Minor Expectations And Where They Actually Lead

I thought love would be marriage
A horse-drawn carriage
Daily low-fat, plain porridge
I was wrong

I believed love would be an unageing spouse
Rolling hills, a rose-garden, a Cotswolds house
A well-lit living room with a huge oil painting of a grouse
I was wrong

This is heaven
This is bliss
I have never known
A love like this

They said love would be lazy Sundays and Pimm’s and all afternoon barbecues
Gently discontinuing the blue
Always genuineness, never hullabaloo
I was wrong

And they said love would be walks along the beach
The most beautiful lesson that life can teach
Happiness, never out of reach
I was wrong

This is a miracle
This is a tryst
I will never again know
A love like this

All alone, I began to write
And I stayed up all night
As a vast sky-breath touched me with all its might
It was Song

Text after text, poem after poem, word after word
Every act of creation uncaged the bird
Which ended up in my hand, as a sword
It was long

My friends were worried I had gone mad
So they ditched me, what are you, a monk? How sad
Maybe they were right, but just a tad
They were never the best thing I’ve ever had

See, something in my heart
Deeply insisted on art
This was to be mine own grounded start
I was right

Tell me, my glow
If these seeds you sow
Do not now grow
Into forests

Admit to me the truth
That you avoided me your whole youth
That you were being deliberately obtuse
And eccentric

Rise up into my Soul
And I will make you whole
Climb up into my arms
And together life, let’s disarm

I thought love was dead
Or that love was just words you haphazardly said
It was all in my head
I was wrong

This is beautiful
This is God’s kiss
I am now recreated
A brand new Chris

Every time I say goodbye it doesn’t make it easier

Your eyes
have evil
in them/
and yet
here I am/was/
a man/
apart/
totally
beside
myself/
falling
into your
arms:

Heaven
is a place
of grace
even so I plunder
my wretched body/

into
hellscapes/
intoxicating wicked
beds/traps/
those half-
witted witches

feeding from
a man
apart/
a man
now making a
new start/
withholding information
of a
broken heart

a man
with a
broken heart:

And how
could you
have hurt me
so thoroughly

Your attack
felt vindictive
It
felt misplaced
And it
ended me

“Tu non sei mio padre”
you said(
also
ended me):

If the
past

is the past
then why

is it
so present? I will

get out
of bed

I will be
cleanly dressed

And I will remain
prepossessed

In this
monastery

Married
to Jesus

So when I lift
my cup toward

the heavens
the waters

of His Love
will fill my cup
and quench
my eternal thirst

I have moved
on

I am someone
else now

Fall, falling, fallen

I want to fall in love again,
I don’t want to be this miserable
irreparable heart beating
in a scarecrow chest,
I want love to pull me
like a lost asteroid
back into its cluster. Disheartened, I fell,
fell from the flames, fell
from the firmaments,
fell from the mountains,
fell back to earth, and how
I got up, and when I got up,
there was a semblance of a
beginning again, which was
a true beginning. You were next
to me, fallen too, I reached out
my hand to grab you,
to help you up,
and I had never seen eyes
so green, as green
as the turtles,
as green as the photosynthesis
of algae, as green as
the green sea. I want to make
love to you
and look at your face,
not your back,
don’t turn away from me,
for the love of sharks.
You bite your bottom lip
and take bites out of me.
I am complete
by virtue of incompleteness
and by being trapped in you
I am paradoxically, entirely free.
Trust me? These are words,
let them do what they have to do,
and be what they have to be.
Take a step forward,
half a step back,
and watch the world split open
and the universe break its back.

Austin

Describe him he is in his mid-thirties
he is quite tall
American
he body-builds
he has strong arms
strong legs
a strong stomach
a powerful neck
he has a masculine head
close shaved hair
a stylized beard
an aquiline nose
high cheekbones
small puckered lips
ie, everything you
already know from
all the narcissistic men
on Instagram –

but there’s a difference:
there is a sadness to Austin

a deep pool
swimmer swims
in circles
in his dark brown eyes
a broodiness
which makes Austin irresistible
because on the one hand,

you want to be saved
by Austin, dear Helen

but on the other hand,
you want to
save Austin,

as well.

The future delusional in three drafts

Draft one:

Working title: The Year Of First Magical Weddings

One day I’ll look up and I’ll see you. You would’ve seen me first, but you’ll never tell me. I would’ve planned our wedding before you would’ve offered to buy me a drink. I’ll then devour you.
And we’ll live happily ever after.
Temporarily.

Draft two:

Working title: If in summer, a set of trees

You’ll be wearing green
overalls, like you just came in from a royal park, where you spent the day trimming the harsh bits off an elm or an oak, and I will notice the leaves and scraps of twigs all over your uniform, and not believe my luck. I spend my days with trees, but my nights are free, you might say, and I will feel like I am prettier than Ryan Gosling. We will alight the bus we found each other on together, and there will begin our love story, brief, complete, uncomfortable, boring, and finally over. It must have been love, we will both think
looking back at us, but it’s over now. It’s better to have loved and lost, even if it means you have to be a tree whilst you get over it.

Draft three:

Title: Heights

The taller the better.

 

On days as swaying, as these

On blustery days like these
the wind shakes the birds out of the trees.
On days as swaying, as these. I’ve

got sore knees,
from backup dancing for so many superstars for forty years.
Forty years of loneliness, forty years of tears. Forty

years of photobombing
every celebrity rich ass fuck,
I could never be. Destiny

is a wind that breaks me
out from inside the branches I hide,
where I lie, lying, most seasons. I want to

keep my lips on God’s kiss,
but you keep coming in these narrow and wide open rooms,
swinging your big long dick, like an elephant tusk.  You could

be a gentleman,
and you could take me out dancing instead,
leaping off window-sills, waltzing across the clouds. Or you

could be a jerk.
Evoking my contempt and my lust.
Funny how that works. In the

interval between romance and vulgarity,
a masterpiece of lover anonymity,
two men exchange essences, and never see each

other again. Now I am alone,
not trembling to the bone,
not bored, actually, though it is a

Monday. All my bruises
are in place, but they are small,
I take care

of myself. I am in what’s left of my room,
in an house exploded in world war two,
watching, from my fourth floor window,

all manner of birds,
soaring, in the wind. It makes me so happy
to just look at them, them and I, splitting infinity and infinitives.

On blustery days like these
the wind shakes the birds out of the trees.
On days as swaying, and wise, as these.

 

Electricity

If it was love, then
why was the world upside down,
why was Atlas drunk
why was the universe’s crown…

If it was love, then
why did it feel like despair
why did I wish
to tear out all my hair

whenever you were there
as opposed to not there?
Living together
with someone you love

can kill
love, like
a
gun

shot
to the shin,
that is not healed,
and the shot, is left,

to bleed dry. Living together
bled our love dry.
Ask me why
I write these poems.

Why I come back to the wounds.
To disinfect them, my old love, so old, so very, very old…

With electricity.

Magic Number

I am everything in your hands,
and when you kiss me,
I make sense,
I the dense,
I the faraway and the too
in your face.

This is dangerous.
I love love,
but your flesh was so warm,
it was so peacefully warm,
and when you kissed me,
I made sense.
Through my body
my body was freed

from all your shoulds
and my supposed tos.
I was all finger tips
and toes
and pulse
and power :
broken down
so I could examine
the parts,
the most important
of which
is the heart.

Don’t leave me now.
Don’t grieve me yet.
Let me stay a while,
with the two of you.
As in trees,
I fell in love
with a couple
and a couple
fell in love with me.
Three
is the magic number.
If we love love
let it change us
as it lets us change it
if we let ourselves
change love
in summer16.
You know what I mean.
Love’s serene tepidness
heated up,
maybe even boiled.

Climbing love

Once upon a time I was ivy
The seeds of ivy, even

Wishing to grow
Wishing to know

The wind in my leaves
And what it would be like

To see an elm or an oak
Face to face

But it occured to me
Still as seed

That I would need
Someone to grow on

Something to grow on
Grow on me, they’d say

And I’d do so, immediately
unabashedly, hopelessly romantically

hitching up my creeping stems
up their tapering surfaces

tree, house, rock,
as high up as possible

to glean
However with ease

and from one source only
The sun

I’d feed the birds my berries
and sing my ivy graces

Through my
wind-shaken sun-kissed

leaves
I’d be grateful through abundance

and beauty:
I’d be grateful through

an abundance of ivy beauty.

Dance with me

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? is one of those poignant, timeless questions that be effortlessly amended to be applied to the everyday in an attempt to understand the forces within it, for example, What happens when an unstoppable Mediterranean force meets a cold Northern European object?

Marriage of opposites?

Storm in a tea cup?

Billet-doux?

A face that launched a thousand ships?

A crime of passion?

The urge to turn the sparkling blue river of content into an opal ring for your finger is also irresistible, so as to provide for you, the reader, the romanced, a pool of solace, for those time frames amalgamated by respite.

As for the one I love?

The pain in my chest pains me, but his devastates me.

The tears in my eyes sting them, but his kill me.

I want the sadness to stop. But I am afraid that to achieve this would be to unhinge ourselves from history.

I want us to be maudlin.

And then I want us to be happy.

I want the flowing to cease. But I fear that if the flowing does cease the seas will dry, the light of the sun and the moon will wane, and everything and everyone we have ever seen or dared to love will disappear.

We need this pain.

We need these tears.

But if we were, you and I, to embrace, to wrap our arms around each other? If you were to step back, and ask me to dance? I would do anything for a moment like so, in which your hand is in mine and you are lifting my hand and you are saying, Christos, relax. I am not immovable. You move me. You are not unstoppable.

I’ve got you.

Relax, and just dance with me.

You smell of the future.

Your skin is so luminous.

Your ruby lips make me cry.