What Love Means

oh man, i need to stop posting these poems post-midnight. there's just so much work to catch up on >_<

What love means

sometimes i find that i forget
what love means and, regardless
of what the linguists would have you believe,
Miriam-Webster is not the last word on everything.
I want to find the etymology of skipped
heartbeats, to lead archaeology teams as they
excavate the chasms of my chest, dissect
the surge-electric sent by stolen kisses.
I want to take the metric measure of
the musculature surrounding sorrow,
to know why it is easier to smile
than to cry.
I have been born a poem, whose
lines are inscribed in a language
I never learned, where time is
translated roughly into sandpaper skin.
I need a candid cartographer to
map me the message articulated
in my arteries.

sometimes, i forget what love means,
though there are songs that remind me,
and they are golden oldies, reminiscent
of the '60s, but by the time that I was 16
I had already lost my virginity to a
facsimile of affection;
forty years too late to love properly,
and not awkwardly,
to not be property.
I need a guidebook for generosity,
an outline of the boundary between
giving blindly, and being taken for a fool.
there is no scholarship or special school
to study my senses in how to turn
past tenses into life lessons.

sometimes, I forget what love means,
but I remember its smells and sounds,
tracks trembling under train cars and
the fragrance of a fresh-cut frisbee field.
you won't find feelings like these
in the dictionary, so I dig them up
from the cemetery, at midnight,
under the moon.
with dirt under my nails, I redefine them,
and the resurrection reminds me
what love means.