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# I love I
- URL: https://www.qntns.com/i-love-i/
- Published: 2025-04-12T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T16:45:56.000Z
- Description: Deplete of love, Asphyxiating from the noise Of my past wrong actions, Drowning in the debt of purchased goods ...
- Author: Quentin Staley
- Tags: #fixed-lines, Poems

I love i

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Deplete of love,  
Asphyxiating from the noise  
Of my past wrong actions,  
Drowning in the debt of purchased goods,  
Fettered to the compulsive whims of SaaS subs,  
I am caught this morning in a human spun web.

Somehow I have mummified myself  
In my own silk,  
Preparation for  
My own envenomation and  
Extraoral digestion.  
For it does feel,  
Like the spider awaiting  
The intestines of its prey,  
That I am liquidated in  
My own webbed casket  
From where I have caught myself,  
Awaiting to eat myself  
At a future date,  
My exoskeleton  
Turned into pudding  
So my pharynx  
Can slurp myself up,  
My old liquefied carcass  
Nourishing my new self —  
It all forever caught in  
This orbicular webscape.  
Netscape. Dream. 'Scape.

My eyes betray me and  
Obsess on the beauties  
Fleeting in my periphery.

A woman, perhaps,  
Wearing antifit jeans,  
Converse, a blazer.  
Powerclash. So cool,  
Yet professional. Confident,  
Yet chill. Damn. Desire.  
Casually in front of me.  
I overtake thee. “Get behind me, Satan.”  
Laughing. You fool.  
What am I but also these things?

A man whose arms like trunks  
Are toned. Swoll. A tattoo:  
Poignant, somehow of nature.  
He works out and I wonder,

> “That’s a lot of reps. Where do you, good sir, find the motivation and time to carry-on with so much body building while my puny self is satisfied with a mere push-up here, pull-up there?”

A child sits  
Knees-tucked-to-the-chest  
On a gate chair by terminal two.  
So nimble. So casually flexible.  
Desire even this.

A sparrow swoops in  
To feed on the insects  
By the door. So swift.  
So stress free  
Despite my worrying about  
How I’d ever be the one  
To catch an insect  
In my mouth while  
Swooning through  
Tight quarters.

At twenty-eight thousand  
The pilot takes us down  
To smoother air  
Between the outflow boundary  
Of neighboring incus clouds,  
Left and right, where we bounce  
Hundreds of feet at a time,  
A silent prayer:

> “If this is death, thank you, Lord, for this good privilege to be a human; and better, a human who has remembered Thee somewhat. Follow me in this next life. Don’t keep me from Me as you did for so long in the middle years of this life, a decade’s drought between confirmation and psychiatry of vowing ‘God is dead.’ I can’t bare the moments where I have forgotten Thee. Even now is shambles, but thank you, Lord, for this chance to appreciate life as we tumble through the skies contemplating death. I don’t think we’re going to die, but if we do, what a ride. What a ride.”

Out there to the west,  
The sun is giving paradise.  
All we see from our angle  
Through the fuselage port  
Is an orange-melon gradient  
Spilling across faraway clouds.

You know — you think you know —  
That those pilots are getting high  
On the beauty of that sky,  
The rest of us,  
Shades down  
To stop the glare  
On our seatback displays,  
Watching the news,  
The Masters, or  
The show that ends for us  
Before The End for us,  
Having prematurely  
Reached our gate.

Beauty, beauty everywhere.  
I’m doing it again,  
Walking through  
The infinite thoroughfare of  
The world’s busiest airport,  
Surreptitiously spying  
Eyes, that furtive glance  
With a beautiful stranger.  
My eyes betray me  
Looking for beauty  
Out there  
When  
The joy  
I crave  
Is in here.

Channel, channel, channel  
That you once have been  
The woman whose body curves,  
The man whose muscles bulge,  
The bird whose wings glide,  
The sky whose clouds  
Are wondrously effervescent blush,  
Simultaneously caustic gray,  
Violent pangs of Tron-green lightning,  
Dun as far as the horizon sees.

Channel, channel, channel  
That you have once been  
What it’s been like  
To have been  
The bend in the river,  
The leaf upon the tree,  
The tree,  
The chair beneath the bower,  
The shade and the light,  
The chiaroscuro,  
The canvas,  
The art and  
The artist.  
How much longer  
Must I long  
For what I am  
No longer  
But still am?

It pains my eyes,  
My ears,  
My hands  
To only caress  
My love,  
To only admire  
My love,  
To only listen  
My love. I the feeling  
Is never satisfactorily  
Close enough. I am not  
Close enough. I am not.

The recognition that  
I am not. Only I am.  
Only I. I love I.