when I, or you, wake up and go downstairs
to see our parents in the morning and they say
I love you, how do you do, and you say
I love you, slept well, how about you?
and they say, good, me too, and you go to school.

You go to school where they tie and fasten your noose
and pull you under gray skies until you swear
you'll lose your mind, you go to school where you lie
and wait- covert eyes, surreptitiously despise that you have to
whisper to me, between closed walls and closed doors, I love you.

In this world of rules and halfway angry, halfway desperate
people, we build palaces so as not to see the little black box
underneath it all, this indestructible fortress, where no one can hide
or conceal, every time you open it, you get more and more undressed
naked, under the glaring light. (But hold me tight.) I love you.

when, in storms and cliffs, half past raging and half through sadness
what can we do to end this madness, when even in
the depths of our beings, even in the darkest of magic
we can't find the strength to say it, I can't open my mouth
because I've said it too much or too little, maybe, but I love you.

When the spires and pillars and holy desires clash, and this
Church cannot stand on sand, what is the one thing they've forgotten
they say that marriage is less, and more, too, but they don't
even know what they mean, after eternity's lost all hope of despair, what
is the one phrase that their God cannot bear? I love you.

In alleyways of the heart, in broken and forgotten verse- in drunkenness
and dying, what slips in through the cracks that the light gets in? What
scandal is too vulnerable to be wounded? Why do they call it sin? the blood
that flows under the current, between the leaves of book pages and underneath
pulses beats from long ages, (please have the nerve to say it), I love you.

If, at the end of time, when there are no more rhymes
when the forests are burnt to ashes and all life left has died
when breath no longer rattles through the bones of the dirt
and the darkness has quenched all of our God-lit thirst
what have we left on this Earth? I love you.