Shades

(a prompt from Light and Shade Challenge using the following picture)

I wake, with slumber fogging up my  head

And turn to where your sleeping shadow lies

And stretch my arm across the half cold bed

And miss your eyes, and miss and miss your eyes

Coffee for one, and while the water drips

The light moves slyly and I watch entranced,

Upon the kitchen floor, a cruel eclipse,

The moving shadows of the waltz we danced

I need to clear my thoughts, and breathe fresh air

But in the garden there’s no solace found

In silhouette a summer’s kiss hangs there

Upon the fence, and in the past I’m drowned

The car was coming fast, too fast it sped

A thunderbolt, a kraken on the lane,

Then painted new in Rorschach-inkblot red

It left you there, unmade, in shaded rain

The future’s long and cold.  How can I last

So haunted by the shadows of the past?

The Gardener

(a prompt from Studio30Plus using the phrase "It Should Pounce" in 150 words or less)

"The thing about inspiration," Simon said, "is that it is not a tame thing.  You can’t force it, it should pounce on you unexpectedly,"

"From outside?"  I was bored with his nonsense and this dire little bar.  I wanted to get home and write, but I was suffering a bad case of writer's block

"Yeah," his eyes drifted to a woman sitting nearby, shabby and reading a paperback.  "Yeah..."  She looked up and met his gaze.  Her eyes narrowed.

She strode across the room and slapped him hard across the face.

"For the last time," she said, "I am not your muse!"

She stalked away.   I looked at the shocked expression on his face and at the blossoming painflower of red on his cheek.

Painflower I thought, A garden of painflowers raising their heads towards a dying sun.

"See you later," I  told Simon, "I'm away home."

Silence

(a prompt from Studio30Plus to simply address the 3rd 

dictionary definition of "Love" : sexual passion or desire)

It is too tame a word for summer lightning

And the high winds over the moors.

Just a word,

Too small to contain new lives and dreams

And whispered forbiddens shared in smiling seething night.

A single sound

Cannot within it bind the shattering of ease

And its glorious rebuilding.

It should burn

Not sit so simply on the tongue

Lazy and heavy like an easy thing.  It should pounce

And grasp

And bite

And hold so close and for so long

That worlds could rise and fall unseen

And do.