Fuck Love
Self-ish prompt: The Grinch stole Christmas, Who’s going to Steal Valentine’s?
Disclaimer: If you are a romantic, this poem’s not for you. And it includes a lot of fucks 😉
This is for those who love to hate love,
but can’t help falling in love anyway.
And so we fuck love; naively, without protection.
We spend so much time denying that we feel anything
that we hardly notice when it slips past
our carefully constructed but lightly manned defenses
— and into our beds.
So we fuck the love we claim to hate
and we don’t even know it’s love;
we refuse to call it love.
Love is some grander feeling,
some bigger person than this little thief that just wandered in.
Love is not this adorable thing we just want to play for a little while with.
Because —
If this was love, we would know, right? right!
Our walls are still standing, our gates firmly shut;
Love would know better than to come in where all the signs point out.
So we fuck love; this lost, innocent thing we found in the garden.
We play around, we feel safe.
We show it our secret spots,
the holes in the wall we’ve been forever trying to repair.
We make plans, share our dreams of maybe — one day
sneaking across for just a little peep at what’s on the other side;
what everyone’s been going on about;
what our moms warned us against.
We even confide a little and ask this stranger,
“Have you ever seen love?
Is he as they say he is?
Do you think these walls will stand?
And he laughs and shakes his head and winks as he says,
Forget love, keep your eyes on me.’’
So it continues, so it continues.
Till we wake up one day and we realize —
Love fucked us.
We watch in horror as our walls are crumbling down,
the cracks running through the mortar like marching ants.
We try to find our new friend,
But isn’t he the one on that horse, leading the assault?
Had it been love all along?
We scream for mercy and ask him to remember,
“We had fun, didn’t we? It was all play. We let you in!
Please don’t leave us this exposed and naked”.
But he smiles as he rides down the gates.
‘’Mercy, mercy’’ we crawl on our knees, humbled.
We finally see everything that lies beyond and it scares us;
Light and darkness, good and bad; everything that is and isn’t.
Is this what it means to be Alive? Awaken?
“Stay or take us with you,
but please don’t let us face this Unknown alone.”
But he laughs and says, “You get what you are given”.
and kicks the dust of our defeat in our face
as we birth his bastard babies amongst the ruins of our hearts.
Fuck Love.
