Love: From Street to Space and Back - WhoWhatWhy Love: From Street to Space and Back - WhoWhatWhy

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Yellow-Red-Blue, Wassily Kandinsky, 1925
‘Yellow-Red-Blue’ by Wassily Kandinsky, 1925. Photo credit: Wassily Kandinsky / WikiArt

Love through the eyes of an unusual poet

ON THE CORNER

How dare these young girls come
in cut-short shorts and too tight
T-shirts before all the weirdos
waiting for the light at their age
to think that no one thinks any
but healthy thoughts to see their
hard calves drumming their
sweat-stained running shoes
on the curb before the light

LOVE SONG

“The love that’s scrawled
on bathroom walls
and subway tiles
is out of style. Good-by
to spleen and spite
that chalk the night’s
obscenities. Such heats
are not for me. My heart,
by keeping cool, has found
a love as real as Paris’s.”

So say the Pharisees.                                  

LOUPE

Star-crossed lovers apprehend
through grief’s glass eye
what weary divers pry from stony lips
and surfers feign inside the curl—
the self-perfecting patience of the pearl.

BIRTHDAY POEM
            for Barbara

How well the machinery works!
The sun burns, the world turns
and both wheel round the center
with every dust mote
in the galaxy. 

                         The year come round
Fall’s frost-rimed fingers squeeze
the green from every vein and
leave a sign that what is lost
is always less than what is found

                          What better time
to re-affirm as lovers must
our vow to freely fall
around each other’s
unfaltering appeal.

PILLOW TALK

“What can I say?” she said
when our bodies let us go. 

“Say it,” I said. 

“Like one long orgasm,”
she said, “that went on and on.” 

“And when it stopped?”

“Can an orgasm have an orgasm?” 

“Did it?” 

She nodded. 

“Then it can.”


Author

  • Gerald Jonas

    Gerald Jonas is a senior editor at WhoWhatWhy and a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, as well as other journals large and small.

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