Not All For Love: A Book of Poetry
mechanical
process, chemicals
injected here, then
pressure applied there,
the whole mix heated
to a thousand degrees
until it’s become
something entirely unlike
what it’s been, something
artificial, something manufactured,
something made to be something
other than what it was. But
love, true love, cannot be
manufactured; true love is
not artificial, not felt. In
the heat of the moment,
an eccentric, unwitting
partner makes itself
joined with what’s ours. This,
then, is our love.
Love is patient,
it’s said, love is kind.
It does not envy,
it does not boast,
it is not proud.
It does not dishonour others,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love is not a feeling,
but a surrender to the
purity of union with another.
It always protects,
trusts,
hopes,
perseveres.
Love can never fail,
for love is unassailable
by the forces massed
against it, emerging
as it does from a darkness
gleaming in the light.
7.
None have been
so wounded as to
forget the joy and the
fear of love, in surrender
of the self to another.
No, none would have been
so bereft of hope as to
look back and see only
a sadness where once
there’d been serenity.
This is intended
as neither conviction
nor confusion; I relate to you,
now, the story of a
woman I’d once fallen
in love with, once
fallen in love with having
never forgotten her, nor
forgiven myself for
letting her slip through my grasp.
She,
her hair long, flowing,
the colour of a pristine oak.
She,
her eyes twinkling
when the moonlight strikes just so.
She,
her voice grating, harsh,
so unlike the feminine, yet right.
She,
her figure shapely, curvaceous,
with lines striking, daring.
In time, she came to
fall in love with me;
an devotion of the heart
I’d done nothing to earn,
nothing to deserve, yet
given anyways, she
in an act of
kindness and grace
taking me into her heart
like a prophet
admitting a pilgrim
to some holy place.
In a rare moment of
honesty,
I can
admit weakness,
I can
show softness,
I can
confess a vulnerability
when I am with her
as I can never
bring myself
to confess
when I am with any other
woman I’ve ever known
8.
In love,
we become blind
to the flaws in our love,
to all the little imperfections and
to all the little nuances
that make our love so real.
In love,
we become enamoured
of an idea of our love,
of a conception we have of her,
of an idea we’ve made up of her,
entirely in our own minds.
In love,
we create fiction,
in an elaborate fraud,
in the spirit of self-delusion,
in, perhaps, an act of self-defence,
prefer a fiction as we do
to the harshness of the
world we live in.
As young men,
we find ourselves
made out to be
little better than animals,
ravenous, hungry, seeking
only a sexual release;
I suspect she thought of
me in this way as we first meet,
never quite proven wrong
her suspicions were. For
all my pretensions, for
all my aspirations to the
nobility of true love,
there comes the odd time,
here and there,
when I heatedly
forgive an devoted,
dismissive looking-on.
As I commit myself
to the idea of our having found
true love in each other,
an perverse joy
exchanges between us.
In love,
we are they
other than
who they are,
caricatures
of ourselves,
thinly-veiled parodies
of the real people
we’d used to be.
In love,
we are only
too eager to indulge
in the fantasy of
ourselves as
noble,
pure,
honest,
an indulgence,
for a time,
proving too
tantalizing to deny.
9.
So long as
we limit ourselves
to the pleasures of the flesh,
we deny ourselves
all that love has to offer.
In her, I find
a salvation from
such crudeness as
we enforce upon ourselves.
Burning,
our passion draws strength
from some almost-spiritual
place within each of us.
Burning,
we become consumed by
a raging wildfire expanding
to claim every part of us.
Burning,
our flames reach their apex
as pillars of brilliant, sickly colour
making night seem like day.
Burnt,
we are finished,
utterly spent, having
given each other everything
and left ourselves hollow.
It’s as though we’d become
vessels through which our love
could find expression,
expression once found leaving us
as empty shells, as burnt-out husks,
spent.
It’s strange,
though,
how satisfied we become
in finding ourselves as vessels,
as though we’ve found our
true purpose,
achieved our essence,
won through our
final victory and
laid bare the path
towards an defeat.
It’s a tragedy,
when we see ourselves
not yet unborn,
and we feel not sad
in serving our purpose,
as allowing our love to
become as inaudible.
Wonder, where
our love has gone
after having left us…
Wonder, who
will be the next blessed
to be chosen as we were…
Wonder, what
we must do, what we can do
to convince our love to visit
 
; upon us again…
10.
After youth,
there comes a
time in life when
we become neither
adolescent nor adult,
expected to know
what we’re doing
even as we
don’t,
won’t,
can’t. It’s in
this state she found
me, she found me,
she found me, in this
state she found me,
in this state, where
I am vulnerable,
exposed,
able only to
think of the
way she makes me
feel warm whenever we touch,
her skin smooth and soft,
hands seeming to fit
perfectly into mine,
as though we were
made for each other
from the same mould. It’s
an adolescent notion,
alluring, alluring,
seizing on me
at exactly that moment,
that station in life
when I’m young enough
still to be vulnerable
but old enough
to know what I’m
getting myself into,
young enough to
be tempted into thinking
this might just be the one,
old enough to
know better. Still
I indulge in the fantasy,
in the romantic, quixotic fantasy
of true love, throwing myself
so completely, so helplessly
into what she offers,
pausing only to look
for the little glint in her eyes
that tells me
she, too
finds herself
in the same spot. Still,
as she is so much older,
laughing, the warmth,
the infectiousness in her laugh
sees out her
insecurities,
all the little self-doubts
as I know them to be;
ours is a love
never to be celebrated,
but to be carried out
in secret, devilishly,
like flaming coffins
scattered across a
burnt-out landscape
outside a fabled
lost city’s ramparts,
our love prolonged,
intense, feel
you might break,
as forbidden love
should be.
Addendum.
After falling in love,
there’re few feelings that
can match the
exhilaration
in surrender
of the self
to another.
11.
Directed by an
understated beauty,
we head upstairs
and soon find ourselves
trapped behind a hidden veil,
shrouded within a dense fog,
leaving her, ahead of me,
but we’re touching,
always touching,
there’s nothing I
wouldn’t do for her;
stand in the way of a bullet,
run through a forest aflame,
scale the highest mountains,
all for her, all for her. It’s
not as though
we’ve either
got much time.
We need to
make the most
of what we have.
We have to
make the most
of what we have.
Last night,
not last night
but the night
before last,
we live alone
in the middle
of a long, slow
descent into the
heady days of summer,
the darkness
of the forest’s floor
seems to welcome us,
in that one place she and I
becoming ourselves, becoming one.
In the midst
of a torrid, passionate affair,
we have become
warmed to each other,
in the middle of the
darkness our love
becoming our light.
But there’s a time,
and it’s coming, soon,
when the darkness
might overtake us,
and I hope,
when the time comes,
you’ll feel
the same excitement I feel
whenever we’re together.
12.
We’re
in each other’s way,
our love the
supreme obstacle
to our own selves,
love as pointed, terse,
unwittingly an interwoven
tone mocking
on ahead, dauntless.
Up ‘til now,
it’s been a mystery
to most