James Bond Romance Antithesis

Our love
Is not a stampede of horses
Or tidal wave
Or explosion
Or fire
Or drug
Or battlefield
Or any other dangerous metaphor once scrawled madly into song.

Our love
Is rather
A quiet inhale
That takes in all of you –
Your breath from dinner
Your wrinkled shirt
Your five o’clock shadow
     Your aging body
       Your imperfect everything 
– and finds there

oxygen.

Sometimes there be hard times.

To be on the verge of tears –

To feel the wellspring in the back of your throat burst up and push at the walls behind your eyes and nose; a throb, throb, throbbing, indifferent to the curious spectators on the other side (the boss at his desk) (the passerby on the sidewalk).

The sigh before the wellspring bursts that at once hurts and salves the heart; that at once lifts and intensifies the lump in the throat and the weight in the stomach.

The desperate final attempt to suppress a perfect storm, an uphill battle against Mother Nature herself (who lives, as we know, in the back of the throat as much as in heaven’s hovering rainclouds).

And then you cry.

Dreaming of reality

Sometimes I am flying through an orange sky and taste the autumn air 

Then I am on my balcony on the 900^th floor, where I inhale deeply from a cigarette and look out over an alternate universe that I discovered, of all places, in a playground’s tunnel slide. 

Then I dance with abandon to a song that plays as it is written inside my head.  

I stretch my legs, my arms, my toes.

And the orange sky is gone

And the strange wildlife below are fading

And I am lying in a bed in a basement apartment. 

Sometimes my dreams are as real to me as the pillow beneath my head

And I return from them and think

Maybe I’m dreaming now of this basement apartment

And my life is still happening on that 900^th floor

And this breakfast

This conversation

This kiss goodbye and drive to work

Will seem so magical and strange from my view atop a tall tall balcony

So I’ll inhale them now like my dream cigarette

Like I’m going to wake up at any moment

and find they’re all gone,

like smoke

like a whisper

like a forgotten dream

and I’ll try to remember that everything is extraordinary to someone

so why not my life

to me?