CLINGING

Though they pressed tightly against each other,
love found a gap and leaked away.
Love goes without saying, even
without sighing. Everything else
oozed away, pleasure, excitement, even
at last clotted boredom--it all went
without saying--until, stuck together
by the vacuum between them, in silence
they became inseparable.

[Note: Not intended to be a criticism of love, but a description of one way to fail to create it, while mimicking it, the uniting, not of mutual admiration, but of mutual need for it. That's not a new idea. Perhaps this metaphor for it (the pressure of clinging pressing out love as if squeezing moisture from a sponge) is a new look at it. (Probably not!) The old idiom of things going without saying, here becomes the silence as love gradually vanishes, perhaps not noticed until long after there's nothing there. Of course, love doesn't vanish. It simply stops being created. And in this case, it was badly alloyed with need to begin with. Reminds me of an old song, CLING CLING CLING off my trolley.... ("Clang Clang Clang goes the trolley...")]

Dean Blehert
dean@blehert.com
dblehert@verizon.net