this is a love poem

Driftwood love, and it washes up in the grit of low-tide. "That's love alright, you can tell by the footprints". Love has little footprints like some extinct thing, like it's a miracle every time it walks. Face like a glass of whiskey, voice like a foghorn. Love has the softest skin.

Love is a new cancer, but love is more like a taste (salt?). But it's more like the instinct to run or fight with your bare fists. Yes, love is more like a bribe. Oh yes, love is more like the dust on the top shelf.

 

So maybe I don't know a lot about what love is but I do know a lot about what love is not.

Love isn't the crusts cut off, love isn't stuck to flypaper in the heat of July. Love is not kind. And love is not unkind.

Love is not the soft, kitten skin of the pink rosebud; it's not even the thorns, nor the unquenchable hunger of the sun-soaked leaves---what's it called again? photosynthesis---it's not the stem (no, of course love isn't the stem). Love is the roots. Love lives in the dirt, love is thirsty and no matter how much MiracleGrow you beg from the hands of the kneeling gardener, love is still thirsty. And then all at once: love is very easy to drown in your haste to water the plants before your 2:00 appointment to meet someone somewhere---it could be anyone---but there, you've done it, you've drowned the cactus, you've murdered the marigolds, you've let love's lungs fill with water (because love, you poor fool, cannot swim), but that's fine, everything's fine: you'll make it on time, 2:00 sharp.

This is a love poem. It goes: L for lobotomy, O for the occipital lobe, V for vendetta, E for the color that eggplant is (the color that your bedspread is). Love drank too much, yeah, love is sobering up.

I know another word for "love". It's "karma". Love is the way you run over a cat in your truck, and someday: the way you get hit by a truck. Love goes around and love comes around; you pour love a cup of tea and I swear, love pours you a cup of tea. If you wake up in the middle of the night shouting, "All's fair in love and war!", then love will bring you the TV remote and the pistol, because love won't know which one it is this time: LOVE or WAR?

We all find love in the unlikeliest of galaxies: me in a death threat, you in a blister pack, I know a girl who swears love was the anvil that fell from the sky and broke her neck. Maybe we don't fall in love, maybe we jump for it. You were easy to forgive, but not to thank.

The truth is, I'm seventeen-years-old and I don't remember heaven and I don't remember hell, so I have no idea where I came from. I've got one-tenth of the truth and I've got growing pains and the only word I know how to sing is "love". I love you, that's the truth, too. Whoever you are, you're skin and you're blood and I love that about you. You're so sincere: I love that about you.

This has been The Devastation Diaries.