How would you understand the words
I love you”,
if they were to issue from my lips?
Would you see it a catastrophe?
A young friendship, slowly built,
and suddenly rend?

The love of a strawberry, the totality of it,
the soft and hard, bitter and sweet.
A love that must always result
in the gnashing of teeth,
a violent shredding so soon after
the first kiss.
A complete consumption in consummation,
use of what is useful, disposal of what is not.

Would you think I wish to do the same?

The love of a flower, the rash desire
that demands you pick it and have it for your own,
to sever it from it’s roots and the earth it so loves
and indeed cannot live without.
To offer it only light and water and your gaze
until it withers and fades, and then a place in the trash.
Leaving you alone as you ever were.

Would you think I cannot love a flower where it stands?

The love of the flesh, the meat that stands before you,
and the mad impulse to possibly destroy any link
with the spirit within just to feel those lips
touch your own as she leans in to talk to you
above the music and lights.
And what is the sense of talking in the face of such bliss,
but that the price is much too high.

Would you think me willing to risk so much?

The love of the soul, the rare ecstasy
of seeing another soul and…
a physical ache that feels as though
all the organs in your torso are replaced with light
which travels down your arms in rods and out through
the center of your palms.
It speaks volumes that could never be stained with words,
and offers no explanation as to why it is.

Would you understand it as this?

If you are of the school;
“ some things are better left unsaid”,
I can only agree and point out,
this was written.
Far less courageous and yet,
more fitting, and irreparable.
The face that holds the lips these words would issue from,
it is not my face.
It is the face of the meat that loves you
because you are pretty,
and not the soul that does
because you are beautiful.