Neil Myers's untitled poem begins with a blunt claim: love and hate come from the same dismay. Both, it suggests, grow out of a kind of helpless shock, a "breath of solitude," while whole countries fall apart in the background. The personal and the political seem to crumble together.
The middle stanza turns toward the pull between two people. The speaker says "we should fall / further" into what he calls "the sweet act / of lesion," a phrase that joins tenderness to wounding. The final stanza gets physical: loosening fingers, waking legs, eyes "bigger than nights," bodies close together. This reads like an intimate scene, though the poem never spells it out.
The ending is the hardest line: "love must carry / its own abuse." The speaker doesn't seem to celebrate harm, but accepts that love cannot be separated from it. The mood is tense, tender and weary all at once, with a fragile hope that closeness can briefly clear away "tedious loss."