When You're Away, I Consider Form

I don’t make any separations. A poem is a poem.
A building’s a building…. I mean, it’s all structure.
—John Hejduk

I need villanelles of you pulling

my breath like lines moving down

the page and the promise of rhyme

bending my ear. I need a sestina

of touch, patterns of palm, stroke,

skim, brush, and rub returning—

a cycle of sound and pressure I

apprehend in my bones. I need

the triolet’s refrain rolling off

your tongue like a sample, new

and nuanced here and here and here.

It’s all structure is why I need angles

of play, the love our bodies build.

I miss you. The ache's more sour

than a dropped foot, a forced rhyme.

If you're free from me too long,

what will you jettison first? Meter?

Lines? Come home. Our sonnet’s

the fourteen creases in the sheets.

A couplet of light greens your eyes

only inches from mine when iambs

ascend atop iambs. Please. I need

you in haiku: distilled in syllables,

laid bare in the last line’s turn.