Many will say
Love cures all
Those without it
Suppose
Once possessed
No grief and loneliness
I would tell them
Even with love
The hole in the world can be felt
And standing in your life
You may still feel as alone
As when you were single
There is no magic pill
Only the kind of sadness
That is not situational
But sits on the perch of the happiest days
Like a drab trailing cloud
Raining when you should be smiling
And the cult of happiness
Declares you a failure
And the cult of love says
Why wasn’t I enough?
And the insistence of mindfulness and karma and gratefulness and other totems
Banish your bad self
To the hinterlands
Where supposed beasts lurk
In the rolling gloom
And you are there talking to your therapist
Minding your manners and saying nothing
Of the deep scratch underneath your skin
Or how you came to be
A changeling
Who unwaged by the ambelical
Left the desolate nest
And found more succor in the sad glass eyes of a stuffed toy
Than any human hands
Many will say
Love cures all
And you saw the old lady in her wheelchair
Recognize you as herself
Fifty years hence
Though you would not wish
To inherit her absences
Growing like an orange
Without sun
Will therefore capture
No taste