Moon at Half Past Noon

The world is lit with neon-lit skin,
A sudden, sharp and foreign grin.
A laugh that rings a different chime,
That pulls me from the weathered rhyme
of twenty years. A frisson, hot,
recalls a self I’d half forgot—
the hunter’s pulse, the primal stir,
a siren song that calls to her…
But “her” is you, who sleeps beside,
in whom my quieter selves abide.

My eyes, they linger—can’t deny
the brief and alien battery
that stirs a dormant, younger man.
A waking beast that shifts and sighs,
and meets your steady, sleeping eyes
within our silent span.

I remember when the world was small,
a universe contained in all
the language of your breath at night.
I forgot the street, the sky, the sea,
for the empire of you and me—
that heady, blinding, single light.

And now this flicker, brief and crude,
a shifting snare of raw, untamed prelude.
It is not love, but memory’s ache,
a current the ego yearns to take—
a treason plotted in the mind,
a mirage leaving naught behind
but guilt’s sharp taste, a chilling shame;
For I have whispered another’s name
inside the cathedral of my head,
while you breathe softly on our bed.

So I let the flicker starve and die
beneath our older, deeper sky.
I turn from that bright, empty glare
to the silver threading through your hair.
I trace the lines my laughter drew,
and touch the craft I made with you.

It is not the fierce, forgotten fire,
but the embers of a long desire
that warms the bones, that lights the room—
the choice to tend, and not consume.

For love is not the lightning’s streak,
it is the ground on which we speak
our futures, built with stone and sigh.
It is the knowing, steady eye
that meets the tempest and the lure,
and finds its shelter is more sure.

This is the love I understand—
not the first strike upon the sand,
but the slow stone the tide caresses.
Not the wild and hungry fire,
but the choosing of a single lyre
to play its quiet, constant praises.