what we code about when we code about love

there's no better way to love than with violence and war and fighting and when you know you want to kill your partner that's when you know love has infected you like heroin or MTV we sit around playing cards and Laura has her hand on Nicky's upper thigh and the cardiologist is telling us about the man who survived a broken heart but couldn't look at his own wife after that– and the devastation it wrought– and who would know better than a heart doc what love is but when he finishes the bottle of gin he is a mean drunk throwing punches at his old wife and telling us story after story how she loved a brutal man he complains brutal to her and brutal to himself and brutal still after all these years and he paints their love false but the wife says at least he was willing to love and to die for their love and to kill himself for their love and then there are of all those soldiers who are shipped around the world and sent into the most foreign environments known to love well what are they doing there? if not fighting for the calmest parts of the heart of Saturday night the lulls filled of bored teenagers driving up and down the strip hunting for love and tossing it out the open window with cigarette butts and terrible pop music