MODERNDAY PRIMITIVES

(ME AND YOU AND

JOHN AND YOKO) 

I love you
whatever that means

love is
a many gendered thing
a mutual cannibalism in
which contradictions collude,
blood and sometimes milk
trust and then betrayal
endless promise
and intense
beautiful
desolation

tell me the truth about love

it’s the one night stand
you never expect, the squelch
of unquantifiable copulation
where 100 million years of
evolutionary programming
gets thwarted by the
thinnest membrane of latex,
when you wake alone in a
strange room with your
contact lenses welded
to the back of your brain,
in a sick sense of
emptiness

love is John and Yoko, Sid and Nancy,
Wystan and Chester, Fred and Rosemary,
Sartre and De Beavoire, Popeye and Olive,
David and Victoria Beckham,
me ... and perhaps you ?

The Supremes keep ‘Falling
in and out of Love’, as though it’s
a constant equation of measured breath
skin humidity and hormonal disequilibrium.
a viral infection of known properties and Lab
tested chemical composition, subject to
particle accelerating expectation until
beyond this point on the neural
print-out, it becomes primal
but it’s not

love is the
9-year 10-month 13-day commitment
that ends after 1300 enactments of love,
in bed, standing up, from behind, in the bath
in the kitchen, in mild bondage, in suspenders
interrupted by premature ejaculation or by
Mormon missionaries, 17 in cars, 120 oral,
53 in Hotels, 2 attempted anal,
25 in the garden, 3 on the beach,
then some furtively with
other partners, then separated by long
emptinesses of remorse and insomnia,
until it’s no more, and you’d give
anything for just one of those
1300 lost copulations

it’s exchanges of spores and bodily
fluids, and yet it’s not the only fruit

sometimes I don’t understand it

yet still I love you

whatever
that means


Published in:-
‘BAKER STREET IRREGULARS no.3 / MINOTAUR no.34: Poetry in San Francisco’ (USA - March 2000)
‘PURPLE PATCH no.117’ (UK – July 2007)