InvasiveThoughts.com

Poetry by Tom Keene

Body massage with lotion

It is,

between shower and sleep,

our bedtime ritual.

Over the months and months

of nights,

I find a friendly compulsion

to attend your parts, familiar and fond,

discover new and secret places:

             tiny pits above your temples,

             tender hollows before and

behind tendons in your groin,

             ruts that run between bones

             of hands and feet.

I feel addicted,

like my need to tell you

and keep telling you I love you

and the telling never seems enough.

The lotion, the smoothing touch

seeps, soaks in you and sooths us both,

so with unguent ease

our separate sleeps overlap,

weave into one.

Even our waking

is a drifting lift into light

where we behold ourselves,

yet to be one again.

Tom Keene

September 9, 2001

On telling our time together

Against what cosmic calculus may we tally the time we took

or mark the depths we plumbed in psychic waters we went?

What whirring wheels of clocks or plottings of planets,

what patterns of waking and sleep, eating and bathing

can measure the stretch of ventures, involutions,

our love making made?

Can we time it with the tingle of our skins

that carry within the tacit echoes of touch?

Or the beat in the dance of our hearts'

give and take, follow and lead?

Or with our cell-made-music,

its strains coursing in our veins?

We find it not in what we did,

or even time's doing we let be done to us,

but being, being, being,

present, present, present,

to our attuned attending selves.

Tom Keene

July 9, 1988