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It’s difficult to write about love,

When you’ve forgotten what it means to feel it:                  

I still possess all the superficiality of love,

I see your body and desire to touch it,

But I cannot feel your heart beating,

And I cannot feel my soul; I only float

In the distance between them.

We can make love, and I will shout like it

But when we’re done turn me over to my side,

Like a living, breathing corpse, exhaling

My conscience and inhaling guilty regret.

When we’re done put your arms around me,

My body will accommodate by perfunctory design,

I’ll even sigh contentment and sink into you, life-like

But make no mistake, my eyes are wide open.

I will stare into nothing wrapped in dissonance,

That you mistake for harmony, you poor soul

Pouring your love down my skin, it permeates nothing,

Like grey rain on a windshield, you only make me colder.

I was fluent in love, but I lost my tongue,

So I begged my flesh to react and remind me

What are the qualities of love, its corporeal affiliations?

But my blood is silent and my heart is an amnesiac.

I feel for you, I do, in the nature of affection,

But it is not love were it so I would not pity you

And drown myself in disaffection; this is only

The nervous rambling of a privileged apology.

I desire you to desire me, of that my ego is sure,

But I can only let you wander in the dark for so long,

Until you’re lost and forget why you came here at all,

And I remain hollow: a cave in a hill made from guilt.

I have words too many for emotions too few,

But for love I have none; they are gone:

Their spirits severed from their skeleton semantic,

They are translucent letters of a phantom vocabulary.

Forgive me love, I have tried so hard to wake you,

I have tried so hard to want you, need you, feel you.

You remain ignorant or indifferent and yet you rage,

Sleeping silver on the ashes of my frigid ruin.