A Visit from St. Valentine

Alfred Gescheidt

Love is a many-fingered thing…

So scroll on down for an odd assortment of love poems, and then click on each poet’s name to be taken to his/her previous poetry feature in Escape Into Life.

Ron Hardy

Cheeks

These are the territories, just below the darkest of eyes, where experience bubbles up. Here then are the twin plateaus on either side of her prominence. I stake no claims, I have no jurisdiction, but I will inhabit the left one with a native sensibility, not with any right, but rather with a writ of belonging. I touch this soft, happy land with my hand—my only gesture of love’s sovereignty.

Kelli Russell Agodon

Love Letter with Language Barrier

Dear Beloved,

My mouth is empty for you.
You are the aspirin I am to take
to possess the morning,
to make the earth rotate left.
I write to you this letter
from my ventricle and mail you
my internal organs.
What you left behind
aches, interrupts me. Inspired
in paradise, we canceled
our clothing. And when we love
together, the bees groan. I give you
my mothwings, my core,
if you remember what is fragile
inside me. We will touch. Sleep.
Yes, sleep. Yes, love.

There is simply no perfect way to say this.
I have been writing this letter for days.

–from Dancing Girl Press’s billet-doux

Mark Kerstetter

Proscription

I would seem to have banished
the mode of addressing you,
yet I do.

Does that mean you still hold
a piece of my heart?
I won’t ask for it back.
Instead I’ll say, keep it.
I hope it doesn’t rot in your hands
like a piece of meat.
What will keep it preserved?
My dialogue is one-sided.
Can I affect it, anymore?
Or does it depend on your breath?

I can only ask the void.
It’s like a death.
I yearn emptiness.
I cry nothing.

Nin Andrews

Your Last Orgasm

It’s true, Love.  The capacity for disaster is within each of us.  We know this as a fact we fear and never admit.  We could all fall suddenly from grace.  The divine would only sigh and watch, just as I watched you walk out the door and into the winter night.  Afterwards I saw my fears rise around me like a luminous cloud, like foreboding, like unrequited love and regret, like all the spoken and unspoken sorrows between us, so many of them, they had no choice but to resort to a breathless silence, first lifting of their own accord, the way the prayers of the dying rise in one last breath before sinking down, flattening into meaningless threads, a million and one disconnected thoughts, nonsequitors, each an open admission that life or beauty has no meaning after all, that from now until eternity it will always be four o’clock in the afternoon, hours before dinner and hours after our last interesting thought.  That time of day when all humans begin to wonder if they will ever make love again.

They never will.  This much I know, now that you have left me.

For another “Love Poem,” be sure to visit Escape Into Life’s currently featured poet, Paul Hostovsky.  Then click around some more on the Poetry page.  You could get lost in there…