This is probably

my favorite love poem. Written by a scientist by vocation who does poetry on the side (!). I love the last four stanzas especially.

Love

Two thousand cigarettes.
A hundred miles
from wall to wall.
An eternity and a half of vigils
blanker than snow.

Tons of words
old as the tracks
of a platypus in the sand.

A hundred words we didn't write.
A hundred pyramids we didn't build.

Sweepings.
Dust.

Bitter
as the beginning of the world.

Believe me when I say
it was beautiful.

-Miroslav Holub

I love this.

It's sort of cloudy and makes me think of antiseptic.

Falling

You're pressing your fingers against the sky,
asking Jesus if he sees how close those trees are.
You don't believe in Jesus. A stewardess takes everything
sharp that could hurt you: plastic cups, prayer beads.
All of her omelets are gone. You're watching your window
like television--a show about the suburbs, those stubborn lives.
Whole families relax and look lovely at home.
You're folding your hands around the armrests,
feeling the vague sadness of the stewardess's voice.
There are no clouds today above the boxwoods.
You could live in a world so solidly blue.

-Lesley Dauer

So I've decided

that I'm going to start posting in here again, because keeping good poetry to myself feels selfish.

Worry

Say you want to sing right now,
over and over, the name of an old lover.
Aren't you afraid the neighbors will hear
your voice shaking a little, the way you shook
in that lover's arms, the night you started
losing one another? If you were me, you felt
a lessening no talking could lessen, a sense
the motel television made sense just then,
with its wash of poorly adjusted color
lighting the room. Between leaving
for more ice and forcing a toast
to the future, plastic glasses patting
and sloshing, you thought, "This
is what we're entitled to."

If, unlike me, you had pulled the curtains open,
overhead lights might have glinted
off the balcony railing for you
and exposed the courtyard, the shutdown
fountain. The two of you might have danced
down there, slowly and close. The two of you
might have rescued something beautiful.
If you were me, you wouldn't sing
that name either. You'd worry
about the neighbors. You'd worry like I do.

-Aaron Anstett

This is so beautiful it makes me want to cry.