Sometimes you wake at night

and feel the pulsing of love

in your heart.

You sort through your catalogue of love,

the many-coloured samples.

Sometimes you paint love with sweeping brushstrokes

into your dark corners

and it seeps deep down

to the places you thought

you had carefully sealed.

Your work is particular

but not always measured.

You linger, sometimes, over a detail,

something particularly fine;

but sometimes you are so saturated

with love,

it is like water seeping through your barricades,

slipping in and loosening the boards,

and finding its way even between

the cracks,

so that you are slowly pulled apart,

splintered, and then fragmented,

into a dusting of particles, like sand;

and you can no longer gather yourself

together

into the shape

of what you once were.