The Futility of Medium

Stop sanitizing your love, dulling its razor edges and instead
presenting a safe sphere of promises you can’t keep. Don’t bore me
with talk of the universe and destiny or anything else you must credit
to later seek absolution from blame. Come to me incomplete, broken, cut,
borderline depressed, manic and unrepressed and I will show you
something so demented no god would ever permit. It has absolutely
nothing to do with rainbows and roses and other overdone
demonstrations of an affection so carefully prescribed, but everything
to do with rocks breaking off cliffs and falling into the water as
giant walls that displace the moss that has gathered over years. It
eats like an ulcer and claws its way out, making nothing else possible
but a piercing silence of hunger and desperation, irrationality and
lies. Way beyond white horses and confections and sunsets and all that
poets describe. Past the wide open fields and dreamy yellow suns,
instead worrisome like a shipwreck after dark, its explorers tempted
by the possessions of the war’s dead, their innocent surprise of not
having a hatch or break in the hull from which to surface for air,
and nowhere to turn but backwards through a complex maze, all without
light.

Tell me then if it’s still possible for you to remain in your body
when the rest of you is consumed by another place and time. Only then
should you attempt to capture in gesture what even I have to admit
failure in trying to describe. There’s nothing as overdone as the
futility of medium in love, other than believing it appropriate to
send me used, secondhand, watered down manifestations of how you think
it could be defined.