Love

you always ran too fast for me to catch up

You know I'm no athlete

But I've got a heart of steel.

Love,

You kept jerking away from me like

Autumn leaves swept out of my grasp

By a cruel spring wind.

Love

You were always out of reach

Like words whispered beneath the hum of midday traffic. You never made haste,

Yet you reminded me, all the same,

of the time I was wasting.

Till one day,

We played chess.

One day,

You sat,

Still as a church mouse

Your eyes half-hidden by

Half moons of alert light

One day

As the rain formed a warm cocoon around us

We shared a cup of coffee

And you stopped running

Love, love, love,

My heart has beat those words

For days, weeks, months in my ears,

Love, love, love,

Like tribal drums

I just wanted to say those words,

That even now,

Stop the earth in its tracks,

The sun in its orbit

Shocking the planets into meek submission.

Love

I want to shout it,

Yell it,

Scream it,

So that it reverberates in the cosmos

And the stars may hear my cry and give me a moment of their brilliance

Even snatching the dust from a comet's trail to crystallize this moment

As we linger here in this beautiful limbo,

I want you to know.

Words are God's gift to the reticent tongue.

And my words,

This stammering, painful poem,

Is my gift to you.