Love

alex stoddard

Love is a pack of cigarettes that you smoke all at once and now you are burned and sick. Love is unceremonious. Love is drunk and disorderly. Love is a ghost you can’t exorcize. Love is blind groping in the dark—terror, bliss. Love is acres of pain with a square inch of pleasure. Love is a vice. Love rebels. Love is a teenaged party at your parents’ house and by the end, everything is trashed, and everyone’s in trouble. Love thinks it is above rules. Love is above rules. Love is being gutted, gently. Love is wordless. Love is wordy. Love makes morons. Love is a vampire. Love doesn’t give a fuck about you. Love makes you a liar. Love ties you upside down to a tree and sacrifices you in the name of no one. Love is a starving person who can’t swallow. Love swallows. Love is unconsenting. Love uses force. Love is the friend who sucks all the life out of you and then doesn’t even ask how you are. Love is a dumb jock. Love is a poorly-run marathon where you start out so confident and by mile 9 you are sobbing in the back of an ambulance. Love is alone. Love is a big bang. Love is the single greatest purveyor of entropy. Love is a black hole that sucks out all the light. Love bites. Love is on the tip of my tongue. Love wanders aimlessly. Love wants you to quit your job. Love is your job. Love will fire you without notice. Love costs more than a house in San Francisco. Love is somewhere between heaven and hell, and either way, you’re dead. Love is a high-class whore and you pretend to have the resources. Love is defiant. Love is fear. Love is the roommate who steals your furniture and doesn’t pay the electric bill and leaves you lying on the cold floor. Love is a goddamn lesson. Love asks you to murder, and gives you no alibi. Love is the fool who occasionally spouts deep, unbidden truth. Love is choosing to go on hunger strike at the banquet. Love is a burning coal in your beak. Love is an obsidian blade made of winter.