What can I say about Love?

What can I say about love

That hasn’t already been written

On the walls of gas station bathrooms?

Dispense with the regalities

Drop the pomp and window dressing

Love is nothing more than transactional

We trade time for promises of happiness

We give up pieces of ourselves

Hoping reciprocity makes us whole

All of this we do at great peril

There are no fucking guarantees

We diminish with every dance

We are decaying isotopes

You can calculate my age within seconds

Simply by measuring the holes in my heart

Love is just a painkiller

Heart holes grow larger

Euphoric you press ever onward

You’d think the dance would be aerobic

But there you’re farthest from the truth

Asphyxiating cells scream and die

Your lungs burn as if on fire

You claw at your throat

Hoping to taste youth’s freedoms

How far back do we need to go

To be before death stood at horizon?

When the time we could give was endless

It’s here where marrow no longer hums

Your body a tuning fork looking

For harmonic resonance in others

I know for certain that we die alone

This tragedy pervades everything we do

We hold hands just so there’s a letting go

But at least we don’t walk alone

The cadence of time marching

In lockstep with our decay

I know the gift of time is unrivaled

Except for the moments you are given

It’s not continuous but a string of tableaus

Those times you said you could die

Die in their arms, and you’d be happy

Or, when wishing a moment was infinite

These moments are the last to flicker out

The brain performing a fireworks finale

Fingers intertwined blazing in inky skies

Then denouement

And that is something

Perhaps everything