The Service of Love

Please Click Play Below to Hear the Spoken Word Audio File of this Writing Piece:

The Service of Love

It’s so important for you to live

And be happy in the here and now

But that’s no longer possible while I am away.

You tried.

You tried so hard to let go of the fear

but it never soothed the loneliness in your heart.

Not from here.

 

Me, I’m a dreamer. I dream away anyway.

I felt certain of the future because that’s where I live.

My second home.

While I felt confident of the future you felt so uncertain of the present.

But I never did.

I gave you my heart and I never looked back

Because the end of the story had already been written.

 

You wanted to be touched now.

You wanted to be loved now.

You wanted something I cannot give

from half the world away.

 

I could give you my love through a telephone,

through a hand-scribbled note,

a poem, a rose, or

back to the damn phone,

But I cannot love you how I love best and that is with

my hands. My body.

My warm, supple skin and the slow rhythmic heartbeat you can feel just beneath

My breast, my breath, my moving up-and-down chest.

It beats for you.

It does.

 

But you can’t feel it.

Not from there while I’m here

serving my duty. My country. Part of my life dream

And so it would seem

that’s it for now.

 

I woke up one day and my whole world had changed

And the people would look at me and say, “you’re so young, my dear,

It’s supposed to be this way.

That gross, overtold fairy-tale of lovers growing old and gray,

Well, if that were the case

She’d stay.”

 

So it would seem that’s it for now.

 

Now my heart goes onward with each new day

Confused at things I felt once were.

The future seems a lie and the present seems a mystery

And the past throbs in my heart like a living, breathing, history.

But I quiet it’s voice with each inhaled breath,

Accepting the lies, the “one-days”, and inevitable death.

 

This thing, it’s bigger than I, than you, than us.

 

It’s time to settle in comfortably to the vulnerability

The looming uncertainties.

Time to erase the ending to the story I’d already written,

The ending I read to you each night like a bedtime story.

It’s time to wake up with a blank page,

Until the words write themselves.

 

This is my service. It has my heart, but you have my love.