Sonnet 5
Happiness is gained in various ways.
The apt to laugh find humor, games, and jest.
Strugglers leading desperate lives of pain
are satisfied when warmly fed and dressed.
Attempts to find one’s pleasure while in lust
proves pleasure there is fleeting and unkind.
The love and gain of gold, the greedy must
so cherish to indulge their false-led climb.
Some celebrate with colors, friends, or gifts,
or savor solitude in quiet ease.
The artist’s hands and head create to lift
their angst, but I choose one above all these:
the stillness, perfect peace, and comfort true
that fills my soul when I keep close to you.
Sonnet 4
On the twentieth night of June, a summer’s rest,
we stood together ‘neath the moon so clear.
You held me close and leaned against my chest,
and quietly you whispered in my ear.
“Tell me, may I kiss you?” came your voice,
so warm and tender on my trembling skin.
But I was still afraid to make the choice –
I was not confident I loved again,
and loveless kiss is false, a selfish rush,
a crime that I had sworn not to commit.
But then your lips against my cheek did brush,
and I could make no move but to submit.
We gently came together, soft and light,
and as we kissed, I knew that it was right.
Sonnet 3
Of all your traits the human eye may see
or ear discern, there’s one that I love best.
Your flowing chocolate hair, your blushing cheek,
your soft and sloping skin my fingers test,
your angel voice that sugar-sweets the air,
your eyes like topaz burning true with love,
how when your deep affection you declare,
you quick the soul and so enrapture blood -
these all are parts of you, and thousands more.
But none of these is that of which I speak,
for there is one whose beauty rises o’er,
a beauty that oft comes upon your cheek.
When come I into view, to stay awhile
or simply for a moment’s time, you smile.
Sonnet 2
I pull these bedsheets close about my chest,
imagining you, angel, here with me.
Three years is not so long a timely test,
but at this moment seems eternity.
Within my heart, my love for you holds strong.
Each time I think on you, it swells, it grows.
But actions humankind has labeled wrong
are evidence of love I cannot show.
To fall asleep, your hazel eyes the last
of silent stills before I drift to dream,
and waking, see your face a-sleeping fast
as golden morning through the window streams…
this wish is not so wrong as others say.
But still asleep without you must I stay?
Sonnet 1
When friendship’s bonds become a crushing burden
and action seems the only course to take,
when rapid rift and quarrels quick are certain
and jealous fools of both they dare to make,
the choice is clear: the method to impart
is breaking of the bonds so hard to bear.
So countless friends await your happy heart,
yet this one binds your smile in thorny snare.
But here, a different kind of bond to make
once friends gone past have left their heavy hole,
one diamond-stoned, impossible to break,
yet rare and hard to catch, like streams of gold.
The bonds of love are evermore and true,
and love I have discovered here in you.
Two Wrongs…
“What I did was not only legal,” he told me. “It was right.”
An old adversary who has escaped from prison
was serving life for murder
who had their own blood spilled
He loaded his .22 rifle in the van and took off.
“Even if you could extinguish that instinct, should you?”
That shoot was on the beach
This young innocent kid is
knocked to the ground by three men with sawed-off shotguns
“At first I thought it was a joke,
but then,”
He put the animal in his sights and pulled the trigger.
in the back of the head
Graphic scenes of gunshot victims spurting blood
“The cat dropped like a rock,” he said.
fired 50 rounds
A fallen victim’s body is riddled with gunfire as blood spurts across the screen
And yes, they can bleed.
Being pursued by the police
was likely under the influence
He then smashed through several walls of a ranch house
the accident ended a four-minute, high-speed chase
“it took five or six cops to hold him down.”
“Anyway, the cops pulled me over and searched my van and found the gun, and –”
authorities allegedly found a gun in their luggage
“What kind of man hits a kid?”
Today’s front-page headline:
A California man was arrested after a gun was fired during a fight
he was found guilty and sentenced by a jury to death…
Others can indeed bleed. And now they do.
What I See
It’s cold outside,
but I have thoughts of you that keep me warm.
I imagine you sitting beside me;
I construct your familiar face
and I look out at this still winter night before us,
and I realize,
this is what I see in you,
what I’ve seen all along:
A kind of silent beauty,
fresh and clean as this first snowfall,
an untouched purity blanketing the world,
a soundlessness of calm patience,
the smallest of true pleasures,
a pause,
the most detailed of heart-crafts.
When I look at the winter quiescence,
I see your smile, small and sincere
as if every love were gently stored behind it
and you are sharing the secret back door.
Your eyes are wide and bright as the snow
and endless as this darkest indigo space
as they glitter with curiosity and white hope.
When there is no one else outside
and the world is sleeping beneath soft bedsheets
and the air settles to watch,
all perfectly still as a picture
but impossible to catch…
I think of you beside me,
and this is what I see.
