

Dido lies across her funeral pyre—
A suicidal queen burning fierce--
consummating their marriage with hot steel.

She thrusts his long blade deeply within her.
Her abdomen wraps around his broadsword,
inner-fluids grasping and convulsing.

He: a foreign man from a fallen race;
wise; pious; heroic--a noble savage.
The gods call him away to other lands
And his fate is elsewhere—so he now says to her.

Marriage, their marriage, means nothing to him;
The boundary between lust and love blur.

How distant, she knows, are the ones we love;
For love is eternal and our bodies fleeting.


8.

The distance of eternity is both
Unknown and familiar—love is foreign.
The exile’s holy citadel burns, razed
by gods and mortals. They have both left him.
He travels, wanders by the will of gods—
With hopes for his child and no love of life—
To the plains of war and a new city
Rising from the blood of innocent men.
His race will vanish—his honor lost.

The poet thus rises to grasp the eternal—
To commune with the immortals about
The glory of this wandering stranger.

The pious exile who suffers the fate
Of silence and emptiness has the muse.