My Love Is Too Much

My love is too much- it embarrasses you- blood, poems, babies, red needs that telephone from foreign countries, black needs that spatter the pages of your white papery heart. You would rather have a girl with simpler needs: lunch, sex, undemanding loving, dinner, wine, bed, the occasional blow-job & needs that are never red as gaping wounds but cool & blue as television screens in tract houses. Oh my love, those simple girls with simple needs read my books too. They tell me they feel the same as I do. They tell me I transcribe the language of their hearts. They tell me I translate their mute, unspoken pain into the white light of language. Oh love, no love is ever wholly undemanding. It can pretend coolness until the pain comes, until the first baby comes, howling her own infant need into a universe that never summoned her. The love you seek cannot be found except in the white pages of recipe books. It is cooking you seek, not love, cooking with sex coming after, cool sex that speaks to the penis alone, & not the howling chaos of the heart.