Your beauty is a thief
that steals the breath from my lungs;
a tryant who commands the motion of my eyes;
like a fire loosed in a dry wood,
or salt rubbed into a soldier's wound:
your form is both the torment and the prize.
How can I call it good
when all pain and heartache
are its proof and sign?
Yet somehow,
that fire and salt have a sugar's taste;
that thirst and burning, a savor like scented wine.
Love is indeed the true insanity!
When all else is reduced to shambles,
and the lover's heart, a place of ruin,
he begs only for more of the same:
a last glance, a parting word,
the chance meeting of a pair of eyes...
Ruin me! End me! Destroy this fool some more!
The mention of your beauty alone undoes me;
and that undoing binds me again,
and chains this Sisyphus to his poetic demise.
