Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
21h
We love to hate, and hate to love
ah but what is this weightless, vapor-thin love we throw like coins,
sprinkled like dust, dissolving in air,
we keep the prize tucked for the deserving,
spilling naught for fools, oh, is this how it should be?

Grasp—grasp!
Ungrateful swine, swallowing your words,
blind in your greed for something more
love none, yet declare you love all.
Empty mouths speak in hollow tones.
You are nothing. We are nothing.

Empty words, lips carved from stone,
numb hearts for sale, wrapped in the lies of a comfort
you can’t even taste.
Apathetic to the rawness of feeling
devoid, disconnected,
shallow oceans beneath this glassy sky.
Love’s too far, so we reach
stretching thin, grasping for meaning where it’s lost.

Try to love it all, they say
What does that even mean?
Absurd, exhausted, a lifeline tossed
into the void, only to be consumed by hunger.
So how do we love when the world turns away,
when love is stretched, a fraying cord?

Ah! Love everything, love it all, love so wide
a judge of hearts crushed into ash
not a breath of truth in the dust
that scatters on the wind.
No soul left in the words, no fire— just smoke.

To say “I love you” without fire,
a wound left bleeding, a scar left open,
not a whisper of realness— a void wrapped in nothing.
And yet we breathe in those lies,
letting them fill our lungs with hollow ache.
How pitiful
But we keep on. We keep on.

Love is not for the void,
not for the gullible hearts that pull at straws
Oh, no. It’s fierce.
It’s a hurricane
A flame burning for the worthy,
consuming the unworthy, leaving nothing but charred remains.
Don’t waste it.
Don’t throw it like seed, feeding the crows.
Cast it like an heirloom
burning bright.

Hate, too, finds its place.
How long have we been afraid to hold both?
Torn between mercy and punishment,
love and hate are twin flames.
To hold both is to know the whole.
Are we so naïve as to think we’re better than this?

To love everything is to love nothing
To say it, feel it, but never know its truth
How fragile this offering we give to the wind.
No.
Don’t give me shallow rivers when I seek the sea.

So forgive?
To forgive all
but the cost.
To forgive, to love, to let it flow
until hatred grips so tight it drags you down.
Which will save us?
Love or hate?
Which will burn longer?

Do you know what it means to feel deeply?
To hold both, to know love and hate
in their raw, unrefined states?
Oh, we hold light and darkness in one body,
and when we know them, truly,
we know what it is to be alive.

The sun does not love the moon.
And the moon does not hate the sun.
But they are bound
connected by a distance we call time,
pulling each other into orbit,
in their own perfect way.
Both necessary, both.

We love with clenched fists
proving nothing but fear.
Blood and fire
all for the grace of love
until bodies fall, tears rise,
and the sun doesn’t know
whether to burn or bless.

So humiliate, so break yourself,
lower your soul to fit their mold.
And where is the love for the one you should know first?
Yourself
Lost in the lines you draw between false spaces.
How can we love when we don’t even understand the power of a single, honest heartbeat?

There’s no grace without truth
no salvation without the burning both:
light and darkness, love and hate.
This is the measure. This is the scale.
So hold both, feel both,
and you will know what it is to love.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
August 2024
The Balance between Love & Hate
Malcolm
Written by
Malcolm  40/M
(40/M)   
22
 
Please log in to view and add comments on poems