Love Poem 13

There is a crowd of people who say

love is pain.

There is also a crowd of people who say

love has pain.

There is another crowd of people who say

love should be without pain.

I am sure there is another crowd of people who say

love is the absence of pain.

And, of course, I am sure there is another crowd of people yet

again who say

love heals pain.

I am in the crowd of people who says that sometimes

none of this damn thing

is worth any of the time or energy.

I am in the crowd who thinks

all of the headaches

and

all of the heartaches

aren’t worth a goddamn thing.

Of course —and we all knew this was coming—

there is another crowd who says I am

nothing more than a cynic.

Oh god, and then there is that other crowd who have the

nerve

to say love is what gets us through.

And, I , the cynic ask:

love gets us through what?

Gets us through a life without meaning?

Gets us through a droning existence that bears little fruit

beyond pain?

Helps us navigate a world defined by breakdown and decay?

Love, and all its trappings, put me in the crowd where

I am the only one standing.

Love has taught me, more than anything else, that

I need to be prepared to feel and to be alone in the life,

that I need to

keep going

until I have nothing left but

an empty glass and

an empty heart.

One day, maybe I will fall in with one of those

other crowds,

but I have a hard time seeing that happening.