A symptom is she

Close my eyes and try to sleep but yawns become sighs

wondering if my secret was exposed when she looked at me with those
tap running eyes, a water like glance. Tried to hold it; slipped out my hands.

But for ever in this mind it’s framed with either ignorance or faith to be blamed

Caught off guard when we first met, and I jumped to visions of the future

crash landing in regret of the past for not truly making most of the present

as it was back then.

Dressed in black as if she was at the funeral of my dreams.

All doors were closed

until a smile unlocked a beam of light.

She tried to resist with a heart of some kind of metal

only to discover I was magnetised

but the sweat of my intense grip

let her slip.

.

Then, fortnightly frictions of five minute meetings

ignoring attraction, taking a beating

from this heart of mine

in this pantomime

Of monologues,

and echoes of fear I hear as applause.

 

 

She looked not once my way as I

half heartedly tried

to make her.

Thought in the imagination of another

I was safer.

 

Then that evening, out of politeness we sat together

and I got more than what I prayed for

that’s what I have my faith for.

But my heart spoke, not my mind, I had to escape

from her gentle intensity.

Someone to work with and talk to

not a body as a playground my passion

could walk through.

Made my excuses and left

before my faith fell victim to theft

Then from a distance that gaze I felt

and read each letter of every word it spelt

and put in on my reading list for another

time.

 

Protecting piety, my most foolish crime?

Two months later re-appeared the list

by then illiterate was I

And no books on the shelf again, why?

I’ll do anything to avoid feeling this way again

even if I have to take the devil as my best friend.

 

 

Only through her memory is how I now see the world

her thick brown hair like calligraphic swirls

opening paradise with her smile of flying doves

in congregation.

 

 

As the memory fades I plunge too deep into self…

 

 

Just need something or someone to call my own

Like a mortgage on a house, I’m just a( )lo(a)ne

In a holocaust of idleness I’ve killed too much time

And now, sentenced is my mind

To imprisonment within four cold walls

Where I fall asleep to the sound of wake up calls.