Love is not the scrawl of notes

left on the bedside, whilst

the alarm clock suffers to clouts

and rings, awakening her.



Neither is love the aperture

between silhouettes

as they embrace so readily

against the walls. Some clinch

of absence, the antiptosis

of the you and I.



Love is not the spaces between

the ‘I miss you’s’ and the

‘here we are once more’s.’



Neither is love the separation

between our wants and needs,

to the disparities in the world.

It is not the defiance of obligation,

nor some holy rest-house

to the ills of the modern world.



Love is not some shared novel,

a story born out over a communal

conjecture of where humanity shall

rest upon the end of everything.



Neither is love the offering of a rose,

or any other bouquet of severed

life, strangled for the nourishment

of her; the justification of your

placement in her life. These are just

condescending gestures,



weak offerings to the Lord

of all you claim to be divine.



Love is not a life to be feasted upon,

nor is it the self-satisfied glance

in the mirror, as you finally decide

on your definition of ‘I’.



Neither is love this malformation

of words, this attempt of veritas,

this hollowed pursuit of whiskey-fuelled

longing, longing, longing for

some great hand to deliver life

upon my doorstep, upon our’s.



Love is simply the eternal rite

of Gaia; the motes of existence

that tumble with great devotion

and all-cause to their eventual demise,



their inevitable return

to the spiral that created them.



Love is the spaces between my breath,

between your’s.

Those pockets of meditation,

and the realisation of union

between all that was,

and ever will be.



Love is the acknowledgement

of power between us. Our previous

lives, blades of grass wilting together

under the footfalls of the now-trees,

the now-governors of our lives.



Love is in the ‘I know you’s’

and the ‘what would I do

without you’s’ that we have so struggled

to forsake in the day-to-day

tumble of our lives.



And to this, I say, that love is

these spaces that you may

no longer occupy. The barren stretches

of grey matter that no being either

mortal or otherwise,

could ever reclaim.



Love is the birth of bespoke experience,

and the knowledge

that nothing can erase us

from the archives of

everything that should ever matter.



Love is us.