Every kiss is a crown

Every kiss is a crown.

Our love is so absolute

it creates a world of its own

where it can dwell, unconstrained.

It summons wishes to walk, step forth, speak up

emerging from the quick and core of our sleeping selves

where we dream love's joyful edicts and decrees

far beyond the perverse contradictions of odious day

where sundry sullen selves assemble to be overthrown in quotidian toil.

A half-moon raises its bright goblet high in my dream,

and tips its silver toast to our love with its light,

above the waters where I dive deep to retrieve a heart of coral,

whose bright sprues and bifurcations radiate like arteries, 

and surface to offer aloft fists full of pearls to soothe the insult of the touch

of my straining fingertips upon the star-strewn skin of night;

above the mountains whose tests and trials I seek out,

in whose halls I hew and heave agate, quartz and amethyst,

and the pits where I strike citrine and cassiterite from the rock’s tight grip;

above the torrents from whose gravel I pluck spinels, garnets and corundum;

and finally above the high wide open empty deserts far away

whose brink  the moon has swept dry with broad curtains of pallor,

where I wander at last, to retrieve peridot and diamond

from the distant ruins of fallen stars, to form the pale gleaming limbs,

swift red blood, stiff straight sinew and smooth marbled marrow

of the polished living throne I make of myself for you, in my dream,

far from the dreamless, broken, hollow, crowded coma-boned streets

and twisted stricken straits of town.

Each kiss is a crown,

and makes me king of the sunset, and you queen of the dawn,

and the hours in your arms, in between these twin twilit stations of the night,

conceal a realm more infinite than any day can reveal.