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Love is
Hate is
Hot; it tingles
Good and
Bad: sends
Couples / singles
Growling, roiling,
Humping, laughing to
Thoughtless thinking,
Dreamful gaffing;
Destroys their time.
Yet what is
Great is
How function-
Melting
Love is
Hate is.
*
I think about you way too
much
and it makes me feel
stupid.
As a loner, I was too
smart;
I laughed whenever cupid
messed with a friend's
head:
“It's easy; don't let
her bug you.”
I'd watch them fight. I'd
role my eyes
as their shouts turned
to “I love you”s.
“What idiots,” I'd
think to myself,
“who waste time on
eachother,
looking for peace in their
lives through
rage-blinded eyes, chasing
violent lovers.”
So I found my peace alone, and
it's still:
In this calm now, I
imagine us fighting –
so bored am I with
sensibleness
that I'd find our dumb
madness exciting.
*
Power.
That's what anger is.
Contentment slumps, soft;
Agitation is froth; but
Anger moves, dense,
propulsive.
I go
Forward, hungry
And untirable,
Wanting someone
Who's set me fire-full
and
Primed.
And NO,
I wouldn't
Hurt you. I only
Look that way: I could
Hold you, red-warm
As a phoenix half-gone,
If you'd let me in
Today.
* Thanks to online dating (oval mirrors & now, the only relevant time), Les B. (crown jelly), Julie P. (Brooklyn wedding & Paris war angel), Ryan G. (the stats collar tattoo/stattoo), Bernice Abbot (a bouncing ball in diminishing arcs – c1958), Jomeline (Huntington Garden ducks), David K. (Panama sloth), Angela (smiling in the SB surf), Abel T. (wedding revelry), Kerstin B. (attack-a-man), Rachael (bubble gun – Mexico), and Tiesha (high school note: “Okay Kimberly so I really am in love with you. I don't know how to tell you so I'm writing this to tell you. I love you so much.”) for making this collage full.
ReplyDeleteTo me, this poem's structure seems to show the process of love. First, there's the giddy, passionate love that becomes a dichotomy of the negative and the positive, the beloved and the unknown. The diction encapsulates this with its use of opposites like "good / and bad", "thoughtless thinking", "growling" juxtaposed with "laughing". The looped cycle of these feelings is shown with the repetition of "love is / hate is". The middle stanza holds a message about losing yourself in love and maybe sacrificing some of the person you thought you were, applied through the speaker's observance of other people and how he never believed he would exhibit their same behavior, only to now feel "stupid" instead of "smart" and enjoy participating in the same "dumb madness" his friends did. The third stanza can be read as either the end of love or the concluded truth of love; love is anger, love is hate. The supremacy of "power" and the movement of anger explained through the diction shows the fiery agitation that love is. So the speaker moves through these phases: giddy, blissfully paradoxical love, to a reflection upon himself, then to the end of love or the ultimate realization that sometimes love is bitter. The ending shows that this cycle will happen again with "If you'd let me in / Today." If the beloved lets the speaker back in they'll go back to the "red-warm" of the first stanza, tying back to the first words "Love is / Hate is / Hot".
ReplyDeleteNot what I was going for (but a fair interpretation): this poem was meant to be an -etic (outsider) look at love and romance, rather than an -emic (insider) one. It's 3 stanzas drop from high to low -- from the most removed and abstract (what "love/hate" is, its defiinition), to the observational and analytic (what "love/hate" looks like to one who's not in it), to the deep and almost inexpressible affective experience (what "love/hate" feels like, being drawn toward someone else).
DeleteTry reading it with that lens, too, if you like -- maybe you'll find something for yourself that's more personally resonant and worth pondering.
Thank you for the clarification. I see what you mean now--with the outsider perspective. I think the descent from removed to observational to actually involved is what I was observing when before with my comment on the process of love. With your explanation, it seems like the poem really boils down to the essence of romantic love, which is, as you said , "almost inexpressible".
ReplyDeleteUpon initially reading this, what caught my attention was how hate and love are paralleled as practically identical emotions with practically identical repercussions many fail to acknowledge. The way that it flows in ideas though, from rejecting the ideas of love and relationships to desiring it and the power it brings, in a way, made me feel like I understood the mental motivation for pursuing romance that many carry. It’s not that it resonated with me, but it was like someone unmasking their emotions and truthfully saying what no one is willing to admit to themselves and outsiders.
ReplyDelete