When you wake the morning When you wake the morning red headed children shimmer in your eyes. The veinous map of sun drenched eyelids flutters throbbing topography. Your muscles ripple. Scared animals burrow under your dewey skin. Frozen light sculptures where wrinkles dwell. Embroidered shades, in thick-maned tapestry. Your lips depart in scarlet, flesh to withering flesh, and breath in curved tranquility escapes the flaring nostrils. Your warmth invades my sweat, your lips leave skin regards on my humidity. Eyelashes clash. Getting Old The sageing flesh, a wrinkled vicedom. The veined reverberation of a life consumed. On corneas imprinted with a thousand dreams, now stage penumbral plays directed by a sight receding and a brain enraged. To fall, as curtains call, to bow the last, rendered a sepia image in a camera obscured, a line of credits, fully exhausted, fully endured. In Moist Propinquity Hemmed in our bed, in moist propinquity, 'tis night and starry and the neighbourhood inebriated, in the vomitary of our street. A woman, my stone-faced lover, a woman and her smells. The yellow haze of melancholy lampposts. Your hair consumes you. Prowling The little things we do together to give up life. The percolating coffee, your aromatic breath, the dream that glues your eyelids to my cheek. We both relent relentlessly. Your hair flows to its end, a natural cascade, a velvet avalanche buries my hands. In motion paralyzed, we prowl each other's hunting grounds. Day breaks, our backs turned to the light in dark refusal. Contributor: Sam Vaknin