Lovelorn

Oh child of Lower East Side
Attending Snick meetings
In the orange Manhattan haze
Trotskyite fledgling
Wandering tenement halls
Like a new born babe
Wonder at every manhole
Steam rising from grates
Walking angelically
Through graffiti subway tunnels
Lower East side blues
Seeping salsa rhythms
Through fortified walls
Bright eyed moonchild
Surveying dreamscapes
Aglow with love light
Sauntering through neighborhood
Fate dropping ceramic pot nemesis
Inches from peering eyes
Gazing at death from a stones throw
In the housing project interlude

Setting out across island city
Visions of wheat fields
Beyond the cement wilderness
Where love is elusive
Like a unicorn
A myth, which hides
Behind walls of lust
Arriving at Cloisters
No closer to liberation
From fortress urbania

Emerging into womanhood
Storm front gathering
Clouds of desolation
Lining the horizon
Falling in love with long haired Jesus hippie
So bewildered by love
A virgin in wonderland
Her dancer’s body objectified
In night club desperation
Shining knight lifting the veil
From frightened eyes
Too clouded with tears to see

Archetypal male
Descending like Icarus
Betrothing reluctant bride
First sign of womb life
Sending her on greyhound bus
Across bulging continent
To meet him in Hollywood
Her pregnant with child
Passing through twilight sadness
Landing in magic kingdom
Where innocence lies wounded
And celluloid fantasies
Melt like plastic
Into hardened reality
Birthing boy in tinsel town
First leg of a journey
Of weeping sorrow  

Love child emerging
Into her all embracing arms
Gypsy wandering
To swampy mire
Of magnolia blossoms
Stranded in cow pastures
Alone with herself
In primitive solitude
Night a swarming sea
Alive with pain
Intruder violating sacred sanctum
As she feigns it her husband
Eyes closed in surrender

Out of the midnight oblivion
With connubial consort
Second boy emerges
And then a daughter of the moon
Her world suffused in sorrow
Her stigmata aching in holy suffering
Universe collapsing to pin point void
Passage to hospital sanctuary
Like comet pulled inexorably to sun
Golden flashes of flaming hurt
Shooting stars of hope
Fading into velvet night
Slow ascent from Hades
Rising into sunlit vistas

Chance encounter in limbo
Romantic illusions sparked
In inebriated ballroom dialogue
Opium magic casting spell
On misty eyed pair
Tentative touching
Melting like butter
Into torrid love
Days spent drenched in intimacy
Drinking in each other like wine
So brave and unaware
Years unfolding in idyllic bliss
Following the roads to pastoral paradise
Bucolic journeys of the heart and mind
Swimming forest streams like otters
Dalliancing in delighted desire
Words of love whispered on windy hilltops
Walking in sacred silence under cathedral pines
Years reeling by like a romantic movie
In which the key to love opens any door
Leading to labyrinth passion
As infinite as time and space

Darkness enfolding mountaintop
As the mammogram portends
An omen of mortality
Hanging over our heaven
Like a pall of smog
Raining death
Reprieve granted
With surgical excising
Demon exorcised
Thread of life
Stretching beyond
Carried out on stretcher
Her first words
“Did you miss your class?”
Down turned face
When I affirm her fear

Turbulence invading peace
Like a disturbance in the jet stream
With abrupt collision
Two streams cascading
Over levees too weak
To contain our yearning
Two souls never yoked
In matrimonial union
Her decades dream
Realized under oaks
Sipping from the same glass
Our sharing deeper than words
My tears barely restrained
Hesitating utterance
Intuitive prophesy of divorce
As I say “I do”
Her smile competing with the sun
For radiant joy
Our lips pressed in the ecstatic moment
Golden scripture of eternity
Blessing the moment
With euphoria
If not the future
A tarot oracle
We never consulted

Year racing by like a zephyr
Blowing headlong into schism
Her mind clouded by pain
As dreams dim in foggy ruins
Her thoughts growing dissonant
As my grandfather dips
Into the crack of forever
Her cosmos collapsing again
With each knot severed
Old friends cast to the wind
With me the last
Left dangling in lovelorn solitude
Amongst the ruins of love