Butterfly Knives

By Martin Bemberg

My lover is most Christian among Heathens
And is not afraid of knives
Some cohort kings have banned and brandished,
Because she is a queen with no aspirations to supremacy
Save the supremacy of love
And I will swim there liberal and enamored
As long as life will let me.

If You Asked Me For A Poem I'd Say

By Martin Bemberg

Some days these hands, they wake to sleep
And some they wake to write.
Today these hands shake slight,
Not worthy of the pen, and so they type
And dream in unseen verses.

"Unseen verses?" you ask. "Unseen since when?
Since verses drowned in beaches black,
Which come around to tell the verses
They read verses now and then?"
(Yes. Unseen since then.)

A summer's day? A rose? I can't go there.
So should my hands then think in prose?
Should they think in prose and write
In verse of love beyond compare?

Well,
They can't yet write, these hands (they shake),
These hands, which you are in and wish to wear.
These hands, they shake.
So there.