I once wrote beautiful love poems rife with

Verses that

Screamed out the exalted joys and melodies 

Of my heart;

Poems which bore naturally assurances 

Featuring the poet comparing women to confections,

Or perfected chemical equations,

Or nymphs, goddesses and triumphs of storied

Vanguards and deceased decadences of the lame patriarchy.

Love,

For me,

Then,

Love had no opposing force.

It was a simple conqueror.

Love was a warrior spirit I expected to liberate

Without Judgment its

Sufferers, like I, who had been condemned to rot in sexless rooms. 

Of sexless rooms:

I can picture still the adolescent snarls of love barrel hellbent

Into these sexless rooms, these

Silent or perhaps fake-moaning vacuums of space,

And charm totally the women and men

Flailing around in such awful places,

Charm them off, away, to terrible and windy suitors

Promising faith entombed—

And less romantically,

(And for only the truly lucky ones–

For that’s who true love spares–)

A completely grandless offer of partnership that

In brutal terms

Prides itself on forgiving awkward first moments and 

Evolving frailties.

Yes!

Forgiving, not punishing:

In favor of:

Always in favor of:

Promise;

Potential nestled up in the trips of todays and tomorrows;

And best of all

The heart’s inert compass for homebound adventure—

Sicked forever on prospering its paired soul.

(Its paired soul?)

Yes!

Every person has a paired soul.

A paired soul—

As the scholar,

The idiot—

Might describe it

Is:

That unknowable other life you invite into your own life who

You put up with and who puts up with you

And who stupidly avows their 

Inconceivable endurance,

Wordless, felt fealty, and 

Reality-drunk confidences to you, as you do them.

But, ah, yes it is so!

But… so…?

And yet…

No.

Not at all–

How should I know?

Well, there was a time in which even idiot I 

Wrote beautiful love poems.

It was a strange time and a time in which I,

Playing the role of the blind jerk harvesting bum fancies of a  

Most juvenile and romantic imagination,

In knowing nothing about anything,

Had come to believe somehow that something as powerful as love could be netted

In curt gestures and pick-up lines, in maybe

The aisles shoved between clothing racks or there within the

Witch eyes thieved off pining elders with cataracts or even in 

Flighty concepts like

Fate, chance, and design;

Anything really…

Ha!

But no.

Love, the sad and diluted kind I’ve lived out, 

It has made me

Dumb without feeling

And smart beyond intellect and it has

Preyed me down.

I never once found it,

Nor do I expect to, now or again, for 

‘las, now,

Those who do love: 

It is them, those alone, I pity.

Yes.

Love, ha!, woe love, for it has surely left a 

Sour taste in my mouth:

Sour now,

Sour since, this, 

Yes, sour

Forever since

It soured South.

 

Am I an idiot for feeling so?

Sure–

Yes–

No doubt.

But can love not harm me in such a state?

Sure–

Yes–

(... ok, I may say so with some doubt.)

But I can go on living with some doubt.