I don’t love
How I’m supposed to.
With my skin
Serving as my heart.
I hear the sounds of lovers
And their flesh meeting;
The dull slap
That constitutes as communion
And I wonder
Why can I not see the beauty
The way they do?
I can understand
Why sex is wanted,
Why it must be done.
Humanity wants to continue
And surely it must be a pleasure to most –
But I do not feel the undercurrent of desire,
I do not feel the fire,
That poets and children both speak of.
Most assume then that I simply do not love.
That I am a machine
Made of wires and currents
Rather than muscles and nerves.
Or that I am daft in the language of skin;
That I will learn later
When the panacea walks along
And ignites my blood,
Which is made of water.
There is nothing simple about it.
I want to kiss someone with my words.
Let the tones and letters twine about their ears
And lavish their mind with praise
Until they are left gasping.
I want my galaxy to collide with another
And create a storm of dust and light and color
So that I may hold a new universe in my hand,
The starlight leaking through the cracks between my fingers.
I want my soul
To join with another
So that I may see all the shadows, the fissures, the holes
And the suns, the stiches, the whole.
I would let them see mine.
And then we would thread together
Like a spider web
And remain so until the end.
My love
It is too much
Too frightening, too consuming
But it is also not enough
Not corporeal, thus it is not real.
But how can
Words and
Storms and
Destruction and
Creation and
Universes and
Everything and
Nothing and
Souls and
Spider webs
Not be real?
Why am I
With my defective skin
That holds everything in
Just as yours
And beating heart
That pumps out blood part by part
Just as yours
And my soft brain
That creates love, fierce and tame,
Just as yours
Less than?