Have I told you?

Loving a poet is
noticing snowed-in flowers
or cracks of sunlight
in a dead sea sky.
Springtime cruelties;
simple guttural changes
that come with smoky,
yellow promise evenings —
ones where we light the lamps
sparrows seek in the sky
with our fire eyes.

Loving a poet is
the childhood memory —
a shuttering of ice cream
dripping through fingers and
sticky mouths catching
the last of sweet cream and
sugar, reminders for
the sizzling sidewalk
that a cruel sun will exile
even the smallest pleasures,
if not finished quickly in a torrent
of all consuming indulgence.

Loving a poet is
dry-mouthed ghosts
that feather rivers in the
deep ridges of mountains,
black and underlining
your name with terror tongues,
peeling petals from eyes,
turning them to turquoise wings
beating the air we both breathe.
Word-filled basins breaking
metaphors from mouths.

Loving a poet is
the smell of lemon slices and
coffee grinds with fresh cream.
Howling conversations
under amaro waterfalls
that catch limbs and sly smiles
in waves of understood
laughter or the saline clear
tears that only midnights can bring.

Loving a poet is
seeing open eyes in
everything. Waking to the
black corner of the room where
the most beautiful and terrifying
creatures lurk. It’s the trees
that watch and the long snaked
creek endlessly taking you
nowhere and everywhere.
It’s opening your own crusted
eyelids and witnessing the mirror,
born in awe for the first time,
yourself again and again.

Loving a poet is
seeing the vortex of nature
in the lines of your palms,
know why I want to map
the entirety of it,
a treasure hunt leading
to the secret of all our longing.

Loving a poet is
loving myself, newly every day.
The folklore I call forth.
Landscapes designed by
words matrixing through my
head and heart, a helix of longing
I can never fully explain
and will never be eased.
I’ve been in love with
a number of poets
so extraordinary,
I became my own beloved.

Understood my own story line.

Loving a poet is
giving it all back in the
lightening soaked power
lines of a word after a word after
a word after a word after…