If you must love yourself then first you must love spiders, understanding loving spiders is the path towards self-love, understanding also that you must love the worms and ants and wasps and beetles and the centipedes and the sea and death, knowing that love is not the roots but the soil and shit cuddling their frail wanting tendrils. You will never attain love; love cannot be seized or taken or held or purchased or sold or forsaken or even given: love rests in the eaves of being. It is beyond you, love, it is more than your petty heart could carry but if you wish to know love then practice loving the spiders; practice to love an eel, a thorny bush, a bad actor; practice to love your lover beyond loving, beyond desire, beyond needing, beyond intimacy, beyond mirth and kindness and horniness and all the other loving things you thought were love but aren't. You will never know love; love cannot be comprehended or attested or understood or reclaimed or lost: even this poem knows nothing of love. It is beyond the purview of thought and far less than our minds could struggle to intercept or interpret but if you wish to know love then practice loving the spiders; practice to love the small things that terrify you; practice to love the big things that consume you; for, the love that dares to try and know itself ought to be the only love that one considers. See, if you must love yourself then first you must love others (and this includes all others you've refused to love beyond comfort; this includes all the stone and water and muck of Earth). And when you have finally come to love yourself then you will realize that all you love is the freedom of loving the spider; you will realize that the spider is the love that dares to try and know itself.
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