The Truth is Stranger

Is it true you don’t choose who you love?
It’s a convenient enough argument,
usually made by people looking back
at old relationships or studying chemicals
in the brain, but that train of thought
also mean it’s out of our hands.

I would propose a theorem:
you can love anyone you know
enough about, which means
love is natural; therefore,
bound to happen again
and again and again.
Yet we’re, including myself,
afraid to call it love;
we’re afraid of labels that bind us,
which also seems natural.

So what is boundless love
supposed to do in a body?

It looks different on every person:
Some throw buckets in faces,
some hoard it into small moments
with particular people.
Some would rather not acknowledge it all;
I can understand that too.

But if love is natural,
as my theorem proposes,
no one would long survive
were it altogether cut off.
Were it altogether cut off,
that person would surely choose
death. Whether it’s absence
is an illusion or reality,
that person would surely choose
anything except.

We’re all learning to let love in,
we’re all learning to let love out.

But we all want to be in love,
surrounded, engulfed, bathing in it
like a claw footed tub wider
than any sea would dare to be.
That wouldn’t do; it doesn’t match
the world around us.
We struggle with two visions
in our head, rather of our brains:
the world we perceive
and the world we want to believe in.

I can tell when I might fall
in love with someone,
because it feels like coming home
at the end of a long day working
under the sun and taking off
all your clothes to lay belly-up
with the fan blowing
on your slightly burnt skin.
Feels like taking a big deep breath
after being under water
and forgetting you could rise up
at any moment, for any reason at all.

Like the sun, love remains
even when shielded by thunder
clouds and rain storms.
And our bodies are like the atmosphere
of planet me: I only look solid,
I only seem to be the atoms I am.
But I could just as well be the table
or chair, the lady bug or stray cat.
I could just as easily be anything,
because the sky only appears blue.
The truth is much stranger;
it almost always is.

*originally published on connerleecarey.com; part of my 365Poetry project, #5: Join the fam while you’re here.