Love Poem: Prisoner of the Past
Tony Bush Avatar
Written by: Tony Bush

Prisoner of the Past

Smart and tasting tart,
Each bead of sweat that trickled down your spine,
Salt droplets upon the tongue
Reminding of times that were both yours and mine,
The moistened lock of lips,
Rapaciously a kiss long lingered on your mouth,
We stood in enraptured embrace
On pine-board floors of a house that faced towards the south,
And in the silken robes
Of the nights that sanctioned twilight suns to sink,
Sparkling chandeliers danced aflame
In depths of cold dry wine we as lovers drink,
Now remembered like old embers
Sweet bites of trysts and times no more remain,
I wonder if like me you make
Instinctive wish to steal them back again.

Like echoes in a vertiginous well
The dissolving ghosts of words that seemed to say it all,
Upon a distant street
A phantasmal passion play when sympathetic night would fall,
The plaintive weep, encroaching sleep
Upon the lavender eyes that never sought to cry,
Focused on the nucleus
Of sensual sacred love that wouldn’t ever die,
Unheralded even now,
Memorial splinters of pain for times when we would part,
Reflective slivers of arousal
Stab and score the secret pleasures of the famished heart,
Then the abstract manifesto
Of erotic times beneath the ashen harvest moon,
Now remain but a prisoner of the past
Of lost loves and lost worlds that fell to dust so soon.