Poem for the Day: Conversation Hearts

 

Conversation Hearts

 You buy thirty candy hearts

         with visible signs of

                  you rock, be mine, call me.

  With each small disc buoyed

          in the hand, you catapult them

                  to the mouth, a tooth blast

   over sweet nothings of love. It’s

         Saturday, fifty years ago on the

                  shores of the eastern coast.

   Love is confectionery, sweet musings

          taking place on the bus,

                   in the shake of a bag.

   Not even the atmosphere of ten miles

          to a movie disturbs the party

                   in your mouth.

   You crack hug me into chalky bits,

          suck lucky lips over cloud nine,

                  chew cutie pie into spikes.

    Each heart seems a milestone in your life,

           honey breaks from moon,

                  wedding from cake.

    All you can do is roll the tongue over

           its sweet nature, remembering

                  a fractured night far off.

    Someone singing in the branches, dream

           boy on the grass, the sugary kiss

                 of real love on the mouth.

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Poem for the Day: In Love with his Words

In Love with his Words

                           after Kenneth Koch’s ‘In Love with You’

Every woman loves the poet who rises
on a sunny morning, claiming his love.
So it’s a pleasure reading his words when he’s
in love with love, shouting O midnight! O midnight!

Seeing him pacing the carpet, the sun raining through
the window, you can’t help repeating phrases like
“love is a taxi” a world you enter into. He’s dressed in
a stiff white shirt. She is as beautiful as October.

Their heads are together, translating Russian. Their
eyes are bigger than love discussing the previous
night, glued to a pillow on the bed, their bodies
“a couple of ruins” like Carthage and Pompeii.

When you read stanza two, you want to walk into the
park with them, swinging arm over arm, stopping like
he does with her, feeling the penetration of eyes like
daggers, hot as the ball of sun, light as the spidery

shadows that creep across the bench. You think
of the red-tipped flame of their shared cigarette.
By the time you reach the third, the second stanza
folds into the morning like Corellas into their wings.

So it is better to leave the house, thinking of love's
dominion over her, over him, it’s physical effect.
The clouds must have been massive on that day,
love as calm as pigeons, words moving towards

the famous, the ungracious King Edward, and his
abdication. You could have cured his headache with
the power of words. The world was new, mutated,
you said. You could have given him the pill, the grey

hooded light of dawn, the electricity that night puts on
into its bright self, baskets of sweet scents, soft towels
gently lowered on the bathroom floor. Oh, and how you
were revivified, breezed with kisses, so unabdicated—.

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