La Vie en Australie

I once knew a boy who wanted to see a new world. So I followed him there to take his photo, because that is what you do when you love. Lucky for me, he is as beautiful as the land.

But right now, these photos are all I have of the person I love, and that isn't such a nice feeling. It is scary and shitty and beautiful and I just don't know what the fuck to do about it. 

So to quote Atwood once again...

Variations on the Word Love

This is a word we use to plug holes with. It's the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart- shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it. We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love, you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too. How do we know it isn't what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weed- seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute. Then there's the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear. this word is not enough but it will have to do. It's a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go -Margaret Atwood

Love Ache

A few weeks ago my good friend Molly gave me this poem written by Margaret Atwood. For me, this is one of the truest and most eloquent expressions of love I have ever read, and it makes me weep every time like a soppy pre-teen watching Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet for the umpteenth time. 

This is the love I feel. This is the love I give.

Variation on the word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head.

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as beathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

Margaret Atwood