The Hapathetic

I would never hurt you,
never in a million years,

sometimes I worried if my happiness would bring us misery,
if we were haunted by our own ease,
our own conflicts of comfort,

and when I wanted to hold your hand I thought would I want to hold it even more if I did not,
hold your hand,
that is,

that was not love,
that was a series of notions and apprehensions about apathy,

what was true of this
was true of anything,
uncertainty,
and nothing more,

but what was true of you,
of me,
was only good,

and maybe,
just maybe,
pain was not as prolific as I once thought it to be---