The Big Orange Love

Let's sing our favorite orange song,
The one that plays in dreams
Of sand and tides and sunfast
Sheets before the day goes brown.

You'll meet me if I want you to.
Low buzzing and resonant chimes,
Infatuated with such a
Transient hum.

Cursory darkness, then orange
Again. You carry me with big hands.
Boardwalk, warm togetherness and
The blue below, abiding in rage.

Its cool breath is pulling me in,
Out of your love, towards
The end of our song, but
You keep on smiling.

You smile into the dark,
When I fall and splash
Blue and black and sink
Into the crying deep.

But you're still there, smiling
And waiting and humming in
Orange and yellow. You know
I always come back.

I saw you turn red from me.

As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw
you turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, somehow had
wildest childhood over my heart.

Rilke, Uncollected Poems, p. 13

Stop smiling. Your face will get stuck, and you'll be sorry when your world turns to shit.

Resent

At once you seem perfect and flawless and contrary to every worldly thing, but you make wind feel like fire, surrounding and burning but never consuming. I'm wretched and fallen and lay melting at your feet, suffocating and reaching for your hand. Eventually I dissolve into the dirt beneath me and decay with the others fortunate enough to have lived this long. I wonder when you'll die, how and why. I think we'll share a fate of endless gloom and self-loathing. Hope is a trick of the devil.