Love as Blindness as Labyrinth

That feeling that as Etta sang, “I would rather go blind than see you walk away,”

I know no one has ever felt even close to that way about me

In turn I have only felt it once, maybe twice, but the second is still percolating.

My heart is a numb ache of wanting to set vulnerability as an offering

Resting unspoken in a hub of vagabonds and socialites scurrying and stagnant

The spoken for and the commotion is a blistering fog of nothingness

Disguising the statuesque assumptions that someone else is in route

The discussion is merely halted for temporary cessation, a breathing repose

For individual sanity, when the duration is neither known nor assured to be any

Less than one’s life span, observing in introverted labor strike

So that we are each running in haste about this life panting for a partner to dance

Whether crowded in outward panic or calm the result is genetic

Our animal kinship whips sexual drives as our master demanding propagation

Of our line in the species even if we know it is not in our best interest to acknowledge

Our true placement in the community

The silence in the vat is habitat for conjecture, overtures and recognition

That we know so little of who we are and in secret hope to discover an answer

In the arms of someone else

That departure sentiment of knowing we are truly loved

By what our removal would do to the other is indisputable.

The function of despair is not to bring one to depression, but sadness

Genuine sadness in the absence of our dearest love

Is not our self, is not our incompletion, but our composite elation

Spun into flesh of empathy and yearning to know the scale of our humanity

Cavernous, intricate and independent to time balances on the breaths we have uncertain

And to revert so dastardly to elect with remaining time to undo;

To select not to venture inward and onward with such hand to skin, eye to the curvature

Of one’s heart tangent to one’s cheeks in the volumes one can express in a simple smile

Or lack thereof, one knows eternity in the extraction

One wishes not to see the darkness of such labyrinths; for there is no bottom, no end

Only the idea of not loving; of untethering one from such bonds and yet remain a self

This is an inexorable facet of true love, of which much has been written

And only the brave have ever escaped