A Realistic Aim

In a way,
I suppose that I must,
Must admire them -
The Legions,
Out there,
So able, easily,
To move on, and away,
From one lover to the new-another,
With an eerily elegant nonchalance,
No fleeting backward glance:
No time to seem,
Their last-lost-love-dream:
Such a waste of emotion: to feel forlorn,
Not part of the function and the form.
So when will I grow up then?
A realistic aim: when I'm ninety.

The thing is,
I still contemplate her beauty.
I have no choice, honestly.
I still contemplate her beauty,
Like a confused bull,
Hiding in a field of iridescent red roses,
In full-spring-bloom;
I still contemplate her beauty,
Much like a king penguin gazing,
And gazing and gazing,
At Inuits,
Dancing ecstatically outside their Igloo;
I still contemplate her beauty,
Like a funeral director,
Sleeping in her secret cryogenic chamber,
Beneath a bright full moon;
I still contemplate her beauty,
Like a confused suicide bomber,
Running towards his life-affirming savior,
As his bomb counts down to doom.

She stands there, other-worldly,
A mermaid's beauty, bespoken:
Hot-cold, human-alien, distant-here.
She's confiding in me,
Even though,
We,
Were a long time ago:
This vortex of perfumed memories,
I have fallen into,
Melts and melds Past Love's Mirror of Perspective,
And, no,
We mustn't get back together,
No sir!

And yet, as I say, here we are,
She's confiding, and I'm listening,
Like a choir,
Singing, listens to the congregation's
pin-drop sound,
I listen because I want to,
Because, really, I have no choice..