Last week on the night before my tenth wedding anniversary I was part of the latest Car Crash Collective reading at Footsies in Lincoln Heights. Under neon lights I read a poem about love before a crowd of Gen-Z literati. Here it is:
I Tried to Talk About Love
and it wasn’t for lack of trying.
My notes app is a shallow river
of built up sentiment and bird-song-calls of love.
There are blackened legal pad pages,
reflections scratched on the weak, egg-yoke lines
cast like tectonic refuse across our bedside table.
They resulted in nothing
but the footprint tracks of a dog wandering
spinning into itself
full and slow under its own indulgence
biting at the parts unknown.
The words worked my fists into gnarled manilla knots
like calloused paws from running
and tighter yet i’m pulled to the page.
Talk about love, try it.
Talk about love, scream.
All you get is a throat burn howl.
The more you know, the more you don’t
and I know nothing,
You know nothing,
I know everything
You know everything, undone.
Ten years into love,
and tomorrow marks the moment,
I did,
I do, forever.
I meant it and said it
to a woman whose skin is
the hour of the pearl,
new sun, young sun, touching horizon.
With breath of lavender and petrichor,
want and ether,
Moonshot and beauty in bedlam,
and when she says my name…
you don’t get it.
I don’t get it.
Cause we’re not supposed to.
I tried to talk about love
I have tried every day for ten years
and the best I can render is to say
love is an instinct and I am a ragged dog, panting.
Poems about love
are poems about breathing, dying, unending.
Talk about love, try it
Talk about love, scream
Because what we talk about when we talk about love
Is akin to looking at an eclipsing sun
through pinhole on paper
we can only see the shadow
of a love in the time of love changing.
Tonight is a night that I can do that more than others
its August 23rd 2023
and ten years ago to the day
was august 23rd 2013
when I was a child at the Holiday Inn
getting married in the morning
to that girl, cast in the hour of the pearl, undone.
We stood before the Los Padres range
where coyotes breed for life
and trot the golden foothills in pairs, unending.
I was a dog, hungry like a dog,
the purest in my wanting.
My frontal cortex, an absent father.
My frontal cortex, who fucking cares.
I never needed answers
for belief in my instinct.
I knew everything in that moment
I knew nothing at the time
I know nothing in this moment
I know everything, what now.
If you can explain love
Refine love and cut it into parts for the edit
Then that is something different than love
That is something,
else.
Talk about love, try it
Talk about love, scream
All you get is a love sick howl.