Lines scribbled at an insomniac 12:30am (or thereabouts) on love

When she found out I could love pretty much
anybody that I thought a good, a kind person, she
reacted as if that meant my love to her was worth
less. I think we disagree on what love is, but
also what "worth" is. To some, cavier caviar is
worth more than rice. For this reason fewer people
eat caviar than rice - but for that reason rice is worth
more to me than caviar. My love is stodgy: it is
carbohydrate. My love is vitamin pills. My love is several
florits of broccoli. My love is 5-a-day, at minimum.
My love is grilled fish on a friday: can't forget that
omega-3.






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Read meaning into the line breaks if you wish but they are not poetry, this is a prose-poem if anything, they just represent where the line breaks fell in the notebook I was writing in. It is interesting (at least to me, at least looking back at my own handwriting) how sometimes we can make split-second decision on where to break a line by hand to emphasise a word or to group ideas or to create an irony: reading this back, "anybody" in line 2 is subtly stressed, as if an accusatory echo from the "she" this is coyly levelled at, while "worth | less" becomes an indecisive pun - if there were more space on the line, if our thoughts were unbounded by the physical limitations in which we inscribe them, would I have written "worthless"? I don't know.

These thoughts owe some debt to 'Her' by dodie (I discovered her LP 'Human' a day before this) and those lines which seek to extroadinarify the ordinary (e.g. "she tastes like birthday cake and story-time and fall"). In that song they are applied to an external object, but claiming some valiant banality for oneself is an interesting negotiation for one to have with one's sense of self-esteem: am I really claiming virtues for myself? how does comparing what I see as my virtues to things whose values are highly subjective (maybe only I value this thing; maybe only people with a certain insight; maybe only people who are, in their way, mad) say about the value of things, to myself, and to those I love?