in the mood for love.

I become a profligate writer in all matters of you—especially now,
I'm compelled to start a religion, write all the holy texts on how best to worship you,
on the cost of devotion, cast warm light on all your shortcomings
(what God do you know is truly magnanimous, especially a young one?)

The art of loving you starts with boundless patience, and a willingness to be selfless,
would I share this poem with all your future lovers? Yes.
If not me, then I'd rather the next person who stirs something in you,
knows the compendium to love you.

Loving you comes easy—a natural state of being. For millenniums, generations
watched the sunsets, some were compelled by an unspeakable force
to cast it in paint, and others in words, but very little tried to
explain the mechanism behind it, why do our primitive
brains find beauty in the dying of sunlight, when it means
danger is to follow? No one knows.
Not everything is meant to be explained.

I think—we were the first humans to fall in love, and this is nothing more
than a generational love story, taking turns finding one another.
In this love story, you found me first. The tides come in,
you're gone, and I walk the entirety of the shoreline,
and find you again.

Of your brown eyes—russet brown when heralded by sunlight,
there is a learned tenderness brewing in your starry gaze, always.
Is it because, even in the presence of a blackhole (me),
even dimmest light can be likened to a star?
Or are you always brimming with light, so those who gaze upon you,
siphon all the ambient light you spill, in an effort to stave off the dark?

Of petal and flesh, of your rosemary breath, of your rosy touch,
I don't know which is the most incendiary, or is it just you—
a universe greater than the sum of its parts?

Every word you speak, born from an invisible wound—they don't carry hurt,
but if you could, you'd never speak again, relying on social cues,
touch, and your hands to do the conversing, except to
address your loved ones by name. How lucky are we to
be able to whittle down the entirety of someone, to just
a few syllables?

Your anger shows in the sea beneath your ribs—ebbing & flowing,
calm usually, but the threat of riptides and tsunamis linger in the salt-air.
Your cruelty comes in gentler forms, for the most part.

You are inclined to be cruel to yourself—it manifests more often in
smaller ways, than in grand gestures, you still endure the hardships,
the monotony of it all, at the cost of yourself.

You live in the margins / you love in the margins.
Your next lover needs to be mindful of the small stuff.
With you—it's always the small stuff.

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poem from my substack, https://prasannawrites.substack.com/p/preamble?showWelcome=true&s=w if you want to check it out