"In the style of Virginia Woolf"?! Have a hunch it is actually more like Suzanne Vega! We are looking at "Influence" in college this week...

SWOLLEN


A dream-like state, out of the body, into the spirit.
Somewhere on the blurred horizon of reality.

I feel your presence so close, like a hand on top of my head
pressing me down deep into subliminal depths.
Becoming weightless, I am aware only of a subsonic pulse,
a heartbeat.

Heaven is to hear you breathe, to feel your bouyancy
inflate my lungs, your air lifting me.

Your nearness impacts like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Poetry thickens a lump in my throat that swells like prophecy
a fullness upon my lips. Your tongue tastes of honeyed sweetness...

So what of the impossibility that bumble bees fly?
Our words, like their short, inadequate and ephemeral wings,
carry a heavy body of meaning:
Rising awkwardly, yet managing to land with such beauty and grace.
Poetry in motion.

I am swollen with the sense of being bathed in your aura.
Pregnant with your thoughts, their life flutters within me
like the first and sudden quickening
of a foetus in the womb.

A mystical conception that spawns a progeny
of fresh poetic life:
Immaculate and mysterious.