Love Poem: We Are Not Built To Last
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Written by: Tony Bush

We Are Not Built To Last

HE: I felt so alive for a minute there. 
The moonlight struck your face.
Beauty fired my senses, arousing.
SHE: Tell me, I need to know you care.
HE: What will that tell you, what will it mean? What you already 
know? Or a dubious ambivalence that you cannot face?
SHE: You think we move too fast, I know. Pieces 
tearing away from us in blurring slipstreams? 
Would they strip us to the bones of unknown futures? 
Things we cannot sustain? Would such velocity deny you 
grip of your own personality. I wouldn’t ask that of you…
HE: Who knows what you would or would not ask of me if 
we don’t stop to think? 
To drink the air after rainfall, to watch 
the moonlight reflect in your tears, 
sweet silvered orbs of mountain dew. 
The savour of your essence, languid integration, 
development of a degree of certainty – barriers against pain and despair.
SHE: My tears? You mention my tears. My tears drawn 
from the well of your own sinking, buckets dipped in 
rupturing premature graves. 
The dagger plunge of reticence; failure 
to tell me of love; to say yes, come on, let’s go – 
and damn consequence. 
To hell with consequence. Tell me…
HE: Truthfully I am unsure of what to tell you. 
I hesitate to express it. I think, yes, I am in love 
with you…but do I love you? It’s early…too early…
SHE: I want to speed. I want to race. To run, shouting 
with adulation of you in 
rapture of your adoration for me. I want to 
move, fast, the way you moved against my 
flesh when needs must, 
when passion, lust, jawed and scavenged your will 
and rammed it against my bleeding feminine surrender. 
Time is wasting. Why can you not move fast?
HE: Fast? Faster than the rush of eroticism 
and it’s frantic tumult? Why, because the danger lies 
in reality and its fickle machinations. And it is this: 
we need to pace ourselves, for love, like 
the nature of existence itself, 
cannot be hurtled towards or through or against. 
Cynical it may sound, but neither is built to last, and 
neither are we. Each moment damns us by its intricacy 
You are…you are really crying now…I see…
SHE: Men!