Poems from Young Lovers

They were written by candlelight
and emailed across the darkness of fiber-optic wilderness
Received miles from their origin or anything similar
Love poems of a youth barely conceived of love
A conservatism of inexperience and morals
shaped by word, but not by living
loosened by the promise of new touches
Each line on edge, delicately balanced to fall
to the abandon of lust, or illusion of temperament
Hungry mouths shaping each word in the writing
and in the reading, in absence of forming to one another
Pictures accompanying the poems, printed out and bound
for a trip away from their only contact
Inexperienced love demanding the reassurance of paper
carried in place of what couldn’t be carried in the heart
Now to read them, to make a study of her face
lit by candlelight and shaped by mouthed words
is to see a great dam of inexperience across the river of living
The raw youth in the cock of her hip, the set of her mouth
a confusion of movie star emulation and desire
I see what it was to be young, and all the tripping places
For she is my mirror, and now stands a perfect image, a loving line
a museum of what I dreamed to be
when I painted in the dark of things I’d never seen
These poems were written of love with the inexperience of short years
In the flickering false light of candles
before the day, and the harsher light of having to grow up
We exposed love, broke it upon the rocks of our young selves
and finding beneath the husk a bitter meat, left it to rot
A hand bound, marker illustrated, chapbook of youth
and two strong wills, crystalline intellects, striving
against one another
for something that could only be had with age
Our love poems are written to others now
an older, polished, love of adults who’ve attained a knowing
to support the desiring
Mouths hungering for what we now know is as old as the stones
but once thought we’d invented solely between ourselves
and once thought we’d solely destroyed
Until in the good harsh light of day, it was rediscovered