cindy ellen hill
LOVE IS BULLSHIT
Copyright Cindy Ellen Hill 2024
Green Cottage Press
144 Mead Lane
Middlebury Vermont USA
No use other than literary criticism/review without prior permission of the author.
Cover image: Decay by the Chicago River, copyright Cindy Hill 2024
cindy ellen hill
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
-Sir Thomas Wya., where is an Hind
My love is like a laundromat
My love is like a laundromat at dawn, empty except for one old loud drunk guy ranting about the Mets as his thick brown fingers pry change slots with a metallic click and rustle, but each one comes up dry, and then he's joined by a disastrous chick whose makeup is not right at this hour cold florescent lights do her no favors.
He asks her the predictable question whether she is inclined to suck his dick She says fuck off, but neither of them leaves and later on he asks if she believes in God. A young man keeps his expression blank, staring while the dryer timer ticks.
Free Jumbo Jack With Order
My love is like the Jack in the Box clown taking my order at the drive-thru when I'm stoned and I can't roll the window down so I circle the place and try again
while the scrawny teenage grill jockey frowns inside the way-too-bright-white fast-food expanse of empty yellow tables. The rain drowns out his voice and blue clown eyes look askance
and all I ever really want is fries but I'm laughing too hard at his round green nose. The speaker squawks out ludicrous replies. Maybe he's saying something about size which makes me laugh harder. I hear, WE'RE CLOSED. I CALLED THE COPS.
That green nose, though.
My Love is Like a Class I Took
My love is like a class I took decades ago, a course I vaguely remember. That thick textbook, its battered red cover. I either aced it, or there were no grades. The professor, old guy, always wore shades. If I had failed, well that I'd remember. He'd make us do those drills! Duck and cover! Pedantic lectures broken by tirades.
Yeah, my love is like that. Brown tweed. Pipe smoke. A secret penchant for interns and coke. Was it philosophy? John Locke. Descartes. More likely existentialism. Sartes. In other words, nothing, going nowhere. Nihilism. Or wait, was it Voltaire?
Chopper Ride
“My beloved,” that imaginary friend, appears as a drunken helicopter pilot in my nightmares, in a chopper that bends in half as it flies. Its motor silent. Massive black spinning rotor blades extend and droop like an umbrella cage, pliant, slicing trees like butter as we ascend. He laughs, full of tobacco stains, violent and mocking. “C’mon,” he says, “haven’t you ever died before, or even lived?” I shake my head, terrified. “I’m not like you,” I shout in a vast empty roar. “No, I have not lived or died or even been kissed.” “You’re like this bird,” he scoffs. “You don’t exist.”
My love is like hammering nails
My love is like trying to hammer nails through glass. I appreciate the concept, but it’s obviously doomed. I suspect that every attempt ultimately fails, just like it has for, oh, millions of years. But people keep trying pitiful fools thinking that if they had the proper tools that sweet sledge they spied downtown drinking beers, or pretty little brass upholstery tacks things would end differently. They could nail stacks of window panes onto their house of heart and not a single one would break apart, no flying shards to slice their eyes or veins, just glass and all the rainbows it contains.
Love is Bullshit
Love is bullshit. This much I know is true because the only times I've heard the word it's been followed by "but...". I'd of preferred not to have heard it at all, not from you, not from those sweet warm lips I thought I knew. "But," you announced, then went on, undeterred, thinking my silence meant that I concurred to be a casual thing, just passing through, and not that I was stunned and horrified, my dominant paradigm inverted, soul-shocked, devastated, paralyzed.
Time passed. Eventually, I realized that love is a ridiculous concept. A dead squirrel in the road. Lifeless. Inert.
My Love is Like a Chocolate Chip Cookie
My love is a like a chocolate chip cookie that makes my mouth water, then when I bite into that fresh-baked warmth, I find sight has lied. It’s not what it appears to be, but big raisins that feel like squashy bees inside my mouth. I hold it to the light. Oatmeal. Walnuts. If I had known, I might have liked the cinnamon taste, but whole wheat was not the flavor I had wrapped my mind around. Having bitten once, I’m obliged to try again. It gets worse. A rotten nut wedges between my teeth, metallic fugue spreads through my gagging soul. Pathetic. And all of my desire is forgotten.
My Love is Like a Red Red Rose
My love is like a red, red rose or cocaine flowing up my nose or white beach sand around my toes and that's the way the poem goes.
Who writes this shit? Seriously! No no no no, it isn't me. I would not be caught dead with thee, O lyrical antiquity!
Thou corpse of dead poetic form! Thine ink is cold; my blood is warm. Don't crash my party, thunderstorm my summer's day. I will perform a magic trick, and hit delete, and leave you lonely, _____________
My Love is Like a Bottomless Chasm
My love is like a bottomless chasm, abandoned well, dark room of emptiness, bleak dusty silence inside an abyss, whispers of a bodyless phantasm on a deserted stage, a lone atom circling 'round the Large Hadron Collider with nothing to crash into, forever.
Crystal rocks glass, without the Maccallan.
My love is my burden and my belief that death will come as a blessed relief from hostility, a welcome reprieve from criticism.
Maybe I'm naïve. Perhaps I'll find out, after I am dead, that I lived only inside my own head.
Church Street Marketplace
The Old Spice smell of newly showered men presenting their appearances for view in ties and oxford shirts of pale Sears blue or pique polos ordered from Lands End.
In crisply dry cleaned suits or baggy jeans that circumnavigate their spreading girth and bulging billfolds measuring their worth; the market knows just what a dollar means.
Textile façades cover what is real, faces masked that dare not breathe a word of passion that has been so long deferred that flesh cannot remember how it feels.
Emasculated in the public eye, holding packages for shopping wives.
What the Hell does This Mean?
My love is like What the hell does that mean? Are the words "my love" meant to signify internal emotion, or something I am supposed to feel passing between myself and others, particles unseen I'll know I've caught when they solidify, like the common cold? I am mystified by these black letters on the page. Smoke screen, prologue, a cheap device to set the scene for the entry of that mythical beast, "the belovèd". Humanoid though it seems, this fairy-tale creature does not exist. The whole disgusting idea's obsolete. How can these cultural legends persist?
My Love is a Hurricane's Aftermath
My love is a hurricane's aftermath cheap made-in-China homeshit strewn for miles, old photographs and linens in wet piles and mold spreading with fierce biblical wrath along the sodden, devastated path of bad decisions, grey insurance files, white-wedding- and red-ticket-shopping- aisles, all drowned in infancy in icy bath. My love is not an ice storm, bound to melt under the next warm sun. No, it's a hell that just keeps going, twenty-four-seven, the worst hand of cards I've ever been dealt. And even when it dries out, there's the smell, the stench of rot, the tang of aggression.
You said
Remember that time you said you put gas in the car, but you had lied. I knew you lied. That was not the only time I knew you lied to me. I would not put it past you to be lying now. You have no class. You think I’m stupid? That I have no clue what you and your little friends are up to? Your shiny perfect world is made of glass and you’ve been throwing stones. I’ll make it plain. I do not want to see your face again. I’ll give you ten minutes to get your gear, and then it’s out you go, you’re out of here.
I know I’ve said this all ten times before. This time I’m standing here, holding the door.
My Love Is a Logger
My love is a logger in deep forest. He walks through cool damp swags of emerald dawn, among tender lichens, past a new fawn still in her spots, tugging her mother's breast. Before the day's sun sinks into the west he's left a path of raw destruction strewn across the land he says he loves. The moon shines silver mercury, poison, possessed, demoniac will-o-the-wisp fable slipping through sharp tangled twisted branches. My love is drunk by now, running, stumbling, blind drunk on self-loathing. A root catches his boot and he falls through the door, bitching that I've not got dinner on the table.
My Love is Like a Autumn - Snared Rabbit
My love is like an autumn-snared rabbit as its translucent furred skin peels away in one piece from its field-taut muscles, splayed out on a stone, red blood on coarse granite, padded feet still twitching out of habit.
I say again, my love is like that. Flayed. Alive enough to know it’s been betrayed; too dead to flinch away from the hatchet, its bright brown eye fading to dull blank grey.
That ripping sound, as warmth transforms to meat. The creature seen bounding through green meadow outside the rippled glass front parlor window is memory, intangible conceit.
My love is like that. Flies and rot. Decay.
An Unlove Sonnet
(after an evening reading Rosetti)
Why do they write sonnets about love?
All full of glowing moons and turtle doves and long lost soul mates, passion, truth and wine; it gets to be a bore, all this divine
devotion, fantasy and light, I might just have to write a sonnet about hate, about dark shadows and the depth of night, of rescuers arriving way too late
to save railroaded damsels from the train, or wars that don’t end well, and death and pain, and unnattractive girls who sit at home and face their empty dotage all alone.
But why waste time on structuring cheap words?
Life is short, and poetry absurd.
Dancing
Let’s get up at dawn and go out dancing. We’ll skip the whole absurdity of day and all the mundane things that people say in cubicles and dreary lunch meetings under green-flickering florescent lights. We’ll grab something to eat along the way me in my pearls, you sporting your beret We’ll sway and spin and glide beneath the bright glittering refractions off the mirrored ball; embers, rising ash, stardust to stars of pinpoint white before my eyes. My head grows heavy as the room turns ‘round. Dearer than all the world to me, this dance of ours. We could go dance at dawn, but you are dead.
Heart Heart Heart
The poem probably emerged at first inside her heart – weary organ, every poet’s well-worn term of art. She bravely sought some other place, less inclined to burst –liver, spleen, appendix – that’s the worst –behind the eyes, inside the mind, she veered through every limb, but it was as she feared, without the heart, her poem was unversed.
Collapsed, anguished, thinking her writing cursed, she could not find a way to put her feelings into words. She searched the classics, reeling, body on fire with a soul-searing thirst.
“Oh heart! heart! heart!” aloud she finally cried, just as Walt Whitman did when Lincoln died.
Comforting a friend outside the palace party
(built from fragments of a poem by Sappho)
Lamplight poured across the dismal garden where you cowered beneath leafless laurel tree, mantle clutched in trembling hand, your dignity molested, cold waves of laughter showered down relentless barbs until your soft heart could barely stand. But everything sweeter, it seems, for bitterness that soured your name; better this dim, wet bench than that pit of demand. And for them, may this storm leave them limp and disempowered consider each a traveler, scarcely known in our fair land. But I scarcely ever listened to their mindless chatter. My soul beloved, ignore so-and-so gossip at the gate or whispered such-and-such; now hide away your pain. To arrive kindly shows their cruelty does not matter. You go there first: beautiful, cloaked inside bright-ruined fate, the makeup and the clothes running together in the rain.
rock shelter
fallroar, ambient, resounding in world-ear drowns out searing dreams of anonymity beneath relentless streams, inflicted gravity sharp shine of needles in gold-glistened air
cave behind the labyrinthine curtain magnifies droplets in silver echo ripple-swells white moon-refracted glow recessed in green-black grotto nothing’s certain what escapes and drifts into the flow and what is trapped within the circling pool is something that the moon will never know sleeping inside round arms of stone embrace unmovable and mossy, soft and softly cruel behind the waterfall, where few have chanced to go.
Toxophilite
Arrayed in rows like fighter jets take flight from off a carrier deck on heaving seas arrows balance across his battered knees sorted out in groups by color of bright fletchings. Pink and white fluff sit to the right, for taking birds while they are on the wing, while on the left sit sleek green vanes that sing when loosed after the deer at dawn’s first light.
Wrapped in the ties of his three-fingered glove, six carbon target shafts all fletched in black he’d won prizes with those, many years back. And in the center, valued more than all, rough cedar, hand-glued feathers gray and small the one split down the center by true love.
My Love is Like the Dog Shit on your Shoe
My love is like the dog shit on your shoe, tracked all over the house, that wretched smell, and all the rugs need washing, there'll be hell to pay, the belt will leave deep scars on you.
You still won't understand, you never do, you just keep doing things I'll never tell the neighbor's grey cat you threw down the well well, love is just like that, like crazy glue, that shit will get you high, addictive too, that shiny stiff red tube, I'm stuck on you, it gets in everything, that stench, noxious. The world should give up trying to stop us.
It probably will knock us both unconscious or dead. Just one more reason to mock us.
I Had the Chicken Special
My love is like a stain on my new shirt butter yellow tee, XL, organic when he has come home early. I'm frantic. If he knows I had lunch out, it will hurt like hell, and makeup can't cover that shit, but teriyaki don't lie, so I'm hit then dragged upstairs so he can claim his turf and slam the bed, my head, against the wall.
I press the shirt against my bloody lip may as well, the neckband's already ripped and ruined, let it go and watch it fall to the vacuumed navy blue shag carpet. When he's done, I'll run out to the market to buy dinner. Stagger, maybe. Or crawl.
My Love is Like a Mouse Inside a Trap
My love is like a mouse inside a trap inside a box inside a room inside a house inside a big wide empty sky. My love could not be left to gnaw and crap on breakfast dishes, stealing moldy scraps of bread and cheese. No, my love had to die, cut off and isolated, cast aside, duct-taped and mummified in plastic wrap.
No one would ever wrap their arms around someone like me with teeth and claws, and jaws full of ideas, pointy things that give pause to inclinations of shared affection. After all, vermin carry infection. Throw it in a bucket, make sure it's drowned.