Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain, Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again. Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, pinned down by need and moaning for release or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.
“To survive, I had to stay unfamiliar to myself, neutralized, at arm’s length. Sometimes, I think, all these years later, I’m still hunting the part of myself I exiled.”
Places I’ve Taken My Body; ‘The Broken Country: On Disability and Desire’ by Molly McCully Brown
