What use is love?
What good is she?
Why this, and not that?
Scream and stamp feet.

It is, perhaps, the powerlessness that comes with the inability
to change a damn thing,
or at least,
change things in my favour.
Of course the powerlessness was always there,
but it's through the unrequited desires and passions
that the delusions and vanity are smashed mercilessly.

It is also, perhaps, the struggle to comprehend
the changes in the hearts of others,
when something once lived in them so fiercely,
and then not only dies,
but vanishes with so little trace as to suggest
it was never even there.
Of course,
I accept easily my own capriciousness
and need no further explanation, nor feel the need to offer one,
beyond the observation that my tastes have changed.
When the shoe is on the other foot,
and it is rammed so far up my arse that it chokes my throat,
There is no greater outrage.

Were I to accept powerlessness and changing hearts,
the loss of love and loss of light,
with wise humility and pragmatic stoicism,
I would consider myself all but
dead.

No.
Fight!
Fuck the stoics.

Each day I compose shit little poems in my head
that mourn loss
or rage in anguish against defeat.
They serve no purpose,
but fill me up with skewed notions of injustice
and so much self-love.
But better this than to surrender,
than not to demand, if not expect, something good.

Course I'm rarely that strong,
and the manual for living with defeat
instructs us to change the aims of struggle
to the point that surrender becomes the victory.
It takes a certain kind of strength
to really kid yourself
that the way things are is the way you wanted them,
or that you can abide them,
or that everyone is, in some way,
living in the ruins of their own ambition.

What use is love?
What good is she?

I saw her today,
pretty and even younger in the summer sun.
It was the way she looked at me,
as though I was just anyone,
that cut me down.
Childishly,
bitterly,
I wanted to present her with the long list of her hypocrisy,
the broken word,
the contradiction,
the woman who used to look at me with longing.
I suspect this is the way that some men become unhinged
and turn to stalking,
become misogynists,
unable to accept the very ordinary and reasonable twists of fate
that they think nothing of giving,
but can never take.