It is a truth universally acknowledged
That any man in possession of the enter key
Is indeed a poet.
Well what is left to write about muse
But our projections of this universe
And all that it contains
But the things we were told are all that matter
Those that seem out of reach
That even when within our grasp
They seep like water, through the palms of our hand
I once read that, before Jane Austen
Before Shakespeare’s invention of the human heart
As Harold Bloom would call it
The love that we know now was a concept oblivious about
Entirely eclipsed by the stuff that actually makes homes
The nurture, the care, the overlooking
The respect, and the quiet understanding
Before that, love wasn’t complicit
to our self-centered that made demands
Before that, love wasn’t as defeatist
And the idea of it being worthy of sacrificing our lives for was just absurd
Mr. Collins had it right
The day little Ms. Bennett said no to his proposal
He moved on swiftly three days later, to her friend Charlotte.
For love wasn’t love that was burdensome
A feeling if escaped from, it’s only atonement be death
Love was meeting a stranger for the first time
And vowing to make life a service to each other
Love is shy at first
And awkward
And stumbles upon itself
Love is an infant that grows with time
It doesn’t burn with desire, like the movies
It’s mute, and questioning, before it learns its first few words
Love then smiles often and makes little eye-contact
Love crawls on its stomach because it’s weak in its knees
before it has a spine
Love is disenfranchised, and not instinctual
And… entirely not what is often thought.
Love is 2am at night and she’s craving ice-cream
Or a smell of your shoe
A belly swollen with your next adventure
Love is a packed meal on a Monday morning
A 20-second phonecall asking whether you reached safe
Love is… the birth of a daughter
As he holds her for the first time
Fragile—as fragile as what you have…had been
Love is the silent treatment
And the hurt he feels arriving to an empty house
Love is…the homecoming
When you’re both glad to be under the same roof
Love is finding patterns of her speech in yours
And your litter of little ones moves out, to live
And hopefully, love,
build something similar to what you had
Imperfect, and quarrelsome, and quiet
Beauty that doesn’t call attention to itself.
Love is a 3-paged poem that isn’t.
Before it happens
And you foreshadow the quiet meals, the roadside silences
of how it ends having left her by herself.
Love is to endure life’s storms, to hope for tomorrow, until you can wake up no more,
taken deep asleep
by an affliction that has no cure.
***
