Legends of the night

The night stealthily
Comes with shodden feet,
Trailing her dark curls behind,
She is my love,
She hides my heart in her bosom,
Her curls descend in my eyes,
And then she tells me stories.

Stories of love and betrayal,
Love that persists
Like the lone flower
That grows anywhere,
In the unlikeliest of places,
And needs neither water, nor manure
To blossom.
Betrayal like the coiled serpant,
That hides in the all-concealing
Darkness of the heart,
The greater the love, bigger the betrayal.

The night talks of hope,
That rises and ebbs,
And disappears sometimes
Like the small stream in desert-sand,
She sings of dreams,
Broken with the first light
Of a harsh morning,
Only to be dreamt again,
And yet again.

My love whispers poetry in my ears,
Of love and longing,
Dreams and hopes,
Trust and betrayal,
Small rememberances
And eternal forgetfulness.

I'm now weary of her stories.
I'll ask her tonight
To tell me other tales,
Stories not given words by poets,
Buried in the womb of this world.

Songs of painted faces
In shadowy street corners,
Of tired limbs and empty hearts,
Hungry songs of roofless children
Sleeping with feet pressed to the belly
To assuage the empty ache within,
Homeless melodies where sleep
Is a fugitive from hunger,
Stories of deprivation,
Of lives with a thousand small deaths,
From one day to the next,
Stories of unhealed wounds,
Festering sores; raw and red,
Like the pus-filled public parts
Of an aged whore.

I shall ask the night tonight,
To sing of a time
When the wounds will burst,
And the oozing pus paint her beautiful face
I will scream at my love tonight-
Its not only love and loss that are poetic,
Even revolutions are.