Love/Hate

“How can you hate what I love?” she asked
draped over the sofa, ellipses stuck in her throat…

“Because I hate everything,” he answered
and deposited a lifetime of trust in an off-shore
account that the instantly forgot existed.

She thought about his words, and then she
thought about her relationship to the words,
so she took a powder and disappeared somewhere

up north, and he collected fall-out shelters
and moved among them like a wanted man.

I absorbed the style of your night,
your courage like a good-sized cocker
spaniel, crouched and hackles raised,
ready to protect you at a moment’s notice.

But you don’t need protecting, do you,
with your prodigious smile and thick
intentions, hogging all the finger sandwiches
at the Banquet of Forlorn and Spurned Lovers?

My, how you haven’t grown, remarked
the 135-year old woman, frail and blue.
It was true enough, though you rejected
her words like you rejected me year ago.

You moved with the the speed of paper
cut, small but fast, redolent with outsized
pain while the rest of us redrew our maps,
marking off the places deemed too dangerous.

"I like my men cold, dark, and handsome," you say,
and I tell you I have the cold and dark parts
down pat, but I struggle with the handsome bit.

You shrug and let me in anyway, most likely
figuring I’ll get better-looking the more you
drink, but that isn’t going to happen, my dear.

You’ll have to settle, I’m afraid, which I know
makes you cringe, but there’s nothing to be done.
Your core temperature plummets as I wrap

my arms around you and the light bleeds away.
Someone is crying--it could be either one of us.
Before your eyes close, you whisper, "You’re not so bad."

You said our love was as impossible
as sunflowers on Mars and left
me under a sleeping, purple sky.
I was terminally awake, a doomed
butterfly having just taken flight
under a poisoned, pretty dome.

Dying but determined,
I forced myself to the red planet,
ignoring the titled passage of years,
and settled onto the burned soil,
tasting it with my tongue.

I surveyed the copper hills
and sienna canyons,
but there were no flowers,
no Martian seedlings or new blooms--
nothing but blasted, irradiated ruin.

I drifted back toward Earth,
buffeted by indifferent solar winds,
no music of the spheres to comfort me.
I gave up somewhere in the stratosphere.

By the time I connected with the ground,
I was nothing more than a cosmic ghost
watching my body disintegrate, its pieces
as scattered and hopeless as Osiris.

I knew no one would gather my parts,
cradle them, and do their supernatural best
to breathe and mold me back to life,
least of all you, ignorant as always to
the astronomy of need, the gravity of pain.

scheduled a meeting with you
in spite of myself.

wrote down a couple of guidelines.

    "be polite. be friendly.
    avoid her eyes, and her hair as well,
    do not look at her legs, do not look
    for flirty subtext in her casual
    conversation. ask the right questions.
    don't stammer. remember you are not 13.
    don't look at her and smile and say
    'I love you'
    when all you should be saying is
    'goodbye.'"

tried not to worry; after all, it's just
a crush.

after all, I am not really
in love with you
that
much.