Weird Wednesday Love Poem No. 6

Jul 19

Prompt this week was ‘Hell is oneself’. Next prompt? Vomit. That one should be fun, right?

(I like posting the poems as an image to maintain formatting, but for screenreader, same poem text below.)

Weird Wednesday Love Poem No. 6

They say, or, rather, one guy said,

once,

‘Hell is oneself.’

But I don’t think that’s precisely it.

I think hell is a very distinct lack of you, Love.

It’s not about

nothing to escape from, and nothing to escape to.

It’s not about being lost in a mirror maze, and realizing

everyone else you see is only a projection.

You can look, but there is nothing to touch.

Obviously, that bothers me.

I feel that distance,

that inability to touch soul to soul, because there are bones in the way.

There is the impossibility and fallibility of language.

I can never know if what they say

and what I hear

are the same thing at all.

But if that is the consequence of flesh and feeling…

Fine.

I don’t care.

Not really.

But you, Love.

I want to hear everything you say.

I want to clasp you so close our hearts shudder in a single cage.

I want to tangle legs and fingers and strands of hair.

I want part of myself to be you, Love,

for I have carried you so long, sunk into my sinew.

In which case, it sounds heavenly to be oneself,

to know you are here, even when you’re not,

to sit in a mirror maze together and know the rest of the world can’t hurt us,

for they are merely projections.

I want to write full time. I think good books can make the world a better place and that’s how I want to contribute.

Things my mother taught me by dying young.