Love Poem: How Do I Explain?

How Do I Explain?

How do I explain where I have been, new lover? 

Once, on warm summer nights 
I laid tangled in the darkness
Warmed against deep loneliness
In the form of a man
And how I accepted it, this moth’s fate-
Tapping my heart 
Over and over
Against that light 
On the other side of the glass. 
Seeking fulfillment from emptiness 
No better then that creature, I persisted. 
Digging myself this kind of grave. 


There was this death before you. 
My death.
And it cycles over and over on the surfaces of my mind
Like the tide, turning in on happier days
And withdrawing with the dark. 
And I fear
I am nothing more than these motions
Repeating with no more reason then to say:
I had loved once
And then it was gone. 


I had loved once. 
And now, it is gone. 


The water washed away the vows,
And with it, 
Somewhere deep within the texture of the bottom
I found fragments of truth. 
I found you.


There is no perfection where you seek it, new lover. 
And how I fear, 
Oh how I fear…
The impermanence of love. 
When permanence of loss
is far more real.