This Is A Love Poem
Submitted in celebration of World Poetry Day, 21st March 2014.
I used to think
I will never write a love poem
because I’ve never known
or wanted to know
the way a spine can bend and break
when it arches
and I’ve never seen
or wanted to see
the blood-red maps
on bone-white skin
in the afterglow,
the morning after the night before.
I used to think that I would
always write falsely,
lie prettily,
pretend to write about love
when I was writing about mimicry,
but that wasn’t true, was it?
Because no,
I’ve never heard breaths so ragged
as to cut air with ecstasy,
nor felt fingertips lace like
tectonic plates, earth moving
and shattering and truths
forming on tongues too warm
to speak of anything
but shapeless sounds,
exaltations and exhalations -
But I have held people so dear
as to feel them crumble
beneath me from afar,
and I have lost myself
in loneliness
at the closing of a door
and the slow draw
of a final breath
and oh,
I have loved
rawly and without thought
to the consequences of loving
without a second skin,
but my flesh is untouched,
untainted,
and yet impure
for all those I have loved have left
some sort of trace
beyond and beneath the membrane.
Perhaps I’ve always written love poems,
and only lovers like me
have ever known them for what they are,
and others have found them wanting,
as I have never been -
but this is a love poem,
to all I have loved
in all the ways that I can,
and sentiment is not diminished
by the similes I can use from experience
and the metaphors I can copy from fear.
There have always been love poems.
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