On Love

My lonely arms wait

not for someone else, but for you

On the solitary balcony in a run down suburb,

I stood with you, my entire heart

overflowing with love, inversely

proportionate to the deficit in our water tank

directly proportionate to the energy it took

to fill it up

Love that I hadn't known, that which wasn't

felt before, love that was mine to keep for

however long I need

And that freedom is enticing, that power is

glorious till the moment you can see love

exist right before you

but love, like life, is no thing really

It doesn't exist without the other,

it doesn't have a body or form

it is, like life, a certain organisation of molecules,

letting your brain function in a particular direction

by exerting forces inside the body

Love, like life, is an emergent property

And so it doesn't show up while you're at

the same wineshop buying whiskey

for four days straight,

it doesn't call on you when you're flushing down

Biryani with Sprite in the family section of

Hotel Hyderabad

heck, it doesn't even knock at your heart

when you're in someone else's bed

after a dinner of peanuts and alcohol

trying to find your release and fall

Love only emerges from something,

and don't ask me what, I have learnt nothing

but I speculate that in the deeps of

my heart, and yours,

we knew what was emerging

how the molecules inside were

forming a bond,

a bond that may be an intensely tight one,

a double helix that was held together

by something other than hydrogen,

a bond that could perhaps emerge out of

what Neitzsche had called the will to power

and the will to power can only emerge

alongside the will to know

Love, my dear, maybe only what we know

It is what we know happened when the molecules

formed the bonds tightly held,

not between us like an invisible string

but inside you, inside me,

separately.