Category Archives: Broken Love Affair

First Lust

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 jdbphotos (Click on any photo to enlarge all)

First Lust

When we were young, before love rusted,
how we pined and how we lusted.
We lived on love. So sure. Nonplussed.
As though we held a deed of trust
on those we kissed. We arched, they thrust,
our hearts pounding as though percussed.

We came home rumpled, dizzy, mussed—
our heads swirling, slightly concussed.
Our mothers warned. Our fathers fussed,
seeking to turn our dreams to dust.
Our hearts reeling in shamed disgust,
our faces flamed as they discussed.

And although we thought we must
pretend to listen, inside we cussed,
knowing their words to be unjust.
Within each throbbing teenage bust
beat a heart free of distrust,
bursting with love’s wanderlust.

Back there at our very starts,
as we were learning to use our hearts,
back when we thought they might combust,
our hearts were tender, without crust.
We gave them fully with no mistrust.
We thought the world of love was just.

 

 

The prompt word today was lust.

Paper Shoes

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Paper Shoes

I’m folding me some paper shoes
so I can walk away the blues.
The love poems I cannot recall
I’ll scuff off as I pass the mall.
Someone will find my words all shredded—
how you wooed and won and bedded
one so young and so naive
that she could not help but believe
words pilfered from a Hallmark store
that you had often used before.

All those lovelorn lines obscured.
All that loneliness endured.
On Main Street I will shed my heart—
that part of me you tore apart.
All the lines I wrote about it,
all the times I grew to doubt it.
Your words the heel, my words the sole,
the sidewalks will consume them whole.

All the futile poetry
that passed once between you and me
ground into the pavement where
perhaps two lovers will find it there—
the words like seeds that hung around
hoping for more fertile ground.
Love sprouted from a used-up word
might strike some others as absurd,

But I like to think perhaps
our use of them was just a lapse.
Repeated by those other voices
who choose to live by other choices,
all those words that we now rue
might work for lovers who are new.

The prompt word today is paper. (Image from internet, photographer unknown.)

Saying It with Flowers

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“Violets contain ionone, which short-circuits our sense of smell.  The flower continues to exude its fragrance, but we lose the ability to smell it.  Wait a minute or two, and its smell will blare again. Then it will fade again, and so on.”
                                       — Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

“Violets” jdb photo 2017


Saying It with Flowers

A lovely gesture, the violets—
but their scent  vanished
before you walked out the door.
“It will come back,” you promised.
And so it did, that sweet aroma,
radiating from the deep heart of the flowers
for brief moments before
vanishing again—
coming and going with a greater regularity
than your coming and your going.

“There is a scientific cause for this,”
you noted, ” The fragrance is still there,
but we just lose our ability to smell it.
It will come back again.”
And you were right.  
I could count upon it’s reappearance—
the mystery of its coming
and its going solved,
unlike your final exit
or why, when I requested
forget me nots,
violets are what 
you gave.

“Forget Me Nots” image from internet

The prompt today was “radiate.”

The Reluctant Gardener

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The Reluctant Gardener

I note the nuance of your kissing
and intuit that I’ll soon be missing
even the last tiny spark
of what we once had in the dark
that, exposed to light of day,
has gradually seeped away.

The occult pleasure of new romance
should, when given half a chance,
bloom and flourish in the light
and with another, surely might.
But something’s absent in your heart
that forbids true love a start.

Some emptiness or darker need
is prone to killing commitment’s seed.
You dig new hole after new hole
with germination no final goal.
Whatever hopes you might have planted,
today you have clearly recanted.

 

The prompt today was nuance.

 

Desire

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Version 2

Desire

All those nights of passion, those years spent in desire,
we were tightrope walkers, balanced on a wire.
We never knew from day-to-day which of us might fall.
Never knew for certain if we’d both be there at all.

Desire in the meadows under shelter of tall grass—
in our youth we never knew that it could pass.
We had it firmly tethered. It could not slip away.
It curled in loosened coils around us as we lay.

Desire in the morning or in the afternoon,
each time we fell into it, was over all too soon.
Then life leaked in to wash the passion from our day.
We balanced, raw and vulnerable, wishing it could stay.

Desire in the darkness was easier to hold.
Something in the shadows made us wild and bold.
But when the morning beckoned, we left each other for
all the business of the day that lurked outside our door.

Heartbeats built the passion that footsteps cruelly bore
away so pulses of the night became the stuff of lore
as our desires migrated into memories
just beyond our fingertips, too distant now to seize.

Note: If sung to the tune of Suzanne Vega’s “Gypsy,,” as per okcforgottenman’s suggestion, sing the following two-line chorus after every verse: (Anyone want to think up an original tune for this?)

Oh, tomorrow, wrapped up in today.
we never know the dreams that we will throw away.

 

The prompt today was desire.

Allergic to Love

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Allergic to Love

Henceforth, I will not flirt with guys.
Don’t like the trouble that it buys.
It starts out with a single rose
and ends up with a stuffy nose,
first due to all the histamines,
and then due to his macho genes.
Sad when he’s here and when he’s gone,
and I am feeling spent and wan—
sneezing over a thorny stem,
feeling pricked by both of them!

The prompt given in my writing group today was “Eyes,” and since I’d already written a poem about eyes for the WP prompt of “Arid” earlier, I asked my neighbor for a different prompt.  He gave me the word, “henceforth.” So, here’s my poem

Dry Eyes

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Dry Eyes

Your eyes were dust, mine were a flood.
The combination, a mire of mud
that we somehow wound up in.
You blamed it on original sin,
but I, agnostic to the core,
had wisdom to walk out the door
to spend my tears on other guys.
Never trust a guy with arid eyes.

 

The prompt word today was arid.

Shooting Stars

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Shooting Stars

We were both so young and nimble
on those nights the world would tremble
with a touch, much less a kiss.
You a farm boy, me a miss
unaccustomed to such things
that woke my heart and gave it wings.
Some part of me knew even then
it was just what might have been—
that though you made my body sing,
it was not an ever-after thing.
Still, oh those nights, remembered still,
parked somewhere on a prairie hill,
I knew for then I was your world,
enraptured and securely curled
In the nest of puppy love.
The very stars trembled above.

The prompt today was tremble.

Unhitched

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Unhitched

I’ll slog through the mud and slog through the rain,
but I’ll never slog back to you, ever again.
If ever again I work fingers to bone,
I will be doing it here on my own—
not chasing your dreams or plowing your furrow
like a mule in a trace or a poor laden burro.
Life was a hard slog, dear, trudging with thee—
much more of a grind than just being me.
So I’ll point my gaze forward, not back where I’ve been
without pulling you with me, ever again.

As Groucho would say, “The secret woid today was ‘Slog!’

“The Gawkey and Flaybottomist—Who Should Have Stopped When First They Kissed”

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The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to write a poem using at least ten terms from a specialized dictionary. I guess when I chose to use the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue  from my own bookshelf, I should have realized that at least 1/2 of the terms would involve sexual innuendo. Nonetheless, I decided to proceed. I must warn you that the following poem is a bit risqué, so please avoid reading it if rude language offends thee!

The 16 terms I used and their definitions are given after the poem. If you wish, you might want to read them before the poem, or you can try to follow context clues to discover their meaning on your own:

 

“The Gawkey and Flaybottomist—Who Should Have Stopped When First They Kissed”

I predict the cross patch and the flaybottomist
are the sort of women least likely to be kissed.
The first’s so busy grumbling that the kiss never connected,
while the second merely thinks of how the kiss may be corrected.

Now, there was an awkward village boy excessively unworldly,
that on one occasion had acted most absurdly
by planting a fast buss upon his teacher’s nearby cheek
then since he was both young and shy, he beat a fast retreat.

The following week when mellow, he thought he’d try again—
His amorous nature brought out by much congress with his gin.
He desired a bit of relish, and the gin made him a fool
So he took his gaying instrument up to the village school.

I fear he was a gawkey–the worst that you might meet,
and he tripped over his crab shells as he stumbled up the street.
The roaring boys pursued him, thinking they would later cackle—
leaking all the secrets of where gawkey stowed his tackle.

Upon his knock, the school teacher opened up the door,
attired in her negligee–and I fear nothing more.
She greeted him with Friday-face, but he took little note,
for he was practicing the lines that he had learned by rote.

The teacher was a dumplin and her suitor tall and thin,
yet when she heard his practiced plea, I fear she let him in.
But what he didn’t know then, as he quenched his carnal thirst
was that on that night of visitors, he was not the first.

The reason our flaybottomist had greeted him ungowned,
clad only in her negligee and with her hair unwound,
was because the French instructor had been there to give instruction—
a fact that I fear later led to misery and destruction.

For her tutor left her Frenchified, which she passed to the gawkey,
who took his French leave quickly, feeling a good deal less cocky.
The moral of this little tale—at least the one you’ll get?
Things are apt to get sticky when you’re the teacher’s pet!

 

Words from the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue used in this poem:

*crab shells:  Irish, shoes
*gawkey: a tall, thin, awkward man or woman
*gaying instrument: the penis
*cross patch: a peevish boy or girl, an unsocial or ill-tempered man or woman
*relish: carnal connection with a woman
*cackle or leaky: to blab or reveal secrets
*roaring boy: a noisy, riotous fellow
*flaybottomist: a schoolteacher
*mellow: almost drunk
*dumplin: a short thick man or woman
*tackle:  a man’s genitals
*Friday-face:  a dismal countenance (Friday being a day of abstinence.)
*French leave: to go off without taking leave of the company
*Frenchified: infected with venereal disease.
*Negligee: a woman’s undressed gown,
*buss: a kiss “kissing and bussing differ both in this, We busse our wantons,
but our wives we kisse! (Robert Herrick, “Hesperides,” 1648) from buss, 1570.

To see the NaPoWriMo prompt or to participate, go here: http://www.napowrimo.net/day-seventeen-2/

Although I doubt this poem will prompt much heavy breathing, I’m posting it on the WordPress site as well: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/breath/