I hold a grudge against the idea
that love is a stage of learning —
a leap from first grade to the second.
In one love, you learn the ABCs,
in another, linear algebra.
I despise the quality this assigns to love:
as something fleeting, enlightening, light.
Love hurts.
Love teaches nothing.
Love is complete unlearning.
It is the undeniable limitation of the human psyche.
From my love, I learned nothing.
I carry it to no one, pass no wisdom on.
From all my mistakes, am I to draw lessons?
NEVER! I will forget her,
I will turn her into a blur,
murky with forgetting.
I will prove to the world that love yields nothing
but the raw essence of autonomy.
Love is the death of joy.
It is carnal, unnecessary,
and entirely fraudulent.
I learned nothing — absolutely nothing —
from my love. And I will not look back
with the face of wisdom.
Not I, not she, not anyone
has any right to speak of love with wisdom.
What is left to us is only regret,
the lost years that never return,
the aching urge to go back and do it all again —
differently this time —
and to pound the ground in rage
at the impotence with which time punishes us.
Let us celebrate the mistake!
My “love”! My “friends”!
Let us celebrate our incompetence
in making this one life
something beautiful.
So we hide in the caves of Santa Maria,
we beg for other lives, we believe in reincarnation!
But we shall all return as insects, if we return.
And we shall all go to hell, if salvation exists.
And we shall drink colossal doses of alcohol,
and we shall cry in the gutters of forgetfulness,
and we shall, at last, feel alive!
And let them come to me with lessons of love,
with parables of soulmates,
with manuals of overcoming.
Let me tear them with my tongue,
burn them with bile,
silence them with my silence.
For from love I inherited only emptiness,
and a heart that locks itself by instinct —
like an animal beaten
who learns to fear affection.
But no, do not say I have learned.
I did not learn.
I was mutilated.
I was forgotten.
I was unlearned.
And from the depths where I lie,
I shout at the sky and spit upward:
I want no lesson, no redemption, no pretty poem.
I want the right to hate without being healed,
I want the right not to forgive,
not to find meaning,
not to turn this — whatever this is —
into some uplifting ending.
For there is beauty, too, in what rots.
There is a strange aesthetic in failure,
there is glory in failing with honesty,
there is purity in untempered rage,
and solemnity in those who dare to love.
Let us understand ourselves for what we finally are.
We will embrace the insignificance
of that random act
that bundled a handful of atoms
and loosed us into this finite universe
in every one of its axes.
And we shall all be shattered by the inconstancies of life.
And we shall all be stretched on the rack of spacetime.
And we shall all be betrayed by our lovers — if we do not betray them first.
And we shall all be forgotten by others, and by things.
And we shall all be unhappy, cursed, and unhappy.
And we shall all be errors of this universe.
And we shall all be.
And we shall be.
Let us, then, celebrate the coming of peace — of death —
the celebration of life
as a sequence of mistakes,
avoidable,
and inevitably irreversible.