My palms feeling sweaty,
An escalating heat fills the room,
Heart palpitations increasing,
Not knowing what I should do,
My pulse starts to race,
Mouth agape from which no words emanate,
Foot twitches rapidly,
Stuttering when I begin to speak,
Paranoid of her discomfort,
Fearful that it’s too soon,
Worried about rejection,
Not knowing what I should do,
Wishing for a magical connection,
A mutual telepathic moment,
As our heads turn toward one another,
And our lips simultaneously converge,
And I've kissed another guy since I lost you
And it made me wonder
If you kissed me again
Would you taste him too?
A pretty girl tried to kiss me on New Years Eve,
I recoiled in pain and disgust,
my smile she did misperceive,
as an invite for spontaneous lust.
She told herself I must be taken,
or gay or something like that,
she couldn’t have been more mistaken,
I just don’t engage in emotional chit-chat.
My deadness is easy to sense and see,
there must be someone who can wake what’s inside,
my world is full of chaff and debris,
until they appear I will live as if I have died.
A touch has a memory.
A voice trigger old feelings.
Meeting again is like inevitable kiss.
Forgetting is a lie; Ignorance is the bliss.
Let us go far away from buttered toast,
And tea, and marmalade, and all of it.
The feathered jostling of their hats, the wit
Unhumorous — I can not bear this host
Of warm, sweet women! Everything offends.
The murmurous movement of each gleaming bead,
Sly laughter on soft lips that do not feed
So much on tea as on their absent friends.
I knew you understood because your eyes
Were beckoning across the crowd to me.
Oh Child, who have so strangely learned to be
Unconsciously, mysteriously wise!
We went away, unnoticed, from the room
Into the drip of slow, autumnal rain.
And laughed, and drew deep breath, and laughed again,
We were so glad to leave that candled gloom.
We were so fearful lest we give too much
And thereby wrench the sweetness from the song,
Trembled to look too deep or kiss too long,
And stood aloof when we yearned most to touch.
Oh had we been content, less passionate
For Love's eternity we had not lost
The least of Love's eternal hours, whose cost
We never dreamed until it was too late.
So was life stripped of even memories
To meet that time when we had no desire,
That day we looked and turned away shamed eyes,
Seeing but ashes where had once been fire.
No splendid shadows of a well-lost heaven,
But tearful ghosts of kisses never given.
I kissed a kiss in youth
Upon a dead man’s brow;
And that was long ago,--
And I’m a grown man now.
It’s lain there in the dust,
Thirty years and more;--
My lips that set a light
At a dead man’s door.
The far moon maketh lovers wise
In her pale beauty trembling down,
Lending curved cheeks, dark lips, dark eyes,
A strangeness not their own.
And, though they shut their lids to kiss,
In starless darkness peace to win,
Even on that secret world from this
Her twilight enters in.
Would I could cast a sail on the water
Where many a king has gone
And many a king's daughter,
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,
And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
I would find by the edge of that water
The collar-bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.
STREPHON kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Strephon's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day.
The darkened street was muffled with the snow,
The falling flakes had made your shoulders white,
And when we found a shelter from the night
Its glamor fell upon us like a blow.
The clash of dishes and the viol and bow
Mingled beneath the fever of the light.
The heat was full of savors, and the bright
Laughter of women lured the wine to flow.
A little child ate nothing while she sat
Watching a woman at a table there
Lean to a kiss beneath a drooping hat.
The hour went by, we rose and turned to go,
The somber street received us from the glare,
And once more on your shoulders fell the snow.
Brown-thrush singing all day long
In the leaves above me,
Take my love this April song,
"Love me, love me, love me!"
When he harkens what you say,
Bid him, lest he miss me,
Leave his work or leave his play,
And kiss me, kiss me, kiss me!