Prisoner of the Past

Smart and tasting tart, Each bead of sweat that trickled down your spine, Salt droplets upon the tongue Reminding of times that were both yours and mine, The moistened lock of lips, Rapaciously a kiss long lingered on your mouth, We stood in enraptured embrace On pine-board floors of a house that faced towards the south, And in the silken robes Of the nights that sanctioned twilight suns to sink, Sparkling chandeliers danced aflame In depths of cold dry wine we as lovers drink, Now remembered like old embers Sweet bites of trysts and times no more remain, I wonder if like me you make Instinctive wish to steal them back again. Like echoes in a vertiginous well The dissolving ghosts of words that seemed to say it all, Upon a distant street A phantasmal passion play when sympathetic night would fall, The plaintive weep, encroaching sleep Upon the lavender eyes that never sought to cry, Focused on the nucleus Of sensual sacred love that wouldn’t ever die, Unheralded even now, Memorial splinters of pain for times when we would part, Reflective slivers of arousal Stab and score the secret pleasures of the famished heart, Then the abstract manifesto Of erotic times beneath the ashen harvest moon, Now remain but a prisoner of the past Of lost loves and lost worlds that fell to dust so soon.