thoughts on love 2013

There isn’t a bit of this that makes sense.

The backlit sunlight sheltering the lip of the bit of open roof where he sits

Sipping Maxwell coffee out of a mug with his fingers laced through brass knuckles

And then suddenly the image buckles under its own weight, teaming with movement as if filled with the kitchen cockroaches, it shifts out and then under

Subsumed in the wave of the past

A year before you would not have recognized him.

Alternately numb and fire, he spat venom at anyone to take him at his word or call his number.

His words were double edged: as much as they cut

they revealed
so people began to wince at the deep ruts inside him of which no one had ever heard.

Now on the new roof there is poison ivy

It says be careful.

On the door there is nothing painted

It says do not forget.

On the floor there is dust

It says you can never start clean.

On the ceiling of his newly furnished room there is a bulb-less light

It says you must bring that with you.

Do not mistake this for a proclamation

Or a description

And most of all, God forbid, for a story.

Though it isn’t true,

please, this cannot be mere coincidence.
His hands were the same size as mine

And his fingers trembled when after four years,

We finally put them together.

Standing in his unfurnished room,

The light hitting the floorboards just so,

The window covers fluttering in the absence of windows

He lit up when he said we had the same color eyes.

Love is neither easy, nor difficult.

And it is not a journey.

The one thing he moved with were books,

Overflowing their boxes, books

Making up the furniture, books

But not a bed, books

And nowhere to put the light, books

And not enough bookshelves, books

So that he was afraid to walk into a bookstore,

That kind of books.

The sheer amount inside a man can be frightening.

My love came and held him like a babe with her words

Loosening her lip so it would not curl, she spread her

Arms to catch the overflowing out of him and when he was done

She gave it back, so much he was hungry,

so much seeing it I was ashamed and thought:

this isn’t for another man to see,

this vomit, this beating heart, everything

he wants to be him, he has tried so hard to put it inside

and now it is all out, all out

in front of me,

and in a new city, alone, he stands suddenly emaciated

a man who might terrify the world with his intellect

and seduce it with his style,

he stands shivering while my love wraps him up

in the embrace that I love so much and know so well

and welcomes him to his own home and invites him to begin again

picking the pieces of his insides and placing them back in position.

On 2ce he saw his own grooves, he said

The pavement opened up

In yawning mouths, the cracks, teeth, rolling

Forward, his whole body becoming stars so that

Too fast his light pouring out, speed making vacuous gashes

Too quick to fill, quantum foam bubbling through, but always there,

His eyes suddenly magnifying towards the holes in everything—

And the only thing to save him

Was Jacob treating the whole thing like a joke

Asking him to tell the future—

The perfectly silly question

To distract him from the crackling inferno of the past.

Love is not a song

Or a phrase,

Or a person in the apartment above you slamming on the ground in a wild dance.

It isn’t the wind in the trees

Or a good job

Or the pills that smooth out the lows and also the highs.

It isn’t a new city,

Or freedom,

Or even the future.

It eats you up, because it is something foreign you try to make your own.

Before me, he had been in love with her.

It gives you a fever because your body tries to fight it.

It takes your food and your drink, because it lays claim to them.

It shows you your own holes and does not allow you to look away.

It says “I am here. You think I am the holes, you fool,

I know. But I am here.

Here, I will give this to you. You are the holes.”

And when I listen to my love’s breath quicken as she whispers she is close,

I forget the words that echo inside me,

Though then, with him in the next room,

They ring more quietly true than any other time:

it is only a moment we overlap like two slides which allow no light,

Vaccuum together, fitting as perfectly as any man made object can,

The Absolute suddenly about again,

Alive and in the flesh,

The magic of systems aligning,

And all of a sudden alone does not mean alone at all

But of course you know what love is.