heart

Love is…

…a beating, throbbing, bleeding heart, pinched lightly between teeth, or encased in a loose fist. Love is alive, and precarious. Love is the absence of love and the love of love. Love attacks you from all sides, but you revel in your defencelessness, want to roll in the blood that seeps from your wounds because it is sweet and life-giving and if you can somehow work out a way to keep it, to siphon it back inside just so that it can pour out again, you will be able to sit on the knife-edge of crazed, intense love for ever. Love is an exchange. Love wants to bribe your soul, but you would happily give it. Love is laughing, love is remembering, love is reaching out and opening up. But love, too, is being left open; raw and exposed on a black mountain, grasping onto nothingness. Love is being forgotten or erased except in that sore, condensed part which stings and prickles salt tears in your eyes when it is prodded by love. Love is grief. Love is, from its very germination, a terminal, tragic knowledge. Love will not let you not love. Love is tyranny, denial, a departure from that independence you once knew, and love cannot help you. Love is a parasite. Love will feed you just enough to keep you alive, and in return it will take from you all that it needs. Love can make you fly; but it can leave you earthbound. Love does not know pity. Love can shine on you so brightly that it hides the black heart growing inside you, a cavernous, unfillable hole that grows as love grows. Love is the red mist behind your eyes. Love is a dark muse, goading you to heights inspired, masking your memory of sense and sanity and calm…

Love is…