Love is everywhere

It hides in coffee cups

Stained with two lipstick colors

Stows away in the trunk

During car rides home

Creeps up to your ear

In words of encouragement

 

It burns, as flames do

Some bright and all-consuming

An idealistic passion that illuminates a heart

Filling it until beams of light 

Run through your veins in place of blood

All without charred flesh

The ideal, rare, sought-after grail

Outside of dreams it wanes and fades

As the candle’s wick is only so long

 

But most flames burn slow

Steady, rarely flickering

One cannot light a room

But neither can the most intense inferno

And so you collect fires

Flames warming your heart

You never notice

Its solid touch

Not even when a harsh chill settles into the air 

Not even when fierce winds bite and scratch at your flesh

Not even when your muscles lock and freeze and you cannot move

When your heart still

Even in the coldest winter night when you can no longer feel

Is warmed by those tiny bulbs of fiery light

Comfort settling over you like a thick concrete blanket

 

Most of us are gathering roses for kindling

Ready to fling them into the fiercest blaze 

That grazes our skin

We neglect the steadiest flames

Place them below the flickering, burning, ravaging infernos

We pretend the little lights aren’t fires at all

It is not love, we say

Yet it always warms

It is within everyone and everything we even dare to cherish and hold close

Within greek philosophy

Within treehouse

Within gravestone

Within yellowed page

Within poem

Within friend

Within you

Within me

Within us

Love is everywhere.