Leeward

Still, two middle-aged teenagers
tossing and tugging
around on a uncomfortable couch
in positions compromised.

Feeling and flashing, hot tinderboxes,
in time and space.
Interrupted version of a love story
we thought we’d read before.

And sixty seconds is sixty minutes
in a reality where both
need them but will never use them
even if they squeeze into sixty years.

Children, place-settings to commitments
long established and briefly gone,
remind them of previous rendezvouses
and the elixir they fed but will never taste.

She, who wears the world
he willfully inhabits;
He, who connects the dots
she freely leaves lying around.

Still, he roams desperate seas,
vacillating between
what he wants and what he has
before the lighthouse beacon comes around.

And she climbs the promontory,
quickening steps,
chasuble flapping in the night’s breath
before her taste passes port side.

Stephen Leonard first suffered as a writer during his undergraduate years while producing political studies and English papers for unforgiving professors at Gordon College. Despite this, 
he continued writing to the tune of an M.F.A. Degree in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont. He is an accomplished writer in the sense that he is still writing. Of course, he
 is still writing his first novel, “The Funerals.” His short features on sports and his personal reflections in short fiction and poetry have found quiet homes in small media in New England 
and Louisiana. He is married and wonders how much longer he can keep up with his three young sons.

Copyright 2005, Stephen K. Leonard. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.