My Love Is Not a Furnace or a Box

I will not love you like Neruda’s verse.

I can’t; I always watched a goddess go.

Her ghost will be the last to quit my hearse.

My love is like an empty coffin, though,

cremated in Her stead, kept in an urn

I buried prematurely, in my haste

to have another vanity to burn.

My love is countless eulogies in waste,

a bitter sip to cure what feels like health.

Although, to Her, whom frankness might disarm,

perhaps my love could be a tarnished wealth

of copper liberties and silver charms.

My love is not a furnace or a rod;

my love’s the honesty most save for God.