I don’t love you like I love

ten million dollars in my bank account,

peace on Earth, goodwill to all men

the corrective to global warming,

God,

me who is a normal person,

unconditional love love love, world without end, amen,

free, unfettered, blissful childhoods,

two good parents with two happy kids

and other things that don’t exist.
I love you like I love

sunshine,

the sun in winter,

the sun in summer,

black coffee & a cigarette,

a friend,

another friend,

one of my other friends,

tower cranes –

such things as exist.
I don’t love you like I love

the Frank Gehry submission for Te Papa

or Kengo Kuma’s, I’d heard, untrue, he entered too,

that it was more beautiful than a Danish museum of fairytales

like those books they wouldn’t publish and the plays I couldn’t write,

the kibbutzim I never lived on,

the travels I might have taken using sails instead of planes,

the trips throughout New Zealand I would have had by train…

Like an absence of trauma setting me sound asleep at night,

and all the things that should have been but never were.
But I love you like I love

the 800-year-old leaning mosque in Mosul,

destroyed like all crooked things must be,

destroyed before I had a chance to love it any stronger,

the way I love the things that were and are no longer,

disappearing Richmond Stoneware china,

Erskine College, Bill Toomath in Karori,

Taputeranga Marae, Futuna here and now but for how much longer,

the blipping time of homogeneous homogenous homo sapiens,

destroyed like you or I will be.
And I don’t love you like I love

contact with extraterrestrial sentient life,

or the colony on Mars that saves hugemankind,

parrots evolving to go to psittacine universities,

octopodes writing epic oceanic verse,

corvids discovering fire and bombing Dresden,

dolphins mastering the dative to outwit Leibniz,

the singularity, the cure for senescence,

and all my nonsense hopes that are beautiful but meaningless.

              (They say that faith is for the future…
But I love you like I love

contact with extraterrestrial bacteria,

that there are robots on Mars at all and probes in deeper space,

and that some guy is trying to grow spider silk from yeast,

that those psilocybinetic fungally infected cicadas collectively live,

the way all life eventually falls to the ground

on this cooling dust ball heliocentring a hundred thousand kilometres an hour around,

purslane porcelane lithophane lithops and the desert blooms,

this present beauteous, slight and realistic hope.

              …and that belief is for the present.)
I love you not tomorrow but today.