Mars’ Love Poem

I would like to write a poem
full of butterflies and rainbows
and chirping, and I could dedicate it to you,

but instead I write the poem of love
that is industrial, that steams and clatters,
is filled with tiger blood and red-eyed anger

because I do not believe in love as beautiful
gentle sweetness all sparkly and whee,
I am the Lover who sees the war of charmed claws

and raking fire as more beautiful,
who understands that an ever-certain pain is better
than an uncertain ecstasy that may end

with a whimper and a good bye folded
into a card and a bundle of soon-dead daisies.
I roar the love like Charlemagne’s armies

sweeping back across Europe, of Crazy Horse
raising his rifle to sight in upon the usurpers,
the love of how I am when I’m bleeding in your arms

and you are bruised in mine because that is how
we sleep best.  I would like to write the poem
of pastel and lace, of average joy, of something suitable

for a movie theater full of easy children, but I’m the poet
of loveflood come a-carrying corpses
and the ruins of lives, of animal stink in the street

when the water sinks away.  I want to be the obvious
but I am the other, as you are the other, skin soft and flushed
fury, teeth at my neck, deep in my flesh, roll me like

tobacco to be consumed.  I want your poem to be
the pen tip’s open gush of too much to take, and I want to handle it
the way I barely handle the massive storm of us.