MAN WITH A DOG

I ran into this man everywhere for years, Only our eyes ever connected.

A love story

Of sorts. Of a sort on the edge of the just beyond.

At a fork on a pebbled road between

mountain and sea. At the end of a pier,

curled toes over worn woody edge.

All the unsaid. And the volumes spoken in silence

between the one glance and the next.

Today? A year from now? The mystery

of least expected, ah the randomness of being,

of sharing space, breathing the air

where one has passed one temporarily.

And the uncertainty so fuelled by

all of the unknowing, of the never ever

and the maybe wanting,

of the almost needing, just.

Just managing to look past and beyond

the obvious. Point where

there is no sure safe fail return.

No true love story that's for sure.

But a story still, continuum of being in suspension

in-between happen stance/pure certainty.

The threshold from within, without,

and the surrendering to infrequent continuity.

Time passes, colours change and

this story remains, re-writing memory

in patterns random, so, so breathtaking.

Strangeness of strangers meeting fleetingly,

tossing and catching thoughts in passing

amid the chaos of a carefully divided living.

Mostly, a wish for never stopping.

No serial and mundane conversations, no flesh

on flesh creation of reality.

No need and fear and greed, dishonesty, no loss

transferred through ink and

tears, no scrunched up papers tossed

in landfill. Worse still, recycled,

bleached of emotion and of memory,

tragically wiping some miss-managed fat arse, no!

This is a love story. Love is ethereal.

Reviews

[Stefano Segnan]

Salute to you! Well, since it is a poem related to the story I've been reading I had add this to my mental storyline.

On a side note: if I remember correctly you asked me if I considered your poems to be free verse? Well, I read a couple and yes, they're definitely free verse for me. There is some rare element that might indicate a poetic flow but predominantly, it's absent. Even if I try to turn it into prose-poetry, your style resembles more rhetoric mastery rather than poetic flow.

I came not, however, to tell you how to write poetry (you can simply ignore my maundering on how poetry or prose-poetry should be), I came for the relation this poem has with the story Love Unspoken. Now I feel I have a more complete picture of the whole story.

[Elise Anton]

Ah, you read it! In a way it is helpful yes because you get a sense of where I was at, during the story. Pray what is rhetoric mastery? And is it a good thing, she asks, shaking her 3.47am head and wondering why she never bothered to discover technicalities... You are educating me and I like that :)