I am not in love with anyone. Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni,
Shakespeare, and all his fair women, dressed in men’s robes,
have nothing on me.

Flinty, unyielding; that is what they called me.
No tree could brace against my wind.
In my savage silence, I could sabotage all lovers’ din;
heavy, and unmatchable, though, I strike a rock in orange brightness.

Water over stone, I rise, reap, than sleep.
I am not in love with anyone. I lay yet never fall.

Should I grip to my breast a Book of Nights, what I eat
goes into my veins for life; no resurrection, no summer of fleeting
billowed sail carrying; no,
I never gave myself to anyone.

Not wholly. Not hardly. Not an ounce of me balanced
on the end of a heart’s thumb.

Annabel Lee, has got nothing on me. Let John Donne be confounded,
Woolf throw her Vita over and over and over me.

I will not arrive. I will not step forward.
I am not in love, with anyone. With any thing. Only the dark. Only
with the lone, only with the comeliness
of an empty room, do I rest wide, nude, and days’dreaming.

White Knights and Blake’s Angels, have nothing on me.
Once, some lover called me formidable;

formidable, and cold,
as the rolling, purging, plowing, undying sea.

I am not in love.