What is love?

Baby don’t hurt me, no more

When I love, it’s an addiction.

It’s unhealthy.

It’s raw.

It’s greedy

and superficial

and selfish

and all the bad things,

but love tastes so good,

like honey liquid gold and blood bead cranberry.

My love isn’t soft,

nor is it light.

It’s cloying

and encapsulating

and suffocating, it clings

and drips off of me like molasses.

I’m immature and undeserving,

so of course my love is contradictory and nonsensical.

I want you to smile at me from the side,

I want you to plan your outfits weeks in advance only to change them on the day you see me,

I want you to have your own sleazy love for me,

and I want it to be tragic.

I want you to see me in everything you pass each day,

I want you to discover a song when you meet me and to relate the two of us forever,

even when you can’t listen to it anymore,

I want to be stuck in your head something permanent,

something sticky and resisting like gum,

for once, I want it to be you thinking about every infinitesimal moment, running and rerunning those tapes of our memories,

I think I want to be seared into your brain with my name in blinding lights over your heart.

When I love it’s like the sword of an archangel, running up and down with righteous fire.

It’s impatient

and childish

and meddling

and petty

and easily hurt,

my love gleams with wicked hints of orange and flashes of sharp teeth.

And when I’m in love I’m spiralling like the rabbit hole,

jumping like looped footage doomed to a monotonous eternity,

I’m a storyteller overwhelmed with the fickle balance of truth and fantasy,

I’m a jester,

flirting,

letting you think it’s meaningless while guarding my tattered heart under a spatter of coloured squares.

I want you to sigh over me when your inhibitions shrivel in the dusk,

I want to be the Rome your mind wanders to,

I want to be the reason why you know how many minutes are in two days and three hours until you get to see me again,

I want to catch on your mind like a thorn,

make you skittish,

make you check your phone three times in two minutes just in case.

Just in case.

I want to be what you think of when you feel your pulse in your neck,

I want you to hear my laugh in the wind,

and smell my perfume on passersby.

When I love, it’s a travesty.

It’s the compass I guide myself with,

it sits bitter in my bloodstream for weeks on end,

it’s something to hold at arms length,

to lock up behind glass and the excuse of curation,

it’s something to be taken out of context and twisted to hurt me,

it’s the pit in my stomach that wanes and waxes like the moon,

it’s something to bask in,

to show off

and to wear on your sleeve,

beside that lovely heart of yours