Free Love

You are my safe place

The haven of your arms

Has the magic of amnesia

Your soft smooth big hands

Slowly trace my body

Like an eraser across a caulk board

Little by little to remove

The hard white outlines

Of little deaths in other lives

To remove all traces of those hands

That reached out without love

To leave only angry reds & blues & blacks

Where I was once all purely white

The magic of your simple touch

Unlearns decades of my flesh

Violated, desecrated, taken away

Until yesterdays rest quietly in the past

And I am freed to live in now

Unshackled, unowned, undone,
I start again at the beginning

As it all should have been

For I love you like a woman & a child

In the open green brown forests of your eyes

I am lost and finally found

The lashes of the whip still on my back

The scars fade slowly yet remain

But my body & soul fly free now

Your kisses, one by one, take away the sting

The love you give has drowned the pain

It is a blessed, blessed, long awaited peace

I find each time I am again in your arms

C. Nichols