Than any human hands

Many will say

Love cures all

Those without it

Suppose

Once possessed

No grief and loneliness

I would tell them

Even with love

The hole in the world can be felt

And standing in your life

You may still feel as alone

As when you were single

There is no magic pill

Only the kind of sadness

That is not situational

But sits on the perch of the happiest days

Like a drab trailing cloud

Raining when you should be smiling

And the cult of happiness

Declares you a failure

And the cult of love says

Why wasn’t I enough?

And the insistence of mindfulness and karma and gratefulness and other totems

Banish your bad self

To the hinterlands

Where supposed beasts lurk

In the rolling gloom

And you are there talking to your therapist

Minding your manners and saying nothing

Of the deep scratch underneath your skin

Or how you came to be

A changeling

Who unwaged by the ambelical

Left the desolate nest

And found more succor in the sad glass eyes of a stuffed toy

Than any human hands

Many will say

Love cures all

And you saw the old lady in her wheelchair

Recognize you as herself

Fifty years hence

Though you would not wish

To inherit her absences

Growing like an orange

Without sun

Will therefore capture

No taste