Illicit love

I love you, although no one can ever know. The busy passage to that other world must hide the foundling of our wet Spring night, grown to light each dawn so it could not die without life’s end…. No matter how impossible. Raw feelings spoken into thin, whispered air of furtive street corners, where our flame kindled safe in cradled hands, and flickering shadows, as lips crushed another frantic, pressed goodbye. Our eyes, dull-embered coals of spent passion, cooled by sucking guilt that someone would be hurt. But never quite extinguished, not even by the insipid rain of a thousand doorstep partings. And as I walk you home through yellow streets of watching eyes, and ready tongues, it’s there between us… caught in each look and darting touch of a casual, wandering finger risking its chance. There in each deliberate lingered gesture and sound that only lovers sense. There in the curve of your lissom neck and tousled hair as you place your hand into some recent space still warm with mine. Lips rose-flushed by fraught, bitten desire, the quiet torture of breath held to stop the noise from demented sighs of longing. A secret kiss, readied there to snatch when none observe…. But they are always there; imagined friends of friends, busy with coincidence. Ghost informers to betray our hearts with a single word in selfish confidence. These intimate cameos, and a hundred other moments away from prying eyes whose noose we felt, but somehow slipped, tell a truth so old, and yet each time it’s pain, so new…. "I can never be with you".