Shall I Compare You

This new sonnet riffs off Shakespeare’s 18th:

…for all those whose love is so fresh and strong it can seem unreal, here’s a sonnet for each and every one of us – Happy New Year!

Shall I compare thee you to a summer’s day… something you’re not?—

To me, you are living poetry

(Not some wordy simulation that can’t be)

And you’re the very essence of what’s hot—

Though similes like darling buds may grow

The sense of us, approximating us,

You’re as unique, incomparable

As our love will always be—deep, unfathomable:

And aren’t all of us much more than sensually defined

Both as couples, and as twinned lone souls (sometimes of one mind)?

Then, in the lives to come, more darling buds shall grow

To blossom free, just like the two of us:

Our loves as indescribable as real

(Although this near perfection sometimes seems unreal).

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

January 2021

when we make love a billion cells break free (villanelle)

when we make love a billion cells break free

our bodies flowing fluid like disgendered

creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously

*

although we’re only human too and so quite ordinary

we spiral into plasmic dust as spores sprinkling our eggshell world

while making love a billion cells break free

*

in some identities we hardly see

among us – beside, within, beyond us – enraptured,

creatures of great beauty rising upward gloriously

*

like stars that gleam and glow in space and transiency

like birds in deep still forest undergrowth unheard

love is made perpetually so billions of our cells break free

*

our love in life is that which lets us be

ourselves in an intensity of moments scattered

creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously

*

we find new freedoms freeform ecstasy

now top and out of mind and sight no need for thought nor any word

when we make love a billion cells break free

like creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously

*

**

*

griffith park

LA

st valentine’s eve – anna and floris: 1270

at dusk she kisses him

mushymouthed and clinging breathless breast

to breast their smooth commingling

hard then fluid tender melting

*
cool hot creamy sex when two

so made so shaped for one another

couple up as one in one

*
dissolving her in him in her like milk in tea

and in the pearl-pale moisture bleeding from those honeyed lips

and in the sweet salt sweat of thighs and loins

*
she cries he too

for in that kindling consummate moment

they come consumed to be together

*
all thought given up

yesterday today no more tomorrow

she wonders how such mindless mindfulness surrenders

*

she wonders is that it then when valentine dawns

*
when is tomorrow then

when I and you become us

and she conceives as day in night is born

and fused and found forever lost that moment

*
when together now

we come as close as one can be to one

then is tomorrow and tomorrow’s past

*
Omm 

valentine’s eve into day 2018

winter solstice: christmas blessing – five haiku

this winter solstice

as I love you, love me –

our Christmas blessing:

*
living loving both –

 if life means anything

let our thing be love.

*
longest, darkest night,

while Wodan hunts with ghosts all yearning

through skies of glowing spirits

*
may that night purge us all

those ghosts be at peace, in love

again with living

*

in shadowlands of love:

as I love you, love me

this winter solstice.

*

Omm

winter solstice 2017

la muse et la petite mort – a sonnet

la muse et la petite mort

 

i sometimes wish I didn’t love you yet

so much that I do I do for you but

nothing ever works for us both, and words mistook cut

us up and out of our connection, when we let them.
*
i always love the way you never get

stuck on stuff – some folk would fall into a rut

when hard and heavy tribulations put

their lives on hold – thoughts mired like fish in a net.
*
but you, you seem to blithely slip

through that wide open ocean of freedom

from all the drifting flotsam pains you ever met
*
setting sail on a climactic far-out trip

through wine-dark heavens, where you and all our friends can come –

loving, yet somehow wishing we didn’t love you, yet…
*

       April 2017

love became a lonely land: autumnal haiku chain

leaves on loam

leaves like love let go

spiral down to snoozing earth,

dark, russet-brown loam.

*

when fall took those leaves

love became a lonely land—

warmth withdrawn, wan sun’s

*

waning light bled slow

blind trails of mud and sodden

footsteps veined with ice

*

wan sun's waning light bled slow blind trails

where ghosts shadowed past,

skulked all through that leafless land

to haunt our autumns…

*

stark, unfelled, strange-boughed—

love’s remains in lonely land:

bare old beeches, clumped,

*

storm-ridden and gaunt,

sheltering our homeless hearts,

winterblown—like us,

*

love’s a vagabond

wandering to a nameless place

of endless leaving—

*

on tracks untravelled

from fall to spring, we will see

leaves, let go, return.

leaves, let go, return

leaves, let go, return

___________________________________________________________________________________

 – I originally wrote this haiku chain on Twitter — a bad habit of mine — poetry on Twitter being so hit and miss, nobody’s looking for it — but I find it a good place maybe for knocking out a first draft.

– When I’d written it I thought Love is a lonely land was a new phrase but then I checked and I saw I had actually lifted it (subconsciously…) from an old, sweet song.

–  This was Billie Holiday’s beautiful, mournful Deep Song (by Cory and Cross), which includes the line:

Love lives in a lonely land

and ends:

Love is a barren land, a lonely land/A lonely land.

–  That’s a song I must have listened to more than a couple dozen times since childhood (my parents also loved Billie Holiday).

– At any rate, my haiku chain has ended up as a sort of retort — a positive echo if you like — to the somewhat bleak sentiments of Deep Song

– So thanks to Billie, Cory and Cross!

– And here’s their song in all its glory:

Billie Holiday: Deep Song