Never Too Late For Love

Would love ever come?

Time tiptoed upon me, and one day I

floundered in a game of solitaire;

mindful of how quickly the bloom of youth runs away,

leaving me clawing for attention at the hands of

vacuous dubious callers preaching to me on a platform

built on quicksand.

I failed to heed the hurricane warnings of my beating ventricles,

And I should have sought solace a different way.

Instead, I fell too fast, for his unpasteurized honey charm

and his cardboard North American dreams.

I filled my wastebasket with paper love notes, and broken heart emojis,

scorched by the fire of empty hopes, lost loans, and fiery evenings.

I tumbled.

I heard a tin pan symphony playing a scratchy tuneless melody

about copper dreams, in notes

made of sedges played by a hapless drifter

from a distant land.

He claimed as his steady companion

an unfinished fag, unpaid loans, and

empty wine bottles –the flotsam and jetsam of an incoherent life.

I cry out plaintively to The Highest One.

Why me? I said. Am I not worthy of no finer thing

than love?

I took an emotional sabbatical and searched,

looking for a way to

unharness myself from the desperations of my troubled cerebral cortex.

I heard the voice of Opportunity call, and when I finally opened

the door, I choked out and gasped! A familiar person greeted me and called

me by my true name: Self-Love!

I fell back, shocked, and lay there crying and weeping over my regrets, the

things I might have done differently,

had I not jumped on a track with no name

and no proper conductor.

When I finally picked myself up off the floor

and stared into the Mirror of My Life,

I saw Doubt and Self-loathing peel away from my skin and wash

away, and I stood up straighter like never before – the pain of 2000 fractious days and nights flushed from me the way the ancient civilizations used to throw dirty water out of

their windows.

It was not too late for me, after all!

Then I saw him there in the college cafeteria!

His uncolored grey hair and beige, benign eyes attached to a superior

Roman nose promised to me of salutary days ahead.

The cadence of his voice reminded me of the possibilities of

a serendipitous Springtime, Springsteen music day, and a caveman cosmic

picnic filled with sandwiches made of Goodness, Kindness, and Caring–all

wrapped up in a biodegradable wax paper made of peace incense from the

loftiest ashrams of the Himalayas.

He was no taller than me and was the opposite of fussiness.

He wore his blue cords loose, slung low down his body.

He was hip without splashing trendiness. I was drawn to him as though his

body was a velcro velvet belt worn by the heroine in a Pam Grier movie.

I felt rattled; unsure if he was The One.

But my rapture for him was returned to me, like a far-flung echo from the

deep recesses of The Grand Canyon.

I became besotted with this bohemian romantic

who expressed himself

with no airs and dramatic rhapsody.

His expansive mind could manipulate

a scenic watercolor mountain painting out of a virgin canvas,

and he served up philosophical concepts

like pancakes ready to be consumed by those hungry for knowledge.

Just when I was losing hope, I lifted the veil, and the aging mocking clown

that was in me disappeared.

In time, our commitment to each other would take us to have

a neon Vegas wedding,

albeit, a simple one it was, without the fancy dress, or even guests.

The kind of Wedding where God and the Minister presided, before granting

a marriage certificate.

I felt that this was

truly the beginning for us

because it was all due to this powerful four- letter

word.

Love came to me just when I needed it the most,

as though I was a quantum astronaut,

riding on a late afternoon beam of heavenly energy

magnified a trillion times by the power of the Sun and Moon

and a billion stars and unexplored planets and

galaxies, and the brilliance transcended my unenlightened soul

and allowed me to experience a hopefulness of my spirit

as timeless and as luminous as a

total eclipse of the sun.

And so powerful are the feelings between us, it is as though

Time and Space are but merely illusions in our existence,

and Love will always be the cohesive force, keeping us together...forever

less a day.

(video created by the writer)