A.S.J. Tessimond: Not Love Perhaps

This is not Love, perhaps,
Love that lays down its life,
that many waters cannot quench,
nor the floods drown,
But something written in lighter ink,
said in a lower tone, something, perhaps, especially our own.

A need, at times, to be together and talk,
And then the finding we can walk
More firmly through dark narrow places,
And meet more easily nightmare faces;
A need to reach out, sometimes, hand to hand,
And then find Earth less like an alien land;
A need for alliance to defeat
The whisperers at the corner of the street.

A need for inns on roads, islands in seas,
Halts for discoveries to be shared,
Maps checked, notes compared;
A need, at times, of each for each,
Direct as the need of throat and tongue for speech.

A.S.J. Tessimond: First meeting

When I first met you,
I knew that I had come at last home.
Home after wandering,
Home after long-puzzled searching,
Home after long being wind-born,
Wave-tossed, night-caught, long being lost.
And being with you was normal and needful
And natural as sleeping or waking.
And I was myself,
Who had never been wholly myself.
I was walking and talking
And laughing easily at last.
And the air was softer,
And sounds were sharper,
And colours were brighter,
And the sky was higher,
And length was not measured by milestones,
And time was not measured by clocks.
And this end was a beginning,
And these words are the beginning -
Of my thanks.

A.S.J. Tessimond: Meeting

Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell,
Cats' meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.

We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other's flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
 The hands, the hair - before the inept lips open.

Instead of which we are resonant, explicit.
Our words like windows intercept our meaning.
Our four eyes fence and flinch and awkwardly
Wince into shadow, slide oblique to ambush.
Hands stir, retract. The pulse is insulated.
Blood is turned inwards, lonely; skin unhappy ...
While always under all, but interrupted,
Antennae stretch ... waver ... and almost ... touch.

A.S.J. Tessimond: Day Dream

One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift
as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet
as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will

 stop, and no one will wonder
or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason,
Even in winter, even in the rain.