Epyllia

(Falling in Love with a Beautiful Description)

Love is an imperfect tense
   As her words
   rose above the bed,
        a sense of muscular light.

I felt your dreams were still here
  in the room,
  hovering tight, like sentences or wings,
           as if they were veiled, or bruised by
            a faint spasm of sky.

I think the world
  might be turning around us.
  almost for us. Harmless, human details.

Re-form the lines.

It's what happens to us,
   when the words fail, one day
   the light will grow old over us,
   like a plant,
   surround us, twist and
   entangle us.

I hear
  you have been unfaithful, again.
Sleeping
     with the poetry.

I finally found out where
  I've been going wrong all these years,
  I have an idiot heart.
    I still fear
    what the future holds for us, or
    what the poems
       would have us do.
You said:

'Poetry can change lives,
save lives, and if you can't be a poet
be a poem.'

As the story unfolds,
   I take your hand,
     my heart is an exotic dancer.

My love is the only
  definitive answer,
       I can give you.


— John Denny
   

New Wave Review called John Denny's second collection of poems The Heartlands as,"T.S. Eliot meets Joy Division." The Heartlands, from which Epyllia comes, follows the author's acclaimed 2011 collection, Englandcollapsed. Born in London and brought up in the Midlands, Denny's poetry has appeared in many anthologies and literary magazines. A love poem, Epyllia (Falling in Love with a Beautiful Description) appears here with the author's permission.