He marked the page with a match 
and fell asleep in mid-kiss, 
while I, a queen bee 
in a disturbed hive, stay up and buzz: 
half a kingdom for a honey drop, 
half a lifetime for a tender word! 
His face, half turned. 
Half past midnight. Half past one.

Vera Pavlova (from Poetry magazine, January 2010)

(via themirrorbluenight)

The clocks slid back an hour
and stole light from my life
as I walked through the wrong part of town,
mourning our love.

And, of course, unmendable rain
fell to the bleak streets
where I felt my heart gnaw
at all our mistakes.

If the darkening sky could lift
more than one hour from this day
there are words I would never have said
nor heard you say.

But we will be dead, as we know,
beyond all light.
These are the shortened days
and the endless nights.

Carol Ann Duffy (from Mean Time, 1993)

Up in the sky the lovers lay in bed
Naked, face to face and hip to thigh,
Her leg between his, his arm beneath her head,
Their hands roaming freely, up in the sky.
In the dark, Manhattan lay at their feet,
A blanket of glittering stars thrown down.
Beyond her bare shoulder, 59th Street,
And from her lovely foot the buses headed uptown.
They came to the city for romance, as people do,
And with each other they scaled the heights
And now, at rest, almost one and not quite two,
They lie almost forever in the sea of lights.
   Where will they go? What happens next? I don’t know.
   I am that man waiting at the bus stop far below.

Gary Johnson

You!

Gavin Ewart (from The Funny Side - 101 Humorous Poems, 2012)

If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.

If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.

No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.

Naomi Shihab Nye (from Fuel: Poems, 1998)

My neighbours do not wish to be loved.
They have made it clear that they prefer to
    go peacefully
about their business and want me to do the same.
This ought not to surprise me as it does;
I ought to know by now that most people have a
    hundred things
they would rather do than have me love them.

There is a television, for instance; the truth
    is that almost everybody,
given the choice between being loved and
    watching TV,
would choose the latter. Love interrupts
    dinner,
interferes with mowing the lawn, washing
    the car,
or walking the dog. Love is a telephone
    ringing or a doorbell
waking you moments after you’ve finally
    succeeded in getting to sleep.

So we must be careful, those of us who were
    born with
the wrong number of fingers or the gift
of loving; we must do our best to behave
like normal members of society and not make
    nuisances
of ourselves; otherwise it could go hard
    with us.
It is better to bite back your tears,
    swallow your laughter,
and learn to fake the mildly self-deprecating
    titter
favored by the bourgeoisie
than to be left entirely alone, as you will be,
if your disconformity embarrasses
your neighbours; I wish I didn’t keep forgetting
    that.

Alden Nowlan (from Alden Nowlan: Selected Poems, 1996)

Marita
Please find me
I am almost 30

Leonard Cohen

That T-shirt – it smells
Of him. Don’t wash it.
I need to hold it
Close.
        I want to sleep
With it near my face.

How ridiculous this is:
Grief leading me by the nose.

Gregory Orr (from How Beautiful the Beloved, 2009)

I close my eyes and see
a seagull in the desert,
high, against unbearably blue sky.

There is hope in the past.

I’m writing to you,
all the time, I am writing

with both hands,
day and night.

Franz Wright (from Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, 2004)

    It was a novelty-store and he went in just for the novelty
of it. She was in front of the counter, listening to the old
proprietor say: “I have here one of those illusion paintings,
a rare one. You either see a beautiful couple making love,
or a skull. They say this one was used by Freud himself on
his patients—if at first sight you see the couple, then you are
a lover of life and love. But if you focus on the skull first,
you’re closely involved with death, and there’s not much hope
for you.”
        With that, the proprietor unwrapped the painting. They
both hesitated, looked at the picture, then at each other. They
both saw the skull. And have been together ever since.

Alan Ziegler (from The Swan Song of Vaudeville, 2005)

I love you but I’m married.
I love you but I wish you had more hair.
I love you more.
I love you more like a friend.
I love your friends more than you.
I love how when we go into a mall and classical muzak is playing,
you can always name the composer.
I love you, but one or both of us is/are fictional.
I love you but “I” am an unstable signifier.
I love you saying, “I understand the semiotics of that” when I said, “I
had a little personal business to take care of.”
I love you as long as you love me back.
I love you in spite of the restraining order.
I love you from the coma you put me in.
I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone, except for this one
guy.
I love you when you’re not getting drunk and stupid.
I love how you get me.
I love your pain, it’s so competitive.
I love how emotionally unavailable you are.
I love you like I’m a strange backyard and you’re running from the
cops, looking for a place to stash your gun.
I love your hair.
I love you but I’m just not that into you.
I love you secretly.
I love how you make me feel like I’m a monastery in the desert.
I love how you defined grace as the little turn the blood in the
syringe takes when you’re shooting heroin, after you pull back
the plunger slightly to make sure you hit the vein.
I love your mother, she’s the opposite of mine.
I love you and feel a powerful spiritual connection to you, even
though we’ve never met.
I love your tacos! I love your stick deodorant!
I love it when you tie me up with ropes using the knots you
learned in Boy Scouts, and when you do the stoned Dennis
Hopper rap from Apocalypse Now!
I love your extravagant double takes!
I love your mother, even though I’m nearly her age!
I love everything about you except your hair.
If it weren’t for that I know I could really, really love you.

Kim Addonizio (from Lucifer at the Starlite, 2009)

Walking in the dark streets of Seoul
under the almost full moon.
Lost for the last two hours.
Finishing a loaf of bread
and worried about the curfew.
I have not spoken for three days
and I am thinking, “Why not just
settle for love? Why not just
settle for love instead?”

Jack Gilbert (from Refusing Heaven, 2007)

Let me cook you some dinner.
Sit down and take off your shoes
and socks and in fact the rest
of your clothes, have a daiquiri,
turn on some music and dance
around the house, inside and out,
it’s night and the neighbors
are sleeping, those dolts, and
the stars are shining bright,
and I’ve got the burners lit
for you, you hungry thing.

Ron Padgett (from You Never Know, 2002)

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,
jar of octopus, cuckoo’s cry, 5-7-5,
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping,
another 75 of what you think staring out
a window. I don’t care about the plot
although I suppose there will have to be one,
the usual separation of the lovers, turbulent
seas, danger of decommission in spite
of constant war, time in gulps and glitches
passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,
speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sled
outracing the wolves on the steppes, the huge
glittering ball where all that matters
is a kiss at the end of a dark hall.
At dawn the officers ride back to the garrison,
one without a glove, the entire last chapter
about a necklace that couldn’t be worn
inherited by a great-niece
along with the love letters bound in silk.

Dean Young (from Fall Higher, 2011)