I want to see your face under the moonlight,
I want to see you in the last rays of the sun,
I want to see you first thing in the morning,
When the rain pours and the snow falls.
I want to see you in your happiest moments and your saddest hours.
I want to see the way your face lights up when you talk about something you love,
I want to see the way you look at me when I turn away,
The face you make when you're concentrating or thinking.
I crave the simplicity of your raw human emotion and the bitter complexities of it.
Let me feel how you embrace those you love,
How you hold someone's hand or wipe away their tears.
Let me see everything that you are and everything that you want to be.
What good are my eyes,
if I can’t see your face.
When you enter a room,
my pulse picks up pace.
That’s me crawling,
under your skin.
One word at a time,
searching for sin.
Together we’ll make it,
all the way to the top.
I just can’t help myself,
please don’t ask me to stop.
When I talk with other men
I always think of you--
Your words are keener than their words,
And they are gentler, too.
When I look at other men,
I wish your face were there,
With its gray eyes and dark skin
And tossed black hair.
When I think of other men,
Dreaming alone by day,
The thought of you like a strong wind
Blows the dreams away.
People that I meet and pass
In the city's broken roar,
Faces that I lose so soon
And have never found before,
Do you know how much you tell
In the meeting of our eyes,
How ashamed I am, and sad
To have pierced your poor disguise?
Secrets rushing without sound
Crying from your hiding places--
Let me go, I cannot bear
The sorrow of the passing faces.
--People in the restless street,
Can it be, oh can it be
In the meeting of our eyes
That you know as much of me?
The pansy makes such weird grimaces,
And imitates all bestial faces —
But there's a thing it couldn't do,
And that is, make a face like you.
I'm sure I've never seen another.
And that you got it from your mother.
You have a morning-glory face
Whose edges are sensitive to light
And curl in beneath the burden of a smile.
Remembered silence returns to the morning-glory
And lattices its curves
With shades of golden reverberations.
Then the morning-glory’s heart careens to loves
Whose scent beats on the sky-walls of your soul.
The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The lips of one are twisted
To a hieroglyphic of silence.
The face of another is like a shining frog.
Another face is met by a question
That digs into it like sudden claws.
Beside it is a face like a mirror
In which a stiffened child dangles....
Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent,
Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence.
The ruins of your face were twined with youth.
Vines of starlight questioned your face when you smiled.
Your eyes dissolved over distances
And steeped the graves of many loves.
Night was kind to your body:
The careless vehemence of curves
Softened beneath your darkly-loosened dress.
And your heart toyed with an emotion
That left you vague hunger poised over death.
They have carved a battle
Across your hard face:
Transfigured conflict,
Lines like suspended lances.
Your voice must be the uneven
Clink of the last carver’s chisel.
Your soul must be a pious subterfuge
Squinting its admiring eyes
At the lifeless battle lining your face....
Middle aged vaudeville conductor,
With a hunted leanness on your body,
Sometimes the swing of your baton
Sways with a brooding patience
That violates your ended face.
Two acrobats appear,
With their automaton bows.
So we have a face
Cupped by tender insolences,
Half repenting insolences
Teasing their own angers.
Then, a tense exuberance
Brushes them away
And burns a humbly erect
Queen upon her face.
This happens in the space
Between a frown and indecision.
Her face becomes forlornly wild,
And a beggarly impatience
Hovers into furtive shame.
All the supplely intricate flame
Vanishes, and leaves no mark.
Her eyes are violently dark
Smiles are the words beyond the words
That thoughts abandon helplessly.
Upon this nervous shop-girl’s face,
Where clusters of tiny limpness meet,
A frightened spark leaps high and drops
Into the hot pause of a banished love.
A lustrelessly plump
Girl beside her does not know
That her face for moments glows
Into a helpless solitude.
Upon an old man’s face
Are gleams of meek embarrassment--
The faded presence of some old debt?
This woman’s face is scorched
By a torch that falls from weary hands
And makes her laugh an unheard lie.
Love me because I am lost;
Love me that I am undone.
That is brave, — no man has wished it.
Not one.
Be strong, to look on my heart
As others look on my face.
Love me, — I tell you that it is a ravaged
Terrible place.