The Hitching Post

Run would you, my love, from Love?
From the hollowness of hearts
that cannot sustain honeyed variables:
breathless sighs enraptured,
captured between satin coverlets
and limbs entangled in fierce vows
till morning light

Shun would you, my love, the common union
of sinners, not saints; in hallowed halls
with lace and baby's breath
a quorum of scoffers
half believers of second chancers
sent down to life ever after
scattered like rice at the portal
Condemned to expectation
of disintegration
pure law of thermal dynamics
that life, whatever life, is doomed
to dominion or oblivion

So your sloe eyed, honeyed gaze
glazes over, and parted lips
once bearing pomegranate kisses
harden like an underscore
as passion dries like potsherds.
Hands, once forever crab-like
grabbed like other to clasp in prayer
now rest lifeless, limp in laps
forlorn, lonely orphans
lost in the sea of everyday dregs:
the promised bliss of matrimony

Run, would you my love, as I plod?
Shun all hopes of journeys shared
cheek to jowl under tangerine sunsets
shimmering wide eyed, pondering
diamond studded midnight velvet
bearing blistering heat waves
braving mountains as monsoons
exhaling at oasis calm with cricket song
then leaning in, shoulder to shoulder
to face hard into desert winds
with the chill of autumn years
down our aging, crooked spines.