Love Past,Present and Future
Love, it’s what we truly live for.
It’s as unpredictable as getting hit by a truck
while the world revolves
Love ever changes and evolves
Well
There’s the first kind of love,
of course,
the kind that walked in
like it owned the place
It kicked over a chair in your chest,
drank all the good liquor, ate your
Pizza
and left wearing your best years.
I thought that was it.
I thought love had to be
some beautiful catastrophe,
some woman with tired eyes
and a laugh like a broken jukebox,
someone who could kiss you
like she was forgiving the world
for being a cheap place to rent a soul.
when you’re young
you call it romance
because it sounds better
when telling the story in bars.
and I told it plenty, He’ll I still do
Old heartbreak
We speak of it
Like religion but
there’s not a priest more convincing
than a man explaining
why the thing that wrecked him
was sacred.
Once you denounce the deity behind the tale’s
Like a Nietzsche-ian claim of it’s death
that’s when it happens
love changed.
it stopped arriving
with fireworks and police sirens.
it started showing up
with groceries.
with a hand on the back
when the room got too loud.
with someone remembering
how you take your coffee
and that your silence
doesn’t always mean anger,
sometimes it just means
you’ve seen too much Tuesday.
current love
if you’re lucky
is less trumpet,
more stubborn lamp.
it doesn’t promise forever
like forever is a thing
you can buy and
Have it next
Day in prime
it says:
I’m here tonight.
you’re a mess.
I’m a mess.
let’s eat something fried
and tell the darkness
to wait its turn.
that’s a hell of a romance,
if you ask me.
better than the old one, maybe.
less poetry on postcards,
more truth in the sink full of dishes.
and the future?
well, the future is the funniest lover of all.
it keeps standing you up
until suddenly
it doesn’t.
I imagine love there
as two old fools
arguing over nothing,
one of them half deaf,
the other pretending not to be,
both of them moving slowly
through a kitchen full of morning light
like survivors of their own bad ideas.
I imagine the tenderness
will get quieter.
no grand speeches.
no climbing through windows.
no declarations fit for a movie
that lies to people for profit.
just this:
your pills are on the table.
the dog has been fed.
don’t go outside, it’s cold.
come back to bed.
I saved you the good side of the blanket.
if that isn’t great love,
then all the poets were drunker
than they claimed.
past love
taught me how easily
we hand matches
to beautiful strangers.
current love
teaches me how rare it is
to be known
and not used for parts.
future love—
if it comes—
I think it will be less about being saved
and more about being accompanied.
which is fine.
being saved is for saints
and drowning men.
most of us just want someone
who will sit beside us
while the ship makes its usual noises.
so here’s to all of it:
to the glorious wreckage,
to the decent repair,
to the laugh in the dark,
to the hand that stays,
to the bodies aging
like unreliable landlords,
to hope—
that cheap, necessary cigarette—
still burning somehow
between two people
who know better
and love