What Love Is Not

Poets are susceptible to intervals of, for want of a better word, madness.  We escape into the darkness of our greatest fears, our deepest despair.  We wonder how we ever wrote a happy poem.  We wonder if we will ever write a happy poem again.  We question everything and everything comes up wanting, needing, pleading for answers that are not there.  We are wounded by the world around us, the people around us, the calamities that are exploding around us.

We are poets, after all, and poets need not be reasonable, need not follow the rules.  We simply stand at the edge of the cliff and wait for the poem to push us off…  “What Love is Not” thrust me into the abyss…

WHAT LOVE IS NOT

broken
souls
of lovers know
what love is not…

foolhardy    hardly
more
or less
than that    harvesting
fractured seeds
that died
a quiet death
in last year’s garden
pardoning
regret as though
it were the disclaimed
feather of a skybound bird
what’s heard
less than lies
greater
than truth
whispered like prayers
spreading
where the heart
had groped for silence
stooped beneath
the treachery
of vows that have
no hope
of being heard

the center
of self
shrouding itself
in the stillness
of shadows
knowing
love
is
slowing to a crawl
walking into walls
abandoning the call
to embrace
the sentience of
self
love is
is not
the muffled interval
between
delight
despair    when faith
holds on
to nothing there
belief in dreams
it seems is
rehearsal
for disaster
though we try
we cannot master
even simple things
like laughter             understand
the clenched fist
hand
thrust at
the abyss of endless
skies that hold
the threat of rain
the
pain of parched earth
thirsting for the
assault that never came
just sun
too hot
too bright
too damned demanding
not hiding anything
beneath its
heliacal sting
when we
are yearning simply
to be
entreating heaven
to enable us
not to see
so
much

of
what
we are
is what
love
is not…