Love in the Brilliance of a New Day

 

First rendition of poem

I'm reaching a rainbow by staying in place

As refracted light returns to true colors

At a magical remedial pace.

I drink to thee only with my eyes,

My glasses removed to see

Reasons to believe in love again

In the brilliance of a new day,

And feelings that stay when a rainbow fades

Into illusions of rippling water,

That pass under the bridge,

And the phenomena of passing days, 

That play with the mind in mysterious dreams,

As sweet music from trickling pores

Rushes to crescendo of a concert score.

No longer the single voice that harmony abhors,

At the place where both ends of the rainbow meet,

Where two hearts beat as one,

In a secret place in glistening mist,

Our place in the sun, 

From a long and lonely stream,

Before our restless lives are done.

 

January 23, 2021

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Copyright © 2021 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved 

In Love with the Other Woman

She knows she will always be

The other woman

but not to me

To me she is the one

The last love I will meet

It does no good to explain

It can never be complete 

It hurts when she's fatigued  

Til she reminds herself how good

We feel when we're together and

Her time for family having passed

Alone in love with a married man

 who isn't singing "Bye Bye Baby"*

Who will always have a place for her

In another unworldly place

A place so out of time

Southwest of her dreams

After telling the man in the mausoleum

What she has finally seen

They have set each other free

  Knowing someone is with her now

Praying in a Lu-Gang temple

Someone who will forever be

All over her body with kisses

In love affectionately

January 19, 2021

"Bye-Bye Baby" by The Four Seasons

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Perseverance Brings Good Fortunate

 

Another two hours in a department store

While waiting for her to buy socks

I text my lover and the wait is better

In fact my life’s improved whenever

I no longer wait for little to happen

To sweeten it in ways she will not try

Though I encourage her with reasons 

She hasn’t missed my presence

without anger or denigration

I love her for what she can offer

And do all the things we have done.

 

Better stay home after an all-day out

To stay unnoticed as we continue

 As everyone happily doesn't miss me

Though it not easy for a writer to be unseen 

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.

Believes longer than recollects,

Longer than knowing even wonders,”*

It is something I have always known

A feeling I can never forget

Nothing matters what I write at home

And details would only encumber me

 

I have seen the best minds of my generation

Wallowing in loveless frustration

Taking the easy way out of marriage

Drinking themselves to death, smoking blank stares

Reverting to pornography and fantasy

All-ing or nothing their existence to be

Numbing the heartbeat setting them free

The heartbeat of love that keeps beckoning

The endless kisses of closed-eyed sensation

The path that angels unfold for the daring

A new morning of life for the caring

 

So I go on living making this image real

Every loving echo of reciprocal sensation

Or a dead man’s lost reverberation

There is no time to lose for living

The breath she’s taken away from forgetting

Breathing softly in my ear 

The words I long to hear

Touching every curve distinctively  

The lady sweats fragrantly with grace

As I taste the odds against the marketplace

And find perseverance overcoming obstruction 

January 15, 2021

(*William Faulkner) 

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It Keeps Us Together

 
Eight o’clock on Friday night and she has no suggestions

I offer YouTube ZZ Top, Robert Palmer;

she counters with Ann Margaret and Elvis

But we’re running out of suggestions.

I offer Cat Ballou and Mad Mad Mad Mad World

but she can not find them.

I look in our file for movies,

but we’ve seen them all.

So I have a glass of rum,

and a bottle of rum,

and get ready to the limit till sleep,

because I can’t get satisfied with her

She doesn’t want it.

Nothing to satisfy me or keep my interest,

Then, finally, a Hitchcock Movie,

The Man Who Knew Too Much.

In her finest hour,

She comes in first again,

It keeps us in love the best she can,

As I brush her side with intent,

But the slightest affection is bent;

So we enjoy a movie  in the living room,

As I rely on memories of feelings 

Instead of the written word, 

To go on being a happy husband, 

Satisfied elsewhere.

January 8, 2021

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Trivialities Dovetail Into Love

 

Such trivialities only matter playing games

Apologetically greeted for causing disdain

Forgotten what caused a Face friend's end 

For slandering a sacred cow’s name

Diverted into English with objections

Made into our romance so betoken.

Two turtle doves on a team of funny love

Contesting with expats until flown to rafters above

Hungry and feeding each other's tender loins

To buffet our bed with tastes thereof

Dovetailing into reciprocal feeling

All such warmed up dreams unbroken

While downstairs lonely expats chatted

Removed us to chamber opulently padded

Regarding our innocents’ sugary sweetness  

To embrace the only sensations that matters

Childlike glee goblet fully filled and refilled

With nothing left to say or be spoken

Our tongues tied in bilingual reciprocation

Eternity provoked in mystic invocation

In a pool of hearts where sugar melts

Again driven home in fateful penetration

Before midnight’s call to say one's belated

Into the night of history's provoking 

 

Without definite dates for sensual visits

Go laughingly the accent of this lizard

Disguised as flattery in classic flippancy

It doesn’t bother this Brooklyn wizard

As covers for more sincere endeavors

Pushed back semantics for measures unspoken

 

January 8, 2021

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Mongolia Can Help

 

We are very good at enjoying holidays,

A teatime trip to the British Council,

A walk to the light show over Love River,

But not a river of love on a New Year’s Eve, 

With the only entertainment on TV, 

In an aged hotel with paper-thin walls

to hear but not be heard at all,

And a forgotten mattress board,

removed for hard rioja asleep.

Twilight evening at home with Taiwan  news

Making herself something as I ponder rum,

And scroll down from Mongolia’s zero death toll, 

To the unveiled line that “Taiwan can help”

Chastised for quipping “Mongolia can help, too”,

As she turns off the set without asking,

Leaving me with silence and cats,

Should I have gone out alone to enjoy the evening?

As the missus misses bed with smartphone spats.

 

For the wine rack we had gleefully chosen,

She's still roiling after calling the police 

on a neighborhood witch she likes the least,

For insulting her mother’s private parts

Making it topical with my proposed position,

To get it off her chest and put it with derision,

For suggesting there were better things to talk of.

That I had only the responsibility to listen.

To take it without betraying a preference for happiness.

So we go through our evening singularly,

My dreamy Desdemona lifting her skirt to fly,

For a tryst in her car with windshield darkly,

My Roasting potatoes for a yearning love taster,

Encouraging her warmth hearing men bast her

Expats elitists not knowing loving Taiwan,

Is prerequisite to loving her long

So long from an intimate place to relax,

a place like Mongolia where there is no flack. 

January 5, 2021

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Only the dead know Brooklyn

 

Only the dead know Brooklyn

In a happy place near her face,

In a beer hall evening without firm plans,

Cuddling in a booth far from Bensonhurst,

On the next earth’s tropical Taiwan isle,

At a drive-in place, smoking hot,

Unwinding to a music box of pent-up desire,  

Lounging naked in shallow sea a-bubbling

Caressing, stroking, and embracing,

Patting, hugging, and kissing,

With an accent on local history,

Awaiting the dawn for his morning DJ,

Who, in a leftover message, 

On a crisp underground station,

sounded happy that

He isn't dead in Brooklyn.

January 5, 2021

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