Posted on by Lydia Ink

Love, Lust and the Imaginary Lover

She wanted to cry and tell him she loved him, and he meant the world to her. Then she would immediately want an Egg McMuffin from McDonald’s. Hot. She wanted it hot, wrapped in a grease-soaked paper with black coffee and a room full of strangers ignoring her eating it.

That’s love, she supposed–thwarted by food.

She did not understand why she loved him other than he was older, past his prime and looked oh so comfortable. What was she but older, just past her prime and oh so uptight?

Fantasies whirled about in her mind about him while she was alone in her apartment. Wonderful visions helped her sleep at night. Those same romps through fantasy land had the most evil tendency to crop up in her mind while on the phone at work or during a committee meeting.  The imagined groan of ecstasy or the most uninhibited scenes of physical love she contrived in her mind would make the tips of her ears glow red while glimpsing him in his office. Male coworkers looked away confused, female coworkers clucked at her “isn’t the change awful,” or “those hot flashes, my mother went through that, just terrible.”

Wanting to cackle, turn green and rubbed her crystal ball for some weird reason, she just bent her head and prayed for mundane concentration.

While on her ten-minute breaks in the basement, she thought back to her teenage years while on her 10-minute breaks; those new awkward years when boys looked tantalizing. A quiet girl who never took part in the wild antics of youth because she discovered too late that she was normal. She never played out her fantasies as a girl, and it looked as if she would not now as a “mature” woman. In her more sane moments, which was when he was present, oddly enough, she often thought her fantasies were more rewarding than probable reality.

Why the fast food craving at her lowest ebbs was beyond her.

What was to become of her? Those low flowing moments when her own life weighed down upon her; being alone, budgeting for a ripe old age, thinking of cats and knitting as a hobby all made her shudder with despondency and long for a lover.

Imagining him not able to speak English and the two of them explaining what shirt, panties, bra meant in their respective languages, she almost choked on her coffee next morning during a sales team meeting.

He asked her once to make copies for him and dictate a letter; he was the old-fashioned type, but she could accommodate. His black suit was double-breasted and hung perfectly across his wide shoulders. He wore a silk tie, a shade of blue she couldn’t name, but him wearing black and blue made her shiver and smile.

“You must be having a good day,” noticing her smile. His voice deep and relaxed said the words in a preoccupied manner.

“Yes,” she said, barely raising her head and imagining a missed fleck of shaving cream just behind his left ear.

https://lydiaink.com/index.php/happy-endings-not-guaranteed/
Posted on by Lydia Ink

The Man Who Woos, The Man Who Dances

Let’s walk the moon and outshine the stars. 

Or rather, let’s walk the stars and pocket every moon in the galaxy.

Why not?

What do you mean, ‘catastrophe’?

I can pull you to me, my hips just above yours,

and push in until you bend beneath me,

then we can spin to the music that begins.

Where we begin and never end, but you refuse.

Nothing matters to you except safety!

Will all the wooing in the world convince you to stay next to your fire at home?

There must be moments–tiny brief moments between too-weary-to-read

and too-restless-for-bed when you think of me.

Rainmakers are embezzlers of the soul, that’s who they are, sorry.

Now I’m a different story. 

I dance upon all the tiny ledges of the second story of your house

and tip-toe past your window when the frost is thick and the moon full.

I do this to frighten you because I am frightening-come dance with me. 

Come dance with me upon the white frost lawn, in the shadows of the bare autumn trees. 

Let me sweep you upward to the tops of the branches that wouldn’t keep a sparrow perched. 

We will stay aloft and dance upon the currents and eddies

I’ll hold you tight, your hips locked just beneath mine.

Stop the worries and stop the longing you have for the written word

Listen to my music, listen to the thrum, the beat, the hum, the heat of what makes me–me.

But you won’t–you won’t. 

You’ll smile at me through your window,

No matter how I dance or lift the music to your ears. 

You will pull the curtains tight against the whistle of high wind and forgotten summer. 

I’ll stay upon your window sill,

Dressed in a midnight blue top hat and tails and thrill you in your sleep. 

Yes, I’ll place my ice blue lips to the thin, thin pane of glass and thrill your dreams with

What you resist and desire.

Me.

https://lydiaink.com/index.php/poetry/
Posted on by Lydia Ink

My Ascent and Fall in Love

Catapulted

Right off the ground

I knew straight up

There was nothing for it

So I spread my arms

On the ascend and lifted my chin

And while the numbing wind

Blows through my hair, my body,

I will take a moment

To forget.

Ignore the memory of

The smashing that is coming

The splat on the grass

And the certain tumbling.

Forget the fact that

Being screwed over is

My fault here in

The twenty-first century.

Be smarter, be better, find

the weak point and thrive.

There is no excuse for tender

Moments and forgetting

The power of lust.

My eyes wide for the momentary stop,

A surge of adrenalin!

Blue sky and white cloud all

On the horizon

But here it comes that

Mild descent.

I open my chest to the pinnacle.

Now

Close my mind,

pause and dive.