Spoken Word Poetry Compilation

Entry #45

"Excerpt from Last Love"

Know that your first love will only be the first.
And the second and third and even fourth will unprepare you for the most important:

The Blessed. The Beast. The Last Love, which is, of course, the most terrifying kind.
Because which of us wants to go with what can murder us?

Can reveal to us our true heart’s end and its thirty years spent in poverty?
Can mimic the sound of our bird-throated mothers, replicate the warmth of our brothers’ tempers?

Can pull us out of ourselves until we are no longer sisters or daughters or sword swallowers but, instead, women who give and lead and take and want and want and want and want, because there is no shame in wanting.

And you will hear yourself say:

Last Love, I wish to die so I may come back to you new and never tasted by any other mouth but yours.
And I want to be the hands that pull your children out of you and tuck them deep inside myself until they are ready to be the children of such a royal and staggering love.

Or you will say:

Last Love, I am old, and have spent myself on the courageless,
have wasted too many clocks on less-deserving men, so I hurl myself at the throne of you and lie humbly at your feet.

Last Love, let me never roll out of this heavy dream of you, let the day I was born mean my life will end where you end.
Let the man behind the church do what he did if it brings me to you.

Let the girls in the locker room corner me again if it brings me to you.
Let this wild depression throw me beneath its hooves if it brings me to you.
Let me pronounce my hoarded joy if it brings me to you.
Let my father break me again
and again if it brings me to you.

-Anonymous