Keep Breathing

An Art Swap Collaboration Prose Poem: A Lesson Learned About Love

The infinite poem composed by us all with every breath which forever self-writes itself with the implicit bliss in the never-to-be-completed sentence “…the word before this one…”

A pretty phrase that says nothing while expressing everything in not a thing. I call it “The answer to what inspires me.”

Inspire: the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of ideas giving breath to other ideas.

I find no inspiration more breathy than the will to simply soldier on. Soldier on or skive off: between that false alternative we find meaning somewhere, although if we find it before dying then I call us saints and madmen. Only the mad sing sane saintly songs. Or do I mean the opposite? I never met a sane saint or muddy madman.

I avoid my point. I’ll get to it.

I forget to mention: that the first theory of particle physics expressed itself in terms of love and revulsion. Some Millennia before (or after?) an apple found the graveness of Earth, a Greek said that little seeds composed themselves into all we see and arranged themselves by love and by revulsion. This seed loved that one, he might say, and they held together to make tingles from touching.

We give these roseate aspirations other names in our lately-learned wisdom. I would challenge us to mean anything more aromatic.

Aspire: the heartbeat steadiness of ideas trying to give breath to themselves.

A pretty thought, yes, no? The nun who taught me to think about loving seeds could not help smiling. The smile came after her worldly divorce and perhaps before her heavenly marriage.

I digress. To a purpose, though a selfish one.

I dislike writing poetry about love, and I now know why. I wondered.

Poetry, I feel, with nothing to touch and no smell or taste works weaker than poetry that touches. I have trouble writing about poetry, because as the aged satirist says and I say in my way, grind the universe to dust and show me an ounce of love I can touch and I will call it strange.

Poetry that cannot be smelled or eaten or touched, I have been told, does not have matter so it does not matter. A teacher told me that. He would tell me now that I love my memories. “I love her,” I might write, and he would tense it right with a little blue d.

I wonder about him sometimes.

Conspire: a secretiveness trying to breathe with other secrets.

A stretched love hurts, you see. Call it loss. Call it broken. Call it a dearth of chances to talk. Whatever I call it, love stretches because of souls.

If souls exist, they make love. They must, because both need to be iffed. I can say, “I love her,” but if she no longer lives, then how do I still love? If I love, what do I love? If a person, what part of her? The body stopped. The mind burnt out. If I love something now, what part of her is it?

A conspiratorial question. I have no answer for it.

The best and worst I learned from love was how it stretches. Past palls, I have to tell myself. If love won’t stretch that far then I will break from making it stretch. Love will break or I will.

Part of an art swap collaboration. To see the art I produced for a story by Stella J. McKenna…