No one should ask the other,

what were you thinking?

No one, that is,

who doesn't want to hear about the past

and its inhabitants,

or the strange loneliness of the present.

--After Making Love, Stephen Dunn

No

between the horses of love and lust
we are trampled underfoot
--so cruel, U2

There is some kiss we want with our whole lives,
the touch of spirit on the body.
Rumi

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it. And once they're done, they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever...

--Eugene O' Neil, Long Day's Journey Into Night

hurt leaves

O sky you have been

made a canvas for them

who unfurl their flags atop
their castles and plant their
gardens of many

colors though not for the

joy but for the victory

over their conquered
territory.

look, this is love

age was once when

we were not afraid

to look down from

teetering high or

on the brink of the end

or the beginning, stop
or start, what the hell

anything would do

and we were not afraid

to stare down

barbed wire consequences

of cutting through

unassaulted by experience

swimming naked in the ocean of

what we thought we knew

but that's a shadow

from a sun long

set now the evening's

hunger has laid

the table and the worry

thirst is enough

to keep some of

us bolted to the well.

Solve for Ex
to find the distance between here and you
calculate without logic the number we
said we would remember if we divided the
secrets we shared without telling, by the hurts
no number of apologies will undo.