Write Me a Kiss
Katherine Grosjean

The words below were gifted to me by the late Sean Thomas Farragher, my mentor, my shadow, my liberator, my friend. They were snipped from his reviews of my poetry and stories from 2000 to 2007. The arrangement is mine.


I am zealous always,
When I am inside a poem.
Would you write me a kiss,
a poem with teeth and spirit great?

Play in words with me.
Wrinkle the air.
Our minds will turn as we conjure
for ourselves what will
rise and fall like beginnings
and ends.

Every season drifts into the next
and when memory stops
that is when we confront the choice.
We read to discover the choices of the authors.
We also read to know our own choice.

I want to read the story.
I hope it appears.
If the story stops there, and it could,
then the beauty will rest in the
sparkling and glittering imagery of
some desolate loss or
win on the periphery
of becoming.

What is not there,
What it is not?
Where we dance in negative space,
we dance in the imagination.

How do we enter one and another's skin to know the other?
That is what a good poem does.
I am caught in every sensation.
You drive me to your intimacy with others,
and yet inside are what you fear and need.
You are the flora and we are
the words that linger.

A powerful poem rises and falls with
the knowledge gained in life.
Yes, we will change.
Yes, we will be scared.
Yes, yes, yes yes yes it will all matter,
As you and my great friend know,
we are all the pages of all books at once.

We do grow.
We seem like we step backward but we do not.
We step forward and the end unknown
rises like the sunlight of a horizon
not yet experienced but
anticipated.

I am the bad boy here.

Kiss.

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