Happy Early Valentine's Day

(Ladies, I want to hear you chime in and tell me if these poems would help you reconsider a love in peril. This is a poem sequence that I've entitled Diary of a Heartbreak that I'm going to present to my SO on Valentine's Day. She recently complained that I don't write poems anymore. So these are the first ones I've written in going on 13 years. I guess I still have a few of the moves. All the same, I want the feminine perspective on this sequence in process.)

Valentine Villanelle
Your arm evades me when you slumber deep.
Once, through your slumber, you had sought me still.
Now, you don’t hold me tightly in your sleep.

Love once had slept between us in a heap.
I miss that more than poetry can tell.
Your arm evades me when you slumber deep.

These evenings, there’s a chasm wide and deep
That love or poetry can’t hope to fill.
Now, you don’t hold me tightly in your sleep.

Quit poetry? The poetry had seeped,
A broken poet with an empty quill.
Your arm evades me when you slumber deep.

Palimpsest of your ideal me, I weep.
I cannot be that man for good or ill.
Now, you don’t hold me tightly in your sleep.

We’d miss eachother even in our sleep
And find eachother as through force of will.
Your arm evades me when you slumber deep.
Now, you don’t hold me tightly in your sleep.

---

Couplet Sonnet For a Troubled Couple

“You live alone”, the misinformed would say,
But one is not alone if loved each day
Without condition by one whose love burns
So hot and white for little in return.
But, Jesus help me, I can’t fight for two.
Especially if half the war’s with you.
You say to live alone’s your greatest fear.
My own? To live without you for a year,
A month, a week, a day or just a chime
Of a clock. There was once upon a time
We would defend each other to the death,
Each inhalation of ours a shared breath.
Our life these days is not worth fighting for.
But what we had once is worth waging war.

---

Chekov’s Gun
“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” – Anton Chekov in a letter, 1889

Like Chekov’s gun, fat trouble sat
Above our heads within its rack.
A bullet needed to be jacked
And shot before the final act.
There’s not much one can do with that!

My literary pedigree
Compels me to agree away.
This ain’t a novel or a play.
Our love is now the hunted prey,
My love of you, your love of me.

Now that damned gun’s been taken down
And sits within your pretty hands
And threatening to kill my plans.
So what if Chekov now demands
You use it like a verb or noun?

This ain’t a novel or a play.
Just ‘cause we’re born with cancer cells
Does that mean we should not stay well?
Forget the bullet and the shell.
Our love is now the hunted prey.