Love Between Strangers

Tell me. Tell me what you have seen.
Your stories of love and betrayal and love again,
of intimacies shared and intimacies weaponized.
Tell them all. Purge yourself.
Bulemia of the soul. Unhealthy
and yet needed desperately, a weakness,
a need to be understood,
but just enough.

Tell me what you have seen.
Bright circus lights and rainy city streets,
the color and death of autumn,
flashes of skin and the coverings,
fashionable and sloppy and seductive.
The deserts. The rivers. The ocean.
The mountains that hem you in
and lift your eyes.

Tell me what you have seen.
It is how I come to know you beyond the show.
It is how I come to know myself
in the congruencies of one life to another,
the similarity of strangers,
Flickers of love between strangers,
here and gone, always lingering.

Tell me what you have seen.

About this poem.

My wife and I both must have “those” kinds of faces, where perfect strangers share their life’s stories in the grocery store. It’s fascinating, that momentary intimacy.

Tom