We are as two ships passing in the night*
You look back and see me leaving as I
see you go, we reach to touch but are lost to
obscurity, mist and fog, buoys bobbing
Somewhere in the night we throw anchor,
mutiny on land legs, we take a side street, get
a room, number twenty-two, upstairs to the right,
three doors down.* Black as pitch, we fumble
for the light-switch, knock over the phone…
"Room Service?"… "no no sorry," … we
disconnect the world….strip off each other’s
clothes, trembling we kiss away the day’s
soot and grime in the shower, dry each other
with fluffy towels, sworn to silence now
we tumble into an oasis of cotton sheets -
pillows fly … We sing the body electric*
Outside the city sleeps, inside, issuing out
of the masthead of necessity and desire,
tipped in a showering of
white-gold sparks
is the blue violet
symmetry of
St. Elmo’s
fire
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Author Notes
* Free Verse Love Poem
* The phrase - ships that pass in the night - was coined by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882, a famous American poet and writer. This line comes from the love poem, The Theologian's Tale - in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn.
IV
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
* I Sing the Body Electric - 1855 Walt Whitman poem about love of his fellowman.
It is also named as episode 100 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. The 1962 script was written by Ray Bradbury, and became the basis for his 1969 short story of the same name.
Whitman wrote the first few lines of his poem -
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul,
* Three Doors Down - a Mississippi rock group made famous by their song - Kryptonite
the question it's asking. It's like - if I go crazy, will you still call me Superman?
* Image - St. Elmos Fire - a weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a corona discharge in ionized air - blue violet in color - harmless but beautiful.
* Please listen to Frank Zappa play his supreme guitar solo: Watermelon in Easter Hay on You Tube while/after reading this poem. Thank you for reading and listening.
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