When you Pluck out my Heart
To find what makes it move, you
Halt the clock that syncopates our Love.²
Love seeketh only Self to please—
To bind another to its delight—
Joy in another’s loss of ease—
And builds a Hell in heaven’s despite.³
I tell my love to Wreck it all:
Cut out all the ropes—and let me Fall.⁴
Love, grown Faint & Fretful, with lips but half Regretful,
Sighs, and with eyes Forgetful, weeps that no love endures.⁵
Heaven is too much a Metaphor to be useful
To a lover Weeping for False love …⁶
If I were out of love & sequence
I’d turn love’s End—its Death—Knife-like
Against myself to cut off my Distinction
And rejoin the commons—Maimed—⁷
If our breath be as happily fatal
To ourselves as to all others—
Let us join our lips in one kiss of
Unutterable Hatred—and so Die!⁸
Will we go on Aching still through Centuries of Nerve—
Enlightened to a larger Pain, in contrast with the love?⁹
Is Love stronger than Unlove?
Only the Unloved know.¹⁰
¹ Gwendolyn Brooks, The Life of Lincoln West
² Sylvia Plath, Trio of Love Songs
³ William Blake, The Clod & the Pebble
⁴ Justin Vernon, Skinny Love
⁵ Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine
⁶ Purvi Shah, Mira Pushes Aside the Mountain You Are Climbing
⁷ Alan Dugan, Conspiracy of Two Against the World
⁸ Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappaccini’s Daughter
⁹ Emily Dickinson, I Measure Every Grief
¹⁰ Charles Wright, Littlefoot 19