Not Love – a Poem

Not Love

It’s not love when I’m afraid, when
	I know from many times that
	you’ll say
		those things with
			that expression. 

I want you and
	already my gut knots, knowing
		whatever happens will
			hurt.

You don’t do tenderness, not in sex.
	Understanding’s not where you
		come from.
	You wear black robes even when
		you’re naked.

I have trouble keeping it up in enemy
	territory, waiting for your knives to
		cut me down.

It’s not love when you won’t hear me, won’t
	hear me, won’t tell me, eyes locked
		somewhere years
			away.

It’s not love when I do for you or away you
	go, snarling, I must try to
		make it better or good-bye.

It’s not love when your eyes turn so evenly
	blank to TV, no time for me, us,
		seeing nothing you don’t want
			to see.

It’s not even friendship, it’s
	a moth trying to love a spider.

It’s not love when it’s we two, hungry, “Feed me,
	feed me.  Daddy, mommy, care for me,
		damn you.”

Suck each other dry, toss and grab another.
	“They’re all alike, can’t trust any,
		unreliable.”

A year, you never saw me once when it
	really mattered.

(Well, perhaps once, or even more.  I think
	sometimes you worked at being kind.
		It’s just I couldn’t count on you,
	worn down by waking every day not
knowing if you’d be with me tomorrow.)

It’s not love.  With you it was
	love as I knew it, school in session.
	You taught me more than you
		know, I think.
	For that I thank you.

I know you tried, hard enough to say you’d
	tried, not hard enough to love, to
		face that what you think and do
			might connect
		with why it
	never works.

So truly brave sometimes, but still
	in love an angry coward.

Never saw
	through any eyes
		but your own.

It wasn’t love, but yet for us it was,
	and now
	I strand by strand untangle wings.
Perhaps I’ll learn to fly.

~riverflows