Most of the famous love poems begin at the writer,
“Shall I compare thee to a summers day?” “How do I love thee, let me count the ways” “When I love you, I become Liquid light”
and the focus is on how the love affects the author.
You are not loved like that
You are loved from afar by a host of witnesses, partial observers who sing your praises and laud your name. I am merely one of many who’s life’s been changed by your black girl magic.
You are the flower and the sun, an entire ecosystem of beauty, pain, feral aggression, and nurturing softness trapped within skin and summarized with stardust.
You are the rot that consumes, dark slick fertility doing away with that which is dead and dying, prying life away from the undeserving.
You are an all-powerful inevitability, like mycorrhiza, interconnected and an engine of reincarnation turning that which you kill with your terrible, exquisite existence into vibrant life.
You are the power of a fire set spinning into a void, so intense that it attracts life and inspires art and who’s mere proximity is the Prometheus of existence.
You are an illustration of regeneration in motion.
You are not just a pretty girl, or a smart woman or a good person.
You are a vision of the universe manifesting itself to experience life and doing it with such style and grace that it takes my breath away.
And so, I will not disgrace you with talk of the love of possession.
the love of self, reflected in the face of the other.
the love only begat by desire
or need
or lust.
Instead, I will pray to you in the way that the moon prays to the sun.
I will describe the love of a devotee as they turn their face to the façade of their goddess and stand in awe of her power, majesty, and the ineffable certainty that they are unworthy.
I will set a record in stone of the magnificence of you.
I will, if given permission, promise to learn you
I will cleave my soul to yours leaving behind a love that endures and will never end, merely change forms
I will inscribe my adoration on the monolith of you, perfect, deific, angelic, demonic, human, you
I will learn your habits, like how you take your morning coffee
I will create tender, intimate moments where I simply watch and wonder at the gift of you in my life
I will love you, with every burning, bared, imperfect part of my broken, bruised, and barely beating heart