What madness can proclaim this righteousness on those loved? What seething, foaming-at-the-mouth anger produce this lowly doctrine?

Is it spite? Is it apathy? One of the two?

No. No.

It’s love. Pure, honest. Love that sends shivers down the backs of men standing strong like bulwark redwoods, love that penetrates past sheets of iron and aluminum castings. Thick, wrought with purpose and meaning. What futile, malleable form is this that can break past naturalized and industrialized carbon, that can leap over minds and sanity like beating, pursuing horses on grassy plains?

Power hunger dogs of man. Rapacious hearts of spearheads and rifle butts. To fall under blunt truncheons, savage and beastly and barbarous even in times of prehistory and war.

This cannot be true, this cannot be real.

“This is the only thing real,” she says in a blue sundress and full moon night. “This, right here.”

Truth is found in compartments under doors and pedestals of wanting men. It is found over the bridges of scientific prowess and between the cracks of literary devices. Truth cannot be, this, this, a lexicon of idioms and rose petaled phrases, this, a miraculous message proclaimed upon a Sinai hilltop, crowding clouds crouched under godly fears, brought down, smitten upon, a lost people searching for their rose in the middle of a desert.

You could be my rose. You could be the truth to it all. Prickly, sweet. Bitter and honest. What is this — life? Mind games?

I find no judgement calls from the unbridled fountain pen, weapon of choice for the serial love poet. Neither ruminating debriefs about what tie to choose nor slacks to present at a dinner or a show or both in a row.

I’ll sit, cross-legged round rings of under grown adults, we, sipping tea like privileged village elders, and talk about famine and Syria and Apple products as if they were ingredients to some NPR cake recipe.

And you’ll be there chatting it up, the center of the cosmos, the atom bomb explosion in the surrounding, eternal dust.

“Charmed, I’m sure.” “Lucky stars.” “Oh, my.”

The explosive tendencies of my own boil over, pasta shells and all.

“I think it’s time we left,” I’ll think as if I’m forecasting the next cold front for a local cable station. “I think it’s time to go.”

No. No, but the brumal season will not concede my opinion. Gelid winds lining artillery, frozen shells crashing. The sidewalk, frozen. The driveway with the cars huddling together for warmth will be subdued. No driving after that bombshell.

Considering the temptations, and the evil, retributions. Considering the fact at hand, the lover, the wanted one, the one across the room by the punch bowl underneath the little throw up green, carpeted staircase. I find solace in being the heart’s victim. There’s little discomfort in being hurt by your own misfiring (or correctly firing?) heartbeats.

And no matter the strife or the victim molding, no matter the amount of pain I’ve saved up for myself like a slowly rising jar of coins, I’ll still shoot.

I’ll shoot for your stars and your moons above in the heavens. I’ll aim for those things you seem to like, those clothes you seem to like to wear. I’ll educate and resolve myself and find out about how and why they make it just so that you, you yourself figured out by now, love it so much that you wear it to these little gatherings in the neighborhood.

I’ll be a Prufrock, an Eliot wandering across sullen city streets contemplating coffee spoons and scuttling claws, his place and if he should pursue. Should I go? Should I continue?

What is this, this thing brushing past me like a common urbanite? Light lavender with fused frankincense. Wavy hair blown back. Moonlit face, pale and beautiful. Chanel bags tossing carelessly in wind chimes. Body curved and supple.

My huntress decked in spoils of the hunt.

My heart on two legs.

Robert-Cole Evans usually writes columns and news articles for his high school paper in Bulverde, Texas. He is a senior who has a developing interest in making his writing better. He also has a Twitter, Instagram and a blog called Topical Tenor.