Alan Walowitz

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, comes from Osedax Press.  The full-length, The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems  is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars. Forthcoming from Red Wolf Journal, The Poems of the Air.

For Comfort

You don’t like to change the sheets.
What’s slept on, dream-stained, already warm
lends a comfort you can’t explain
and helps you get from day to day
through this world you find so full of pain.
But, strange, when I look into your eyes,
improbably they’re full of me, and somehow full of joy.

Change is hard, you like to say,
and to change yourself, an act of will
unbearable for most. You have to want
to bear yourself, trembling, but at last
alive, back into your infant-dreams.

So, let’s change, but keep whatever
ease you can: the bed intact,
the walls a little dingy grey,
the radio tuned to songs so old
we might not know the words,
and have to hum to keep them whole.

Then, rock me hard
and huddled in your arms
where once asleep I’ll dream
I woke you sweetly with the comfort
that comes of this–
this ancient but familiar kiss.