Want Is The Soul Of Love.

How do we know
when to give up?

How do we know
when to finally
let go?

Of all that was,
and all that should be
but isn't?

How do we know?

Perhaps
it is a birthday passed
without the breath of a word.

Perhaps
it is
a Halloween,
a Thanksgiving,
a Christmas,
and a New Years,
spent without?

The black out
and cut-off,
should be the tip of the hat;
but I want more.
I want,
a funeral of great pomp and circumstance;
to bury this love.
I want sad trumpets
and a twenty-one gun salute;
before I can finally take
this love I carry
and put it in the ground.

I want a perfectly appointed,
uniformed soul
to hand me the neatly folded flag
of our "nation of two",
and look me in the eye
and then away.
I want someone to acknowledge,
and agree
that I have suffered a great loss;
through no fault of my own.
I want resolution.

I want to turn back clocks,
and walk backwards
through the hills and hollers,
of the family homestead,
until I somehow
find my way back into waiting arms.
I want to wake
in the blackest of the blue,
of the earliest morn,
and feel the breath upon my shoulder.
I want to reach over,
after waking from this nightmare,
and touch;
feel the alabaster cool
of familiar skin,
beneath my numb and broken hands.
I want.

I have never needed.
Needing is for the weak,
of heart and soul.
Wanting is so much more.
Wanting
is the soul of love.

And now,
I find myself
spinning out here
on the edge,
of this beautifully complicated machine,
needing.

I am at a loss.
"Need" is an emotion
I am not accustomed to.
It is a silly word
used by silly people
without a sense or purpose and self.
And here I am,
needing.

And here's the salt,
rubbed deep,
with steel wool,
into the wound;
It was all nothing really, wasn't it?
Because if it actually mattered,
why would I be out here,
alone,
lamenting the loss of you?