All he wants to do is wrap his arms around him

But he must curtail the sanguine of his love 

 

There can be beauty

There can be sanguine

in enchevêtrement,

in complication and entanglement,

in mismatch and incongruity

 

Two opposing feelings

do not have to fit together,

It doesn't have to be a conflict

 

We created rupture

We prised open something

deep inside both of us

at odds with each other

yet seemed to work in unison

 

We left a residue, a remainder

which maintains difference

in the very context of sameness

A mutual complication

of past and present in each other’s fate

 

We created a slapstick love

Clash of us two

mutually incompatible codes,

exploding the tension

A collision ending in laughter

 

Our joy is found in humour

Yet, I am too embarrassed to share with you

for fear of making, you laugh so hard that you burst,

the true story of when I was 18

and I drove on the A21 on the wrong side

Left lane when it should have been right

Sober, I may add, at 2am

I drove through two no entry signs

It only occurred to me 3 miles in

that there was nobody else driving

in the left-hand lane

When suddenly,  

I was surrounded by police cars

Told to get out of the car

The next day, I went to the local police station

Got off without even a warning or penalty point

when I told the policeman,

‘I apologies Sir, for I am an artist,

a poet whose mind just got a little disturbed’

 

And despite our joking and laughing

at the humour found in each other’s history,

our unspoken unvoiced sanguine love

for each other remains

 

The host (a sage) and guest (a parasite)

Our roles shape-shift with every meeting

Yet, always, the parasite walks a lonely path

Never dare show the host his feelings,

can only do him harm

 

I curtail the sanguine of my love for you.