Something Like a Love Poem
I tried to write a love poem,
But all I can think about is instinct.
I took a first year anthropology course in my third year of university,
And it taught me that I am an animal,
That complex thought,
And abstract thinking,
Are all that separate me from a bear.
Love does not separate me from the bear,
Elephants have mourning rituals,
Crows mate for life,
I find love in the bodies of other men,
And so do swans.
I tried to make this poem about love,
Instead it’s becoming about how my teeth evolved to tear.
I distract myself by thinking about hands,
How fingers interlock perfectly,
It’s romantic to think that we evolved to hold each other,
Opposable thumbs are meant to grasp,
I wonder how long it took for our palms to kiss,
For fingers to weave together,
For love to become a recognizable feeling.
I wanted to write a love poem,
But all I was doing was beating meaning into words with a club I named ‘holiness’.
Everything looks pretty through a stained-glass window,
Anything sounds holy when you invoke Bethlehem,
I am not a son of God,
The memories that built my bones were not conceived in Eden.
I wanted to write about the tenderness of holding,
But all I can think about is cracking open my ribcage and sucking the memories out of my marrow.
Once upon a time my ancestors were scavengers,
Picking meat off of bones and eating marrow like it was divine ambrosia,
Until they learned that they could kill.
What did it feel like to take a life?
The blood on the hands of my ancestors is a pink phantom that haunts my palms,
And the spaces between my fingers.
My teeth evolved to tear meat,
My canines are sharp by biological design,
Everything I have ever loved wears my crooked bite mark.
Once upon a time my ancestors downed megafauna,
But they also planted gardens.
I scrapped my poem about love for one about instinct,
And now I wonder if there’s a difference.
I crack my ribcage open so I can turn my B.C. instincts into feral poetry,
And find that my marrow is sweet as honeycomb,
That the foundation of my being is love.
The first thing a human being is is loved,
We are loved before we can even bring air into our lungs,
The hands that held us moments after birth once tore apart carcasses,
And painted cave walls with powder and berry juice,
Love cannot be separated from instinct,
It is instinct,
It is the first thing we know,
It is what unites us with the Earth,
Our hands evolved to hold,
How beautiful it is that we use them to hold each other.
I took a first year anthropology course in my third year of university,
The unit notes mentioned how there are burial sites older than the invention of digging tools,
I got a D in that course,
But I never forgot that.
They had nothing but their hands and still the graves must have been beautiful,
The pollen still nestled in the dirt tells the stories of the flowers laid to rest with the deceased,
I lay awake at night thinking of my ancestors,
Who dug into the unforgiving earth with only their bare hands,
How their fingers must have torn and bled,
How their nails must have broken down to their beds,
They could have taken the bodies away and left them for the predators,
Instead they dug graves one handful at a time,
And twisted flowers into halos.
Long before we dreamt up holiness,
We made angels of our love.
The sharp edges of the human soul contain an indescribable softness.
I wanted to write a poem about love,
I no longer think that the nature of human love can be effectively put into words,
But here’s my best attempt.
But all I can think about is instinct.
I took a first year anthropology course in my third year of university,
And it taught me that I am an animal,
That complex thought,
And abstract thinking,
Are all that separate me from a bear.
Love does not separate me from the bear,
Elephants have mourning rituals,
Crows mate for life,
I find love in the bodies of other men,
And so do swans.
I tried to make this poem about love,
Instead it’s becoming about how my teeth evolved to tear.
I distract myself by thinking about hands,
How fingers interlock perfectly,
It’s romantic to think that we evolved to hold each other,
Opposable thumbs are meant to grasp,
I wonder how long it took for our palms to kiss,
For fingers to weave together,
For love to become a recognizable feeling.
I wanted to write a love poem,
But all I was doing was beating meaning into words with a club I named ‘holiness’.
Everything looks pretty through a stained-glass window,
Anything sounds holy when you invoke Bethlehem,
I am not a son of God,
The memories that built my bones were not conceived in Eden.
I wanted to write about the tenderness of holding,
But all I can think about is cracking open my ribcage and sucking the memories out of my marrow.
Once upon a time my ancestors were scavengers,
Picking meat off of bones and eating marrow like it was divine ambrosia,
Until they learned that they could kill.
What did it feel like to take a life?
The blood on the hands of my ancestors is a pink phantom that haunts my palms,
And the spaces between my fingers.
My teeth evolved to tear meat,
My canines are sharp by biological design,
Everything I have ever loved wears my crooked bite mark.
Once upon a time my ancestors downed megafauna,
But they also planted gardens.
I scrapped my poem about love for one about instinct,
And now I wonder if there’s a difference.
I crack my ribcage open so I can turn my B.C. instincts into feral poetry,
And find that my marrow is sweet as honeycomb,
That the foundation of my being is love.
The first thing a human being is is loved,
We are loved before we can even bring air into our lungs,
The hands that held us moments after birth once tore apart carcasses,
And painted cave walls with powder and berry juice,
Love cannot be separated from instinct,
It is instinct,
It is the first thing we know,
It is what unites us with the Earth,
Our hands evolved to hold,
How beautiful it is that we use them to hold each other.
I took a first year anthropology course in my third year of university,
The unit notes mentioned how there are burial sites older than the invention of digging tools,
I got a D in that course,
But I never forgot that.
They had nothing but their hands and still the graves must have been beautiful,
The pollen still nestled in the dirt tells the stories of the flowers laid to rest with the deceased,
I lay awake at night thinking of my ancestors,
Who dug into the unforgiving earth with only their bare hands,
How their fingers must have torn and bled,
How their nails must have broken down to their beds,
They could have taken the bodies away and left them for the predators,
Instead they dug graves one handful at a time,
And twisted flowers into halos.
Long before we dreamt up holiness,
We made angels of our love.
The sharp edges of the human soul contain an indescribable softness.
I wanted to write a poem about love,
I no longer think that the nature of human love can be effectively put into words,
But here’s my best attempt.