I choose love. {poem}

I can do forever.
I can choose you night after night
and each day when we wake together.

I can say yes every time
I look into your eyes
wordlessly assuring your heart.

I can trust in what
I know to be the sweetest details of you
and relish in what I get to see unfold in time.

I can evolve with you.
I can learn with you.

Or I can be nothing with you at all.
I can let you leave now
and be at once destroyed and set free.

I can be alone.
I can embed our friendship in my soul
and cherish your past presence.

I can smile at our memories,
I can release with each salty tear
an expectation I barely realized I had.

I can be entirely yours,
I can be completely not.
But I cannot flit between both.

I cannot dance with together and apart,
I cannot sustain my pulse with hope,
beating with a never resting numbness.

I cannot be at your mercy,
I cannot mirror your impulses,
be pushed only to watch you pull away. Again.

I am here if you are here,
I am gone if you are gone.
Let us love each other enough to choose.

I love you enough to choose.
I love you enough to leave.
And oh do I love myself enough to not have to guess.


As published by Elephant Journal: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/02/love-enough-to-choose-poem/