Taken Aback Poem by Whitney Jones Olson

i am taken aback;
i question your strength,
your revelations;
your integrity.
i put myself;
in a position you do not accord me,
and as always,
watch with a guarded
heart that is a reflection.

i wrote about you once.
About the completion of your character, and the colour of your eccentricity.
i wrote about you on a sweet, sad Spring day while taking my solace on the bittersweet ocean of deadened desire.
Although my actual perspective is long since destroyed,
i recall comparing you to a nearly nymphette cocktail waitress, and finding you wanting.

And when the tides turned beneath the heavy technicolor sunset, i found myself without you.
Removed from you, i am always left wanting - muscles aching to grasp your ephemeral form, dancing through the destruction that i alone create.
Destruction - without creation - is an incomplete cycle, the enormity of which i could not internalize - you create from me another, higher being.

i remember adoring you in your grace and wit - your strengths so mirroring mine, while still the chords of masculinity ripple down your back - i wrote, i know, that these things made you a central character in my relative reality.

And, later, i wrote this - that i remember writing of you. And even then i was falling in rivulets down the lines of your skin, the spiral stairs of your frame; landing, randomly, even then.

Later still, i am again in the presence of my being's mystic painter. No longer an empty canvas no longer falling although fallen, certainly. With my own grace to mirror yours, and strength to grasp you. When the tides turn beneath tomorrow's eclipse, the cyclicality of creation may overwhelm me, as it tends to do. A smile a tide will rise by your gravity, as i find myself no longer wanting - in myself, in you.

i wrote about you once.
Writing of you is never complete.

i wrote about you once.
About the completion of your character, and the colour of your eccentricity.

i wrote about you on a sweet, sad October day while taking my solace on the bittersweet ocean of deadened desire.

i wrote about you once.
The idea of you burns in the fall leaves; the scent of the smoke is pure.