The love punch gets me every time

It keels me over

The thunder of it echoes back with bass notes

The octaves that strand my fear

 

My small world gathers on an atoll

Where isolation tricks safety

I can sing that cherished hymn from childhood

The one that I call back to my belly

 

I am barefoot on the rocky island

Shards mingle with the rounded polished stones of my heart

Cuts on my feet bleed the milky white sand

The light abrasive that surrounds my trepidation

 

I fall back on homerun thoughts

They don’t last

Then stark winds

Bend the resilient palms

 

I can build a house here

I can hide

Under a trap covering a hole

I ceaselessly dig

 

I don’t want to blacken my eyes

And purposely starve

Instead I look to

Intoxicating breaths of clean air

 

A flushing out of the colliding syndicate

Whose conspiracies

Taint love

Inside the melting populations of my emotions

 

If I am stranded here

I am also lined up to obey

The guides who seek solace

With a gut-punch or antidote to drink

 

The form is immaterial

The clear key pushes me towards

An open book

Mended by the mistakes I’ve paid for

 

The sky-writer in his meticulous travels

Maps the cursive outline

For me to see

In white columns

And cloudy plumes

Sanctioned by blueness

 

But, I can’t just be the dreaming man vomiting into the sky

On the serrated shore

That tears me up

Bowls me over

In the misty-eyed morning whose pain is plain as day outside my skylight

 

It is love’s gut-punch

That pins my delusions of the future

To my face

Like a carnivorous flower

 

The body blows from the ocean of your thoughts

Too heavy for the undertow

Send the message

Of who I AM

 

The love punch gets me every time