I wrote this book of poetry…
and now I want to write one more. Every year. For the rest of my life.
- – -
Falling in love feels like tripping into a box of hammers that have come alive. You don’t expect it – the broken bones, the bruises, the sacrifice – but when it comes, when it swallows you into a sea of headaches spent like months cruising on a carousel of defeat, you open your arms wide and brew it a cup of tea. Love is not an end game; there is no end game in the world strong enough to withhold love from its territory. Love gives itself like magnets, like irresistible, like broken things that stay broken. Love isn’t a seed, it is a soul in your soul. It is a break in God’s great plan and a stitch in the quilt of the universe, still – it is metaphysical, metaperceptual, metaconsiderably mindbending.
And I’ve been in love with love since I can remember my first crush fresh of the boat. The in-between type, the type of mocha that went with my latte, I couldn’t get my hands full enough of him, my eyes filled enough with him to the brim of my eyelashes that my teachers would make comments at parent night. The reaching of it is what entrances me, still. We have a rhythm like the little engine that could, but it is dependent on coal, on wheels, on tracks lain in front of us like crossroads built by schizophrenics. We make our own destiny and create our own dependency, but this, this dependency is dependent on freedom, on loving that looks like someone’s turned back, quickly running away. This love is everything we have going for us, and nothing.
When I sit down to type out all the lyrics coiled up in my mind, I can’t not write about us. All that comes out is melted chevre, all goo, no substance. And sometimes it feels hopeless, I feel restless because I almost want to get it out of me already, want to write something about someone else, but I can’t. Not when I’m this happy, this hopeful, this oblivious to the opposition that life has purchased for her store, for me. You turn rainy days into hurricanes, resurrect morals that I put down on a side-table on my way to the kitchen, listen as though I’m saying something.
So no, none of this makes any sense. But I am senseless. I am so joyous with it all that I’ve pinched myself till my nerves have no endings, my words are no longer sending their message to every ear I’ve meant for them to grace. And this saddens me, amidst this quiet eruption of love, all I can speak of is love, everyone confirms that love, love is all you need – it is like a compendium of all the trite moulin rouge pieces you can manage, and there is nothing left under the foil when you lift it off. Just plastic, smouldering.
-A
