poem: Love is a Choice

"When I kissed you and lightning charged in like shrapnel and everything was sweetly wild?"

Love is a Choice

Do you remember how love came easy when
it was new and in the full flush of passion?

When I kissed you and lightning 
charged in like shrapnel and everything was

sweetly wild? Do you remember when breaths 
came quick and I was nervous and you were nervous

and all we wanted to do was swim in love’s sleepy waters?
Do you remember how love came easy then?

But love can sometimes get lost in the swirl of jobs, 
and raising kids, and grocery shopping, and mortgages.

It’s then that we have to choose love. To search for it.
To find it in the middle of messy kitchens, towers of

dishes left in the sink, cereal hardened 
onto bowls left out all day on the kitchen counter.

We have to choose love when warring hearts
gallop easily into forgetfulness to break vows 

with pin-sharp words. We have to choose love
when dreams seem aborted, stolen even, and our 

days become plaintive songs of expediency and 
obligation. We have to choose…

Everything in the universe moves from a state
of order to chaos, so why should love be any different?

We are made up of stars that became too unstable
to hold together, stars that could no longer withstand 

the crushing pressure of gravity and shattered 
into the glittering dust of particles that made

their way to you and me. When we choose love we 
oppose entropic forces pulling us apart in the starlit hours.

When we choose love we bring heaven to earth. 
We were meant to be a family of stars!

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