“‘Well,” said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think.  Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”  ~A.A. Milne

In the ghost of the gallows,
where cars squeal and necks snap

he stood staring, sweating,
thinking.
About the human heart and humidity.
About the stench of paranoia and pot.
About the past, like a two-year old ogling
calculus equations, he flirted with solutions.

He had fallen in love four months ago.
He thought about metaphors and the magic of it –
about silly heat and embers,
the blossom of bursting flames –
about how they fulfill the heart and mind.

And how they fail the heart and mind.

He thought about organs, about
blood-pumping aches and migraines,
about melatonin and serotonin and synapses,
electricity and everything that functions mechanically.

The heart can be warmed,
certainly.
Poets have told us.
But can it be baked and burned?
Can love too scorch the sides of the human spirit?

He sneezed and on his knuckle,
stared at the residue of being human.
He couldn’t correlate these two worlds.
The biological booger-stain and the metaphysical chest-pain
of breaking hearts.

He thought about being stuck. And trust.
About how we’re lodged inside ourselves, our
entire unity sinking in the sand of linguistic epistemology.

And said to himself,

“We cannot carry another’s weight,
know their balance, their baggage,
their fluid and lucid feelings.

Their past is a bedtime story.
Their hopes, wants, desires –
post-coitus pillow-talk.

We’re stuffed inside ourselves,
reaching out like perpetual progeny for the
breast of a better world.“

And he thought about her.

Her raucous smile, her cold hands,
her daring heart.
And despite the distance of metaphors and magic,
despite the distance of sneezed organisms and the
distance of simmering enthusiasms,
he thought about a kind of transcendent love,
the kind one commits to,
when the words mean what they should mean,
when sickness and health and ugliness and unhappiness refuse
to separate for the benefit of cells.

And staring at the Place d’Espanya
in sweat and thought,

he cried and vowed.

This place where lives hang.

Copyright © 2011 Christopher Yeates

Somehow the poison of perturbed winds,
carrying the sad and elusive rains of summer,

brings her also from a foreign land,

a typhoon of beauty, disheveled
she stands
at a weary doorstep,
vices in hand,
and in a bright drenched dripping red

dress asks
for a dance.

The sweet stench of the Great Salt Lake decaying,
stinking with each drop pummeling, an angry God playing,
pounding at vaporous piano keys without patience,
Rachmaninoff on your roof; you
take her in your arms and begin burying

all the half-forgotten lies and quasi-romantic crimes,
the love that burns and stings and itches and bites,
and the hope
that tingles and tickles, that slithers and strives,
throwing you three-months later

down an airport corridor,
carrying the happy and shameless heat of summer,

that takes her to a foreign land.

In the brink of goodbyes – you’re sweating,
she cries
at the distance,
the surprise,
the crescendo of the dedicated and the damned, one

true love
weathering.

Copyright © 2011 Christopher Yeates

The taxi mistook them for time travelers,
the driver babbling on about beginnings
and ends, and Africa and AIDS,
proteins, publications, and patronization.

It was the first time they had traveled
together,

each pretending to be as honest as possible,
muddles of ardor and anxiety shattering
their slick veneers of autonomy –
thin shards of what the self was, what
the self might be
glittering noisily, clamoring quietly
in an empty parking garage, lost
in the vapid air of distant car alarms and drunken
Vegas mistakes.

“You look happy,” he had said.
And pontificated more about Sarah Palin,
prejudice, power, and prostitution.

And later they lay in bed together,
laughing and curling over one another
about the strangeness of his sentience,
kissing and falling apart
as one,

raindrops lost in a waterfall
found in the froth of the torrent.

New love,

fused and confused,
splintered and shattered and sinking
as it should be.

Copyright © 2011 Christopher Yeates