“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones,
as the wind douses a candle and kindles a bonfire.”
- Francois VI Duc de La Rochefoucauld

I have found you, sweet girl
we must get lost
among the starry celestial fires where
you’ll remember me
as the morning stars sing together
and the ocean waves bring us home

Ours was an army of angels
and all-not-yet-invented
where love bleeds its deepest red
with its tenderest mercies
and whispers heroic moonsilver
brilliant over our bodies
fierce with inhaled intent
and blissed panic.

It is us who moves the world
and us who will pull it through
not one heartbeat will we forget
with every measure of grace
we will escape into life
before our most brightest star forever
expires.

Copyright © 2011 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved
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Tell me about waking where we were two horses turned loose
running and running until we forgot we were horses
where we would teach each other all the things we forgot
and we discovered we were all made of stars

I need your grace as the earth needs the memory of rain
I will drink poetry from your lips and kiss your fire with mine
I cannot resist you as no mere human
can stand in a fire and not be consumed

I can sit all day wearing nothing but your kiss
I am drowning deep in your undertow
Tell me we shall be ruined by love
and tell me we shall never get used to it

Copyright © 2011 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved
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1. You (only you).

Copyright (c) 2010 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved
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” The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. “
-Joseph Campbell

My Dearest Love,

I cannot lie.
I’ve raced through my life
as I’ve had through a novel,
anxious for its sweet ending.
Mad sprints through the tall
grasses,
heaving lungs, arms
thrusted
through the thinned atmosphere
to touch the light of sacred
stars
in the indigo night.
This is how I breathed you.

I’ve traced your face in the
air with my fingers
across knowing
fields
and waking mountains,
felt it real as the
scripture of trees,
the living water
and the days of March
you wore in your eyes.
This is how I lived you.

Yet, what we know,
what we know the world does not,
is not the brilliance of
dreams
in distant universes.
The freedom we seek,
the love we’ve found,
is in uncovering
the infinite beauty
that lies
in the moments
between the seconds
of our life.

This is how we love.

Copyright (c) 2010 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved
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I want to tell you my stories
whispered secret into your ear,
and feel your struggling lips go soft
with our conspiracy.

I want our eyes to
dance past the cynics
(who have bet their forgotten
innocence against us),
and peer beyond this anxious world of
toothless fear
and swallow deeply
outward
all
space
completely until

we feel
our lungs rise as the tides
and its singular pull
with the heroic moonlight
throbbing in my heart

as we found home

and stilled
the hours.

Copyright (c) 2010 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved
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I fell from the sky
hard

Mouth to mouth,
you kissed my mouth open.

Life screamed back
into my lungs,
through my vessels
from within my heart.

My eyes opened
to no one there.
Who were you?
Where did you go?
The unseen hand
laughed openly
with what twist of plot?

Am I coming home
to a place I’ve
never been?
Were your comforting words
during our trips
to the sun
dreamed into a unsung
mind?

I will fly again.

I will fly
as the match head
struck alit
starved for oxygen.
searching madly.
to find this tender soul
who came back to me
under the fragile sky.

And should my wax
wings melt
before
our arms shall wrap
our spirits again,
pray that I
may quickly unclutch
to the
unforgiving
winds
the
scribbled note:

“In case of
Emergency,
please do

not
resuscitate”.

Copyright (c) 2010 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved
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You were gold
I was silver

We drank moonlight
from rooftops
in drunken glee
and kissed with
the taste of promise
We were

light chasing light
over evening wave tips
I’ve inhaled your sky
and sand and water as

I walked into your ocean
and failed to walk out.

Copyright (c) 2010 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved.
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Let us go then, you and I
and wade into the sea
where the shifting sands beneath our feet
no longer question our souls’ intent
and the swirling salt water washes
through our fragile longing
like the stars that rush
through our bodies
and disappear
toward an unknown
destination.

My fingers will always know
the details of your
spine in the small
of your back,
and the feel of your hair
my hand sifts though
and without knowing all
the colored
details of your life,
I will recite the song of your eyes
with the depth of its
wisdom.

Yet they hold so many stories
I have yet learned to read.

And want to.

Copyright (c) 2010 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved.
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In the stillest moment of the evening
you fire through the aether and
the rush of chaotic atmosphere
and slide through a crack in my perimeter,
past the guards and monsters,
and with silent feet
slip under my skin,
swim up the currents of
my capillaries and vessels,
climb up the trees and
up the furthest branches
to where you will rest.

And in the morning
I will awaken
to the cathedral bells outside
and with you
in my heart.

I am pretending you did not exist.
Ink nightly washes black
over my consciousness
and abandons me as morning seaweed
upon a foreign beach.

I am pretending we were simply
the sparkling imagination of some higher being,
our life together set below a singular epic sky
unrepeated
in future histories

I am pretending I cannot taste you
each day as I do the sea air in my breath
when I am running,
my heart tied upon one foot,
ancient melancholy tied upon the other,
anxiously racing,
madly racing through lifetimes,
to find our brightened souls.

I see you in colors that don’t exist.

It is all that I see clearly.
and why I run.

Copyright (c) 2009 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved.
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