TWO POEMS BY CAMERON MCHENRY

How do you love someone safely?

How do you pretend as though 
the language you spoke to one another
has been forgotten.
That the native tongue of moans and salt
and the pressure of eternity have been abandoned
in the domestication of my pulse 
when you touch me like a stranger?

How do I simply embrace a man
whose flesh was an altar 
where I inhaled the sacred scent of a miracle:

      our love,

      a groaning hallelujah in the morning,
      and a sexy opening
      into Nirvana throughout the night.

      I held you as comfortably as I hold my womb inside me,
      knowing that both could grow and give birth to
      the bare human touch
      that translates the vision of the Almighty
      into something as understandably sweet as a kiss.

      I remember the taste of you so well
      I can recall the visions of divinity 
      that befell me those years
      we made up a language so pure
      words weren't even invited into our conversations
      unless they brought with them poems and music,
      lust, and the eternal exhale.

I can feel you leaving me,
shelving our language 
in between whole volumes of nonsense
held in a book case so tall,
I would have to climb a lifetime
just to be haunted.

I stand before the eyes of a ghost.
whose skin smells of a thousand nights of sacred movement,
whose body is shaped by the way it fit inside of mine,
whose hands cradled my limbs like abandoned children
brought home to the caress,
of wholeness.

You were the one,
the only one,
the old face I saw in the sea,
the dawn's tender belly rubbed violet,
and the midnight mystic casting spells of stars
into the open wide

of your eyes, love, 
into your own delicate pupils, love.
I saw them whizzing and tearing off 
into the never ending space that is your soul.
Perhaps, I was just one of them.
Just a whizzing sensation of light
set free to burn and speed across unknown space 
and time, simply allowed to fly, to feel, to be so close to you
that my very existence caused you to stumble, 
whooping at the magnificent trails I left lingering behind.

What made you stop following love?

When did the fire show stop being enough?

At what moment did you stop looking up to find me,
and instead close your eyes
to slowly pluck me from your skies?

I don't know how to just be human, love.
small talk is a foreign language,
with you, I only comprehend magic.

Why do you look at me 
with the same stale eyes
that you do them?

Where are the fire crackers
and the shooting stars?

How did the universe between us 
suddenly shrink into a stage 
where we rehearse all the appropriate lines?

Why did you accept the script?
Why am I following it?

Where is our language?
What about all the stars, 
and the erotic belly of dawn?

This is a relentless winter with no lightening.

This is the slumber of day without sun.

This is the drooping night,
overcast and brooding.

This is language without meaning.

This is
loving
safely.
_____________________________________

Losing Contact With Alien Translations

Fiercely independent and frighteningly alone
the girl awakes in the morning with death on her mind.

She is content to feel nothing 
and stare out the window for hours,
until only loneliness greets her in vision 
and the city outside becomes nothing more than a mirror
reflecting an image of life from somebody else's mind.

She contemplates all the spasms
she has buried inside the bodies of boys
who loved to hear her moan like she did
when she was plunging into creation.

Creating a masterpiece of red-blotchy coitus notation
from her thighs to her neck 
which erupted into the explosion of ravaged hair
tangling like ivy around tongues 
that stopped for nothing
but the scream
of moans

sounding off from inside lovers
like the dead trying to speak. 

It is no language, but an awakening.
And our bodies all contorted, rubbed red and tangled,
seem like alien translations
seeping out through flesh 
joined together
for life
itself.

This is the greatest Art,
constantly mutating inside her.
It is the force that knows no rules
and a language composed by a love of breathing.

She knows she is alone today,
for the dead do not speak
and the living
are merely a mirror reflecting her own absent creation,
as if everything outside her window
is someone else's distant idea,
as if she were stuck out of context in a rugged story
that is not her own.

She closes her eyes
and reaches inside for the penetration 
of all of those who have shared in her,
but the dead are not speaking.

She concentrates on her breathing
and tries to escape into the shaking rhythm 
of her spasms still quaking 
inside the bellies of those she has shared in,
but the dead are not speaking.

She opens her eyes 
and scours the city for her place
in the story,
but the living are not speaking.

She forgets her breathing 
and tries to slip into the air,
become someone else's story,
but the living are not speaking.

Everything is reflecting.
She is drooping somewhere between the image
and the reflection of the image,
the dead
and the living reflection of death.

She remembers what it felt like to be the creator,
the tunnel where translations hid
until they were forced out 
through moans of contact,
red finger prints on flesh
and tangled hair 
and limbs
decoding the force
that makes us want to breathe
forever.

However, 
she awakes into silence,
fiercely independent imitations
surrounding her into loneliness,
not even death on her mind anymore,
just dullness,
worthy of no reflection 
and no sound,
completely formless,
inventing nothing,
imagination's deconstruction,
tumble 
fall
into artlessness
the end 

Copyright Cameron McHenry