POEM - The Guitar Player

Guitar notes pour out copper like bourbon
Everywhere, set free like helium balloons
Adrift, with wagging heads, like protozoa,
They celebrate what I love most about you.
The guitar player keens every liquid note,
Bending pain as if professing heartfelt love.
It is like that large open heart of yours,
Those radar dish eyes that hold everything
Whenever you look at me, recalling what
I was before my need for walls took hold.

It is a language of waiting,
In a dialect of tremolo, these
Notes scudding like evaporated love
And every bad decision ever made -
All real joy is held in the great sustain,
Isn’t it?

Love disgorges itself from that guitar,
Through the sound hole, percolates in languid
Fashion, this chisenbop of the heart,
Finger spelling for the deaf and mute in me.
The guitar player hugs the curves of his instrument
Just like your shape, the one I feel beneath
My hands, tenderly gripping frets,
Hands that slide along a slender neck,
this movement that evokes metallic squeals
Of chords changing flagging the progression -
The best of me is reflected in the woody warmth
Of you, in rounded smooth ways I can never explain,
The way the varnish reflects stage light.

This is just what this solo conjures up
In me, like voodoo, simple plucked strings that
Pull open the gates of everything that
I guard jealously, in elongated
Notes, longing to release a wanting
That I can barely even acknowledge
To myself in broad daylight.