Bodies Not Our Own Poem by Butch Decatoria

Bodies Not Our Own

"The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own"
- Colum McCann (Let The Great World Spin)

* * *

How often have we departed,
Only to return as broken and disheartened....

Doubt can be kicked aside like boxer briefs
Allowing our starkness to trust in this ease
Of limber flight its heights
when bodies feel more of heaven
removed from themselves

as if an out of body replacement
in each other's unexpected ache and deprivation

There is nothing more immense of touch
Than to experience it with/&/in another
To become elation and levitation without wings

Love if only a brief conjuring of taste
is better explained in skins met and kept
oddly artistic- like fetal sleep -its shape:
Two minds, their temples, composed and content

At their waist: nude / umbilical / magic spent.
Hearts between them beat, overcome
by rhythms from heaven, sent…

how often than not, have we left such captions
of shared life / ecstasies
to the halls of unremembered
the ill-equipped journeys by the ignorant
by the newly seeing youth that we were

rushing ahead for bigger sensations to better
the previous fun, without caution, defunct on rum
dizzy inside maelstroms overwhelming, yet freeing...

Behaved as anyone would at losing sight
following no roads displaced eyes not to recognize;
all thoughts scrupulous doors, dreams mapped absurdly

Tower of a life, a tree a leaf a tear falling from Sky

naïve belief - its all good, yet lonely numb inside
still the hollow hungers and also hurts
misplaced pathos, uncaring of worth your dirt...

How do we evolve without wellbeing or love
why are we, if not measured for the crown of kings?
How often do we listen before our voice is strong enough to sing?


Loving through gifts of our intermingled feelings
Bodies we speak wordless into being, one skein of light
From pitch dark and lost reasons, wakes to its pealing
Night is as beautiful in light's mystic gleaning
Found in another's succor, two bodies divinely beaming…