No Trouble to Me

Of course in a lifetime of warm summers

a few forgotten burns will faze your skin.

Of course in our giggly kitchen waltzes

our feet may tangle and bring the sway’s end.

But listen with a tender ear, lover,

for the whispers after we’ve found dreamscape.

There within might be the soft murmurs

Of a love song hummed for you.

Of course I would hurt you;

Of course you would hurt me.

It is the law of entanglement.

To invest the rhythm of my heart in yours

means accepting the risk of arrhythmia.

To become the air cavorting in our lungs

means accepting the risk of asphyxiation.

Of course my breath escapes me in my listlessness,

which lulls your tumbling mind in the depths of our eves.

And once your eyelids cease their fluttering to and fro,

I will pour the ramblings into some unfeeling pages, so

Perhaps the sheer white will swallow my pen’s ink

and make sense of the colours with which I think.

Of course the words will twist and fall over

each other’s feet, performing a raucous tango

that only I might decipher. But peer closer, lover.

There might be half a love song in there for you.

Of course I still have your blood on my hands,

And of course I will scrub away the warm wine

Before I try again to mend the cage of my ribs over

the two-step cadence of my heart which harbours

the tempo to which we slow-dance in your parlour.

Of course my hands are stained that cherry wash,

Either wine spilt over glass rims in mirthful waltz,

Or the runoff from when we shoulder off the ego

to bare our beating hearts to dance our amoroso.

But of all the ways to breathe life and bleed,

You are by far my favourite conductor to heed.