Pannonica

by J. Otis Powell!

Lavender encircles your eyes

And dares me

Love her as an equal

Though everything contradicts reality

The story in front of me plays like

Unrequited sagas that shattered heart

Felt adoration as porcelain on concrete

But on more luxurious mornings back rubbing

And smile kissing to Coltrane

We soak up medium roast French press

And very berry coffee cake

Rendezvous hold precious memories

 

Once upon a night

Contrast dropped me like a sugar high

After time with you there was nothing

Else to look forward to and nothing

Substantial to do

Except bring home a face you made

With eyes blown like glass

From slight of hand

Eyes that follow me

Encouraging me to believe

I'm entangled in a blue fable

Ranging from powder-sky-blue

To darker-than-midnight

A kind of royal black-blue sorting through

A web of a real and imagined existence

Feeling around with bare hands for truth

Discovering how to say

I love you differently

To mean it with fresh intentions

When my tongue

Nostrils and palette long for licorice

I won’t compromise or settle 

Love is specific

 

I've returned to a theme of Love and Revolution

And it's difficult gardening with stony

Weedy rows to hoe

I’ve returned because nothing else seems important

Now that money needs a new name

Sex is never what they say it is

And romance provides security for the likes of

Hallmark

Diamond brokers

Florists and Victoria’s Secrets

 

I live instead inside your lavender circles

Hoping for protection from commoditification

Praying that abstention from propriety

Will make betrayal moot

Sometimes I hear voices beneath instrumental music

And when I stop to listen they disappear

When I turn around your face is there - stoic

 

Your face (homemade) from your mirror

Is how you see your image  

In purple shadows pensive and smaller

Than your reputation

Your amber face in midnight sky

Unassuming as tree branches

With blood trunk and veins pumping indigo

Complicated as solutions in a new world

I became you to love you better

I became better to love you more

 

You asked what I wished for 

I stopped short of

Answering simply you because you can’t give that

And that’s not what I mean  

I wish for what you

Allow me to do with you

My longing is ancient

It’s a deep ache in my soul

That has nowhere else to go

You exceed my grasp like dreams

From childhood  

Like dreams too long deferred

I pray a homemade necklace

Like rosary hoping divine intervention

Will make whatever happens all right

You are as far away from me as

My own unrequited identity