How desperately he wished he understood her,

The elusive lady who had stolen his heart,

But every time he thought she was within his grasp

Once more she seemed to vanish into the shadows,

Leaving him to flounder in the darkness of doubt.

There were many times when the flame of her presence

Burned so intensely it threatened to consume him;

Days and nights when they rode on a wave of passion,

Carrying him aloft on a tide of rapture

To new realms of inexpressible ecstasy,

His desire fuelled by words of adoration,

Words of such intoxicating intimacy

That he believed that she had surrendered her soul

And that they would be eternally united,

Beyond the power of anyone to sunder.

But then without warning she appeared to blow cold,

Sending an icy chill of incomprehension

Deep into the marrow of his anguished being,

And for long drawn out days and nights she disappeared,

Behind an unassailable wall of silence,

Not responding to his desperate entreaties.

It is not as if she had retired from the world,

For rumours percolated through the swirling fog

Where he cowered in vacuous paralysis,

In shafts of brilliance from the exciting sphere

Where she swirled in kaleidoscopic revelry,

While hosts of fascinated admirers followed,

Caught in the orbit of her femininity.

*****

Sometimes by chance he caught a tantalising glimpse

Across the voiceless gulf of his deficiency,

To where she played in a circle of admirers,

Heedless of his confused cries of forgotten love,

Her flirtatious laughter proof of his rejection.

At times he thought these dark visions were projections 

Emanating from the core of his deranged mind

With no other foundation in reality 

Than his chaotic and rampant paranoia,

Which turned minutes into hours and hours into days;

And the voices that he heard clearly whispering

Their slanderous lies were just confused reflections 

Of the cancerous fingers of his psychosis.

But then, when all hope seemed to have crumbled to dust,

Without warning she appeared by his tear stained bed,

But instead of whispered words of sweet endearment 

And showers of a thousand intimate kisses,

Each one a pledge of enduring adoration,

All that she spoke were cruel words of rejection

Each one designed to puncture his sense of self worth,

Words laced with contempt for his pitiful nature,

And disgust for his bourgeois inadequacy

Both as a man and even more as a lover.

When she came into his room his hopes had been raised,

And for a moment it seemed his fears would dissolve

Dispersed by the sunshine of her entrancing smile,

Only to be humiliated and cast down

Into a pit of endless pain and dark despair.