love has no fixed face, love has many.
i taste love on the lips of my lover.
i hear love amidst my family’s laughter.
i rest my head on love,
on the shoulders of my mother.
i feel love in my arms and beneath my palms,
and sometimes it looks like a purring cat
or a sleepy-eyed dog.
to truly appreciate the essence of love
is to recognize that it can be as diverse
as it is abundant—and then suddenly,
love is not merely somewhere,
it can be anywhere and everywhere.
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diversity of love
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heart
when i tell you that i love you
i do not love you with just a heart;
i love you with unsteady hands,
hands that grip your hands,
with fingers skimming
every bit of skin they can.
i love you with a faulty brain,
a brain that learns you to love you,
without the capacity to love myself.
i love you with lungs;
i’m screaming at the top of them,
how i love you so much
that if you were a cigarette
i’d let you turn them black.
i love you with eyes,
eyes feasting on the view
like i’ve been colorblind
to reds and greens and blues
and now i’m seeing rainbows.
i love you wholeheartedly
but never with just a heart;
i love you with every organ,
each bone and all my body parts.
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“clumsy mouth”
you speak like a ballerina pirouettes
and the world listens like an audience
perched at the edge of their seats.
you make me want to sing,
but my tongue slides against my teeth
like a lush clings to a wall
once they forget how to use their feet.
the words tumble alongside my gums
and drop from my clumsy mouth
like an accident, like silverware
slipping through butter fingers.
and like a child gets bruised knees,
i get bruised cheeks,
but you’ll plant kisses where it’s blue
until everything turns pink.
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“growing older”
growing up feels like missing aspects
of ages you left behind
on playgrounds with bruised knees and scratches,
in front of TV screens that felt like
windows to real worlds,
beneath Christmas trees
clutching gifts that Santa left,
looking up to people in both height and expression,
reading comic books about heroes while vowing once you’re older, you’ll save the world too
because even as a child you know
there’s good things to uphold
and bad things to vanquish.
but growing older is walking past playgrounds
and watching movies without expectations
and setting up Christmas trees
because you’ve become Santa
and craning your neck less
but understanding people more
and still wanting to save the world,
but you take on days one at a time instead.
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“psychological warfare”
my troubled mind constantly reiterates
that i do not deserve love and kindness,
that i am nothing.
but my aspiration to heal
asserts that i do,
i do,
i do.
so the war wages on,
as i realize i am everything:
the battleground,
the revolutionary and the enemy.
and the enemy.
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spectrum of love
you speak in jokes and my love spouts in laughter,
you fall ill and i pack my love in pills
and pour my love in bowls of soup,
you talk about the things that matter
and my love listens because so do you,
you grow angry and my love waits
in the space you need to come back calm,
you feel sad and my love sounds like concern,
but it looks like hugs that wait
for you to pull back first.
but sometimes my love comes in banter
because loving you is making you laugh louder,
and sometimes my love sounds frail
because i get sick too, so it looks like a flicker
when i promise i carry it like a torch
and sometimes my love doesn’t listen,
sometimes my words gush in your presence
like a waterfall in a beautiful place
– you are the beautiful place
and sometimes my love gets angry too
so it pouts in a room
trying to love you more discreetly
and sometimes my love weeps,
because it aches in thoughts
that suggest to love you is to be more,
to love you is to be better
and loving you when i’m less than
feels like loving you less than you deserve.
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“poetic lover”
a boy i once loved discarded me
like a snake sheds its skin,
so i filled his absence with poems
that felt like lovers you can’t really love,
yet you still strip yourself naked
because they tell you
you’re most beautiful when you’re bare
and you just want to feel beautiful again,
so you write in place of love
and you scribble wherever it’s empty,
you write in place of nothing
to feel, to feel something.
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“the moon is always beautiful”
i observe the moon and i mistakenly remark how beautiful she looks tonight, as if there is ever a night where she isn’t.
i suddenly panic; who else have i undermined, so insidiously? with every “i love you” do they understand that my love is constant—constant, even in silence—that i love them, not just in the moments when i proclaim it, but in all the other moments surrounding every affirmation?
or when i tell them “thank you” for every helping hand and every act of kindness, do they understand that my gratitude extends well beyond what they give to me or what they do for me—that i am also thankful for the heart that moves the hands that gift and aid?
do they understand that i am thankful for their existence wholly and how without it food would be tasteless and music would sound muffled and even the moon would seem mundane?
anxiety, life, love, love poem, love poems, love poetry, melancholygalaxies, moon, planets, poem, poems, poetry, quote, relationships, sad, sad poetry, writing
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“hellfire and brimstone”
after you’ve been burned a time or two hundred, you start to wonder if your heart pumps gasoline instead of blood because people strike like matches the way you suddenly combust and even California looks like hellfire and brimstone when there’s no one left to trust.
