Perfumed Perspectives

Perfumed Perspectives

Stinking love that avalanches down,
wiping out reason til I am tumbling head over heels
flattened, lying there as a startled
skunk sulks away. No flash of tail
in warning: ambushed in both
arrival and departure. Sulfuric bellow
as molten lava burns the heart of me.

Mugging for the camera
in a haze of euphoria - that
grand and glorious of loves - that
kind I just know can't, won't, will not last
because life is not a fairy tale. I know this
has an expiration date going in: go in anyway.
Common sense flies out to left field.

In endorphin-enhanced haze I danced
in the face of naysayers, blithely waltzing
around reality. Heart plainly on sleeves,
swirling out, touching all around
who shake their heads, roll eyes, inch
away: They too have been burned.
The candle is so bright: like a moth, I cannot resist the flame.

Time evaporated, ran out, spilled to puddle
on the ground, run into the sewer.
No tomorrows guaranteed; none were granted.
The rules, you know...Aching emptiness for the illusion,
yet still, years hence, real, yet not real, love lingers.
I don't regret a single moment of what was, what could never be
remembering castled tower princess and her glorious knight.

I flew
back across the pond, back to brittle reality.
He returned to preset diameters. Perhaps if timing
had been different, but no. I won't tarnish the illusion.
Lived my fairy tale dream until it was time to awaken.
But I awoke with the knowing of what there could be:
just not then, not with him, not with us...just not.

Searched for gleaming towers; few castles
in America. No knights, just empty nights filled
with longing for some unwritten chapter, but
the magic quill had run out of ink, the pages torn
ragged, leaving me in tatters. A death can be mourned:
no tombstones litter cemeteries of the living ended. No
glorious peaks catching the sun, just the stench of swamp gas.

Hard act to follow: my kilted knight set the bar high.
Yet had I not soared, had I not then crashed, crumpled, but intact,
I should not have seen the sun for the rainbow,
should not have recognized dented armor means one has fought
and survived. In odd moments, my mind flies back, scales
crenelated battlements to find them empty. Home,
atop another hill, my ranch awaits.

In western hat, dusty boots, my cowboy stands, understands.
He too, has flown implausible flights. Rarified air at those
impossible heights cannot sustain life.
We are both better for having flown the wild arc,
for having risen from the ashes.
Fractures knit with greater strength.
Exquisite perfumes arise from the harshest sense of all.