This Is Not A Love Poem, Thankfully

I don't want to love you

like a dog loves a bone —

desperate, drooling, territorial,

snarling at the idea

that someone else might touch what was never theirs to begin with.

I don’t want to be

that drunk poet,

spilling syllables like cheap whiskey

over his dead damsel

and calling it catharsis.

I don’t want to write you

into metaphors

like broken women folded into verses

for the sake of a poet’s redemption arc.

I want to love you

like silence loves ruins —

without saving,

without salvaging,

without the pretense of purpose.

Like thunder loves distance —

felt,

but never held.

I want to love you in a way

that doesn’t ask for belonging,

that doesn’t collect pieces of you

to build altars out of abandonment.

I want to leave you untouched —

not unloved,

just not conquered.

Not turned into another symptom

of my fragile genius.

Because love, the way we write it —

is often just colonisation

dressed up in metaphors

and bleeding journals.

So no,

I don’t want to love you

like poets love their pain,

or men love their mothers,

or gods love obedience.

I want to love you

the way endings love honesty —

with no flowers,

no crescendo,

just the truth

that not all stories deserve

a second draft.