request

[stitchesandlace.livejournal.com]

Hi :)

I'm looking for poems that deal with falling for someone when you know it can't work out, or poems about long distance relationships.

Not really looking for unrequited love, but poems that are kind of like a relationship that has everything stacked against it from the get go, especially distance.

Thanks so much!

Comments

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Love rode 1500 miles on a grey
hound bus & climbed in my window
one night to surprise
both of us.
the pleasure of that sleepy
shock has lasted a decade
now or more because she is
always still doing it and I am
always still pleased. I do indeed like
aggressive women
who come half a continent
just for me; I am not saying that patience
is virtuous, Love
like anybody else, comes to those who
wait actively
and leave their windows open.

Judy Grahn

KHaled Mattawa - Lovers: (Jaafar the Winged)

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Lovers: (Jaafar the Winged)
Khaled Mattawa

Heroic acts are their own rewards, otherwise
why do them? Now the huris come and go.
You can ask them for whatever you want here,
a girl who never loved you, a whore in Khyber
you'd heard about, but your faith denied.

Years later when she came before the prophet
declaring her allegiance, you could not stop
your erection. Those Ethiopian beauties
of the Najashi harem. Boys of all ages,
I had had enough of them when I asked for my first wife

whom they'd had to drag from some deep pit
in Jehenem. The angel said I can have her here,
and she'd still burn there at the same time.
It was like the old days between us, but I wasn't sure
it was her. She was charmed by my wings.

"It's true what they said about you then,"
she chuckled, having found something else
to laugh at me for. I told her my version of the story:
the famous battle--we were such a small army
before the Byzantines gathered against us.

I held the prophet's banner in my left, fighting
with my right arm which soon got lopped off.
Then I held the banner with my left and tried
to stop the bleeding. Then another horseman
chopped off my left. I held the banner with

bleeding stumps and ran toward the rear.
The same horseman chased me and cut off my head.
For a second I faced the sky, then my left eye
settled in the dust. It was such a dance, some game
you'd see played by the clowns in the fair of Ukadz.

History does record everything. Sometimes
it's the victim's story that survives.
And my reward was virgins, virgins,
and every time you thrust into one of them
she returns to her virginity, her vagina

tightening up again. No blood, thank God.
When I asked for my wife, I asked that
she not be a virgin. I wanted her like I had her.
She was confused about being let out of hell.
They'd cleaned her, but her eyes were pearled off

as if she had not blinked for years.
And for the first time since my death
I saw sweat, one stream rolling from under
her left ear down the side of her neck
into the top of her chest. Before it slid

between her breasts, I licked it off.
I sniffed her, the smell of burning still lingered
in her armpits. I rested my head on her chest
and remembered my one life before. When I awoke
the angels had come and taken her back.

Frances Horovitz - Poem of Absence

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Poem Of Absence
Frances Horovitz

to be alone for a month is good
I follow the bright fish of memory
falling deeper into myself
to the endless present
the child's cry is my only clock

yet your singing echoes in corners
who clatters the red tea-pot
or opens the door with a bang
to look at the evening sky?
your typewriter lies silent
it is reproachful
I cannot make it stutter like you

I sit in the woods at dusk
listening for the sound of your singing
there are letters from a thousand miles
you wrote a week ago
like leaves from an autumn tree
they fall on the mat

it was your voice woke me
and the absent touch of your hand

Jim Daniels - What I Did

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

What I Did
Jim Daniels

What are you going to do
when your girlfriend's pregnant
neither of you have health
insurance or a decent job
and you've both been taking enough
drugs to kill a horse
or two?

What are you going to do
when she calls you from Wisconsin
three states away to tell you
she's pregnant, that she slipped
away the night before

she's telling you
and she's crying and she's telling you
she's going to the clinic
in the morning?

You know.
You know what you're going to do.
You're going to drive
your Plymouth Satellite all night

your head jangling
like the coins you use to call her
from the rest stops to make sure
she'll wait
wait till you get there

drive all night to her sister's
in Madison and sit with her in the morning
wringing your hands and going over it
all again, slowly, and again

and you can't let yourself
think for more than a second
of the actual child
you might have together,
what you imagined while driving
when the cold air and darkness
when the lack of a radio
made all things possible

you kiss her and hold her
and wipe her nose
and wipe your nose
and you try to ignore
and not feel embarrassed by
the presence of her sister
silently circling the house.

What do you do? You drive her down
in the painful sun, the forced
squint, you pull out the wrinkled wad of bills you conned
from friends half-gone in the bar,
you lick your fingers,
you count out your half.

Re: Jim Daniels - What I Did

[exceptindreams.livejournal.com]

I do love this poem. Thanks for reminding me of it.

Jeffrey McDaniel - Absence

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Absence
Jeffrey McDaniel

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more
than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks

to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet,
as I drop a postcard in the mailbox and watch it

throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes
are so green – one of your parents must be

part traffic light. We’re both self-centered,
but the world revolves around us at the same speed.

Last night I tossed and turned inside a thundercloud.
This morning my sheets were covered in pollen.

I remember the long division of Saturday’s
pomegranate, a thousand nebulae in your hair,

as soldiers marched by, dragging big army bags
filled with water balloons, and we passed a lit match,

back and forth, between our lips, under an oak tree
I had absolutely nothing to do with.

Belle Waring - Use the Following Construction In a Sentence

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Use The Following Construction In A Sentence
Belle Waring

Tu
me
manques

No
Nobody misses you--Me
I'm like the French the wary French

They say instead of "I miss you"
Tu me manques
You me lack

You're like the time
I stood at the blackboard 'til I cried and finally the teacher smirks
You can never divide by zero, she says, Trick question--sit down

Tu me manques
You are lacking
to me

I'm like the French
cool thinky French
There are some things I best not say

But it's safe to recount
how balletically you rode a ten-speed
the one abandoned on the street

and how you proposed before even one kiss
and how, September, when your visa came through
that red lipsticky stamp cost you

It cost
So you bolt
I break down

Then one evening, months later, this other fellow
takes me to hear a string ensemble playing Bach
like a beast with its multicolored arms rippling the rarefied light

and it makes me cry
so my hot new herringbone date pipes up
You're such a sensitive girl

Tu me manques
You
lack me

I went to a reception
It was a mistake
The councilman tried to corner me by the artist's print of the Kurdish dead

and there was no you
to shoot a look to
telegraph for help

so I said, Roll call! Excusez-moi!
Dumped my cranberry punch on his ego-shined shoes
You shoulda see me cuttin' that move

You
lack
me

Once I got home I hunkered down in my swarthy kitchen
and read some poems my student sent
and I know as I talk out of my own bones

she'll be a hit
and I'll live to see it
She lacks me not

Such a lot of things around here you'd like to glimpse
My cousin Karnay got a brand new beau
He sings right up from the roots of his feet

that kiss-me-all-over-'til-the-birds-crank-up kinda scat
You'd hit it off
You could jam all night

but you wouldn't want to come back
I'd cut clean around you like a bad accident
that the state trooper waves me right past

You lack
man
you lack

Things happen round here
that you would cry at the beauty of
you would shout

like I'm in the Metro waiting to change
I see an Amish family get on the train
and as the young girl turns

and spies me through the glass
there on her face is the most searing joy
so I wave to her

and she
without hesitating
waves back

You lack me
You're like trying to divide by zero
after everybody says

You can't
I'm like the French
the luscious French

playing those cornball accordians in the street
so they don't have to say
Come back