I wish I could love like a man
With reckless
Abandonment and those
Looks of shock, but
Women are some how incapable or
Maybe just me. I
Do prefer to wake up
alone on sunny
Sunday mornings
And have coffee with my
Plants and books.

When I was a child
I would pretend
I was in a jungle, all alone
Or in a tree house, protected from the rain
I would read for hours
The sun would slip
through the thick banana trees
in the late afternoon and
right before sliding into the sea,
he would send me a few rays
to dance across my spine.

Maybe I’m still in love with the sun.
Its hard to forget a first love
and none after him have
burned so brightly,
but I never blistered.
I did protect myself against him too,
in case he became too
zealous or enflamed by passion.
But now that he is gone,
that I have found other loves,
I pull on an extra sweater against the cold,
because nothing warms me
the way he did on those afternoons of solitude.
Danaë would understand,
for she too fell in love with a beam of sun.

But my first love did not incur such myth,
it was over
before I could wind the words into song
and teach others to fall in love
with my myth
and feel the heat through my verse.
So now I love with less intensity
because the sun is an exhausting lover
and the moon, she too demands my attention.

With her it is more of a seduction.
She slips in through my window, unsuspected.
Her soft fingers draped across my shoulder draw my attention slowly,
caressing me into her thoughts
and she into mine.
I don’t notice that these too are demands
that will steal away my energy,
she hides her intent in shadows.

She loves the way I do,
making sure she is loved before professing herself.
It is safer that way.
She too must have been burn by the sun.
She hides from him now.
I don’t have that luxury.
But we understand each other
and her fingers on my shoulder remind me there are other ways,
I just have to turn around and embrace them.
But that too scares.