Revisionist Poetry – LOVE, v4. (Darker)

i’m not sure what love is; i know its shadow.
it is the appetite that wakes at midnight,
a small, precise hunger that learns your shape
and traces the hollows where light once lived.

i love the way you keep a pocket of ache
like a coin for later—found and folded in.
your smile is not bright so much as necessary,
a lamp i steal when the lamps go out.

your hands are quick to stitch the threadbare parts,
to press the seam where my loudness frays.
your silence walks like a patient animal,
soft-footed, waiting at the collar of my fear.

sometimes love is a bruise that wears a lesson,
a dark geography i map and learn.
i love it still — not for how it saves me,
but for how it keeps me honest in the night.