cheeseball lover

You're a great driver,
you have beautiful eyes,
your fingers look good on the neck of a guitar,
you serenade me with adorably off-key improvisations.

You use too many emoticons,
your text messages are full of !!!
you still love R.E.M.,
you're serious about badminton.

You sleep with a toy sheep,
you're hopeful and romantic,
your cheesiness makes me cringe
with love.

this is cheating a little

Ok, so this poem isn't actually one of my own creation. It's one of my favorite childhood poems regarding love (from the book Sing a Song of Popcorn). I memorized it a while back, and it's stuck with me since.


There's someone I know
Whom I simply can't stand
I wish he would bury
His head in the sand

Or move to the moon
Or deep outer space
Whenever I see him
I make a weird face

Then one day during recess
Outside in the yard
He suddenly gave me
A Valentine's card

I wish that he hadn't
It made me upset
It's the prettiest one
I could possibly get

another for ariela

spectres of love past...

“the day begins at nightfall”

do You remember how I looked at dawn?
You thought I was young and beautiful
but i lay weary in my bed.
You looked at my face like a child gazing into windows
i just stared into the new sun and smiled to be near You.
So
You dodged in between the spots in my eyes
and You kissed me
You wrapped me up in dawn.
and You loved like i was young,
moving to the beating of my nervous heart,
a terrified tattoo while my eyes tracked
the swaying of Your hips.
the brush of Your hand and hair.
You thought me to be young
but i am already old.
how could You see me at dawn
when the day begins at nightfall?
the sun, like a teardrop, fell.
i dreamed a softer dream that night . . .
A softer dream
that night.

~jss

the best quote about love by an anarchist feminist that i have ever read

"Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere."

~emma goldman

oh the valentines!

i wrote this a million years ago, for this kid in high school. oh high school.

xo/cb

--------

texas, hold me.

the cards are all down

the bets have been collected

and i am off the table.

i'd be hard pressed to say

just when my fate was in the river

and all the cards that were showing

it seemed i would be won

by someone just completely wrong.

but those hidden hearts

the royal flush - that won me.

the sly way you showed your hand

and swept me off the table.

that was from me

I was counting the cards all along.

one of my favorite love poems

perhaps a less conventional love poem than most...

"Marginalia"

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

~Billy Collins

a call for love poetry

in honor of pagan festival hallmark-a-thon day, a love poem from when i was a better person.

for ariela

Each morning has within
a region nestled between evening and day,
between dream and wake
and each morning, I awake,
trembling with the sole intention of meeting you there.
To see your face clear as the day about to come,
to sense your pulse through your skin.

In dreams, my intentions are laid bare,
and they burn with a fire found
when my thoughts are turned to you.


My Only Desire is to Awake in You Desire.
perhaps
To feel reciprocation flow through your body
like breath,
and follow its path from deep within you
out to me.
For love to stem from your fingertips and
trace secret messages, in dream speak,
on my skin.
In dreams, our hands join to become
something greater that flies
away with the dawn.

And

Each morning I will find you again
in dreams, in love,
I will find you in the inbetweens.

love in this day and age

Do I want to kiss you because I'm drunk, or am I drunk because I want to kiss you?