The Futility Of Medium

Of course I love your letters, your flowers, your bumper sticker sentiments of devotion, your country song renditions of desire. I thank you for the gestures from your big, pure, unadulterated heart. Shout it from the top of a mountain, write it on my Wall, and if it makes you happy, go spell it with burning jet fuel in the bluest summer sky. Accept my touch of kindness but please don’t expect me to reveal what exactly is the flint and friction of my fire. If you had any clue who it was you thought you were loving, you would have already spared me the need to pacify myself and my burning, caustic urge to say what I think would definitely change your mind:

Stop sanitizing your love, dulling its razor edges and instead presenting a safe sphere of promises you can’t keep. Don’t bore me with talk of the universe and destiny or anything else you must credit to later seek absolution from blame.

Come to me incomplete, broken, cut, borderline depressed, manic and unrepressed and I will show you something so demented no god would ever permit. It has absolutely nothing to do with rainbows and roses and other overused demonstrations of an affection so carefully prescribed, but everything to do with rocks breaking off cliffs and falling into the water as giant walls that displace the moss that has gathered over years. It eats like an ulcer and claws its way out, making nothing else possible but a piercing silence of hunger and desperation, irrationality and lies. Way beyond white horses and confections and sunsets and all that poets describe. Past the wide open fields and dreamy yellow suns, instead worrisome like a shipwreck after dark. It’s compelling like the possibilities presented by the possessions of the war’s dead. Tempestuous like the attempt to reach for them and claim their right, panicked by the innocent surprise of having no hatch nor break in the hull from which to surface for air, and nowhere to turn but backwards through a complex maze, without light.

Tell me then if it’s still possible for you to remain in your body when the rest of you is consumed by another place and time. Only then should you attempt to capture in gesture what even I have to admit failure in trying to describe. There’s nothing as overdone as the futility of medium in love, other than believing it appropriate to send me used, secondhand, watered down manifestations of how you think it could be defined.