NuevaJess's blog: "NuevaJess Poems"

Found Woman

My thoughts hold you like lifeline

where you offer comfort and smiles

as readily as you once did.

I don't feel the passage of time

so much as I feel the empty chair

at the table of my heart.

My love has always been more all-you-can-eat buffet

than a 7-course meal that always has a polite finish.

But I'd rather barnacle glue your image to my memory

than to ever scatter the way you made me feel to the four winds.

You could charge interest for eternity

on the debt I owe you for bursting into my life

at the exact moment I almost surrendered...me.

Instead you had me evict those squatters;

Doubt, fear, and insecurity got their walking papers

because you saw me through eyes unfiltered by my past.

So I tried on your views like the shopping spree of a lifetime.

Each garment of your desire tantamount to revelation incarnate,

leaving me yearning for more colors, more styles,

more, more, more of all you had to offer.

My fingers feverishly reading the Braille of your praise

that went far beyond the obvious.

You knew my eyes would xray vision into your soul,

your humor, your very essence of who you are as a man,

gaining my trust by specifically ignoring the Great Wall.

When the struggles for life itself had me newborn kitten weak,

I did not notice the loss of pieces of self weighing down

the scale of my confidence making it so easy for the betrayals

to give that fatal blow.

You touched the secret recesses of my being

without ever laying a hand on me.

Having my lips form words just to mimic the many ways

I could kiss you, but I will leave you with these:

Thanks love, for your infinite kindness

in finding she who was thought to be lost forever,

for reminding her that before she was diagnosed, she was beautiful;

before she was abandoned, she was sexy;

before she was separated, she was sensual;

before she was married, she was flirtatious and insatiable;

but most of all, before the laundry list of men

who disappointed her, she was and still is

a woman in every sense of the word.