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No more damn love poems!
Not a single one more!

No more Ballards to your body:

Your Espalier thighs, set with fruit
And Spread before me.

Your breasts, two young robins bathing in the pool
Of my hands, scurrying the water off like sorrow.

Your red poppy lips stringing sonnets among the stars
In rhythmic rhetoric that resolves in revolution.

Your brown sunflower eyes, wide as galaxies and
Bright as the glint of epiphanies on a child’s face-

No! No more romantic meanderings about that night!

Should I have bore my scars to you?
Would that have made you love me?
Would you then understand why I reacted this way?

This scar happened when I was 4. The dark
Figure forcing himself on me while I was asleep.

This one, I was 6 and there were 5 older boys involved.
I was skinned of my innocence- nothing left
but the shedding to wrap around my young
Shivering body lying on the school bathroom floor.

Now do you love me?
Will you apply the salve of love?

Ah...But what’s the use now, really?
You’re gone- and that’s that!

I’ve broken us like clockwork.
After all,
Relationships are like
Time.

We can’t go back
And
We always want more.

Yes! No more damn love poems!

Only an ode to an armadillo-
The grey geode

I split in two last night going 85 MPH.
His red crystals scattered over the black pavement...

©️DiCicco Cosentino