New from Matt Zurbo

​People baffle me.

We dance around such simple topics, tear our hearts out over what doesn’t mate, waste our rage on so much not worthy of it.
Why doesn’t anyone talk about love?
Girls do. But, mostly, that’s girl love. Why don’t we, as woman and men?
I hear the word used a lot when discussing gay rights. I’m not gay, know bugger all
gay people, but when they talk about marriage I get jealous, because they always talk about love.

That’s the joy of hurdles. They make things hard. A hurdle means you aren’t marrying for convenience, or because everybody else is, or because your family expect it of you, or you don’t want to be left behind. The hurdles mean you’re marrying for love, damn it!

Love!

How come there are no columns on it in the papers? Or it never gets mentioned in the news? In the news couples ‘confirm’ and are ‘seen together’ and ‘become items’ and sometimes ‘tie the knot.’ These things aren’t enough.

Give me your heart, stapled to your bloody sleeve, and I’ll give you a Woman, and I’ll give you a Man!

I’m a man’s man. Nothing to brag about. I work in the bush and play footy and drink and fight at the swinger’s arms. Fucking oath! No apologies or bragging involved. But I’m man enough to say I’m not in love, and it breaks my heart.

When my marriage didn’t work, everybody said “At least you never had kids”

I tell them they’re fools. I tell them we loved each other, but couldn’t be together. That the kids would have been born from and given, by both of us, no matter what, love. Maybe there practical people don’t understand love?

Then there was the Christian Baptist I was engaged to. There was a hurdle. It HAD
to be love. She was always scared shitless of ending in a loveless marriage, like her
parents, bound by religion that forbids divorce, yet, two weeks before the big day, she
left me for her God. And is no doubt married to someone of her faith now.
I hope, but doubt it’s love.

Love’s dangers are also its joy. Somewhere along the line it will break you. It will leave you defeated, wanting to die, but that is such a good thing. In hurt you feel. In feeling you’re alive.

“And he hung up and he sobbed, he howled at he world, but from somewhere deep inside he was glorious that such rich, deep emotion was better than nothing at all.”

It hurts not having love, but it can’t be faked, or rushed. If you’ve been in love,

you know that. So you search, or I do, and explore, and go insane yearning for its embrace. To be lost in its flowing hair. And each day I don’t find it, the weight increases a little, the screw further turns. But that’s okay. Love isn’t the main thing, the yearning is. The want, the fire.

Love would be heaven, yet only when I stop yearning shall I die.