After 20 years
I don’t have it
in me anymore
to not love you
more than my life
more than mankind
more than any life
but yours.

You have saved me
so many times
from myself
I’m pretty sure
you hold the mortgage
on my soul.
If I believed in souls.
If I did
you would be one,
an immense, timeless
born-before-god-and-sin
holy, anti-entropy soul.

And I love you
more than
any version of god
anyone ever invented
and sold by the pound
to the poor, needy,
and helpless.

You are better than all of that, ever.
You are beyond that
in my uneasy mind,
a mind troubled by
literally every fucking thing
but you.

I want to hold on to you
to love you
and have you
near me
for 100 years more.
Alive, I mean.
I know you knew that.
There’s no sin
in the simplicity
of hoping for
an impossible wish.

I already got one: you.
And I want
another 100 years of you,
because the 20
we’ve been married
just doesn’t
seem like enough.

(In California in 1991, 2005, and 2019. See my other work here and here.)