By mojave
Date: 26 March 2000

After a Night of Reading Your Poetry

Reading your poems,
I realize
that I have never really lived.
The thought comes to me
late at night
sharp and unpleasant
and there is no remedy
that I can see...
I would say I don't deserve you
if you didn't happen to be the One
I love more than I can tell.
You have done
what I've only dreamed and feared
in late-night verse,
in false comradeship with false friends
(3am trips to the 7-11 to buy 40's,
no other place open but the strip club
and Hell).
You've fit lifetimes,
it seems,
into just the years I threw away.
(Could this at last be
the long night's journey into day?)
So accept that all I have to offer
is me,
which is hardly you,
but there's this, too--
I think we have some understandings
so deep we don't even
have to talk about them.
I think we've stared
into the same abyss
and made it back
from some of the same dark places.
And now it happens
that I find you in that long night
and we walk together
into this present
and perfect
Light.