Love always catches us loving superficial things;
Love is the mad, impetuous rush to embrace breasts, dresses, eye color, rings.
Here comes 2020, and we make a big deal of a date.
Can we save our love which died in 2013? No, the decade’s over. Too late.
All lovers suffer this paradox. Everything felt deeply
Was based on the trivial—
The most dramatic love, singing with poetry,
Was the one based on a raindrop whim.
The love which was dramatically full
Was the one which immediately became empty!
You asked me to give up the “good life,”
As your creeping heteropessimism
And woke disgust with “old boy”capitalism
Filled your heart, the more you saw me as someone who desired you as a wife.
I wasn’t reading the same woke signs
You were reading. I just thought you were being involuntarily cryptic, sad, unkind.
And you were. Love is never about the world at large;
Love is inane, private, trivial things.
Cleopatra gliding on her perfumed barge
Is not love. And when Frank Sinatra sings,
That’s not love, either. Nor Bruno Mars. Love isn’t Queer Theory
Or marriage, or socialism, or the “good life,” or years.
Love is you, confused by me, confused by you, crying small, small tears.