An Excess of Love

Love is parametric. 

People measure love by love laws as Roy said.

They decide how much is necessary,

how much they can deal with.

Love is not an easy word – grammatically, numerically or even in psychology.

Nobody knows how to use it in a sentence,

how much of it to give or bear or how to explain why it happens.

Say everyone wants it and needs it, 

yet they shirk and smirk and shrug away love!

And if they don’t they say it is

because it hurts, it betrays and it is never enough.

Nobody loves love itself you see.

And some make it Sufi, 

some saintly and some romantic.

But few understand that love is

essentially being in the present with the other.

Love is the trying spirit of humanity. 

Of faith and some such thing.

You write love poems for people who never know it is for them.

Parents, friends and some people

with whom relationships are un-namable.

Acceptance – not compromise. That is love.

Of yourself, and how you feel, and what you do in love.

The embarrassing parts, the vulnerable parts especially.

Too much of yourself if you think of, it isn’t love.

Too much of the other if you think of it isn’t love.

It is what you create together –

what you give birth to – no not another human.

You give birth to art, to experience, to feeling, to situations.

That is love.

Love is not a person. It is not a partner. It is the in between relation.

The space between two persons

which pulls.

It is a force of nature which can temper you, test you, tempt you and make you grow 

or destroy you.

It is of the nature of time itself, yet an idea beyond time.

It is beyond biology and poetry. 

It is some purpose beyond reason.

Best of all, It just is. Even when you realize it too late.

Sometimes I realize I love humanity too much 

Because I give it the name of love.

People cannot believe I love people because of themselves.

Because you have only now.  Because you can only forgive only now.

Is it so hard to admit to the truth.  Yes truth isn’t rewarded by the world.

But it has the small mercies worth dying for.

A glimpse of yourself. Of god and some such divinity.

Worth giving it a shot. Worth loving. Worth growing and hurting. But only if fate allows it.

Push fate a little and you have the world to yourself. And yourself to yourself. 

Fall in love with yourself and you fall in love with the world.