Against All Odds and Pains (poem)

Against All Odds and Pains

I love you against reason,

against counsel stern and cold,

against the quiet arithmetic,

by which affections are controlled.

I love you against patience,

against peace I might have kept,

against the hours unshared with you,

where longing, with me alone in the rain, stood and wept.

I hungered but not for spectacle,

nor grand design or heavy golden price,

I begged for presence, breath with breath,

a nearness with your hand to my heart.

I wished and still wish to know you utterly,

your marrow and your bone,

the secret weather of your thoughts,

no other soul has been lucky to have known.

I yearned to trace your inner world,

to atom, nerve, and your very gleam,

to drink the shape of all you are,

as one inhales a spinning aching dream.

Your doubts, your faith, your tender rage,

your mind’s most private rooms,

I have in heavy effort tried to study every word,

as monks once studied prayer that now rests in tombs.

For I am made of emotional language,

and love is how I breathe, write and see,

my poems starve without the deeper truth,

you willingly avoid giving to me.

I loved you against hope itself,

against my strength grown thin,

I still struggle to learn that devotion

must not hollow me within.

Still, I love you past endurance.

May you crumble with me in the end.

-AubsThePoet

January 24, 2026