This is a left handed definition of love.
An opposite, like mirror blue on lake glass.
As silence is to light what loud is to ground.
Unattached, as things with wings get.
That places defile our feeling, a clue.
Requiem for a scheme.
Sneakers.
The tiny ones by the stoop.
And since I’m here, mine beside.
A ceiling fan that reels film stock.
And on the wall a projection of life,
As seen through a filter.
Black and white motion
Of color filled scenes.
And coffee tainted teeth.
A sweaty palm.
We pound feet on a pond floor.
A foggy dirt rises.
We wonder if fish can be cremated,
And if maybe we’re walking on a graveyard.
Or if trees could talk,
And what they would say about our picnic.
The self-inviting ants in our bread basket.
Like a dirty blanket we tossed to the shore.
Sea-salt scrub.
A torrential rain that never came,
But that threatened with gray skies.
We saw it through a screened in tent
And said let’s stay here until fall.
Or until it rains so much we are swept away.
And we ride in the tent towards circus towns.
So to define it is to see it backwards
And not feel it forwards.
That love is an emotion and not a cure.
But that it always must come with a second emotion,
And not necessarily the same each time.
Sad love,
A boy who sees his dog caught in a current.
A teenage drug.
Or since we are undefined,
So must our love be?
I should refrain from swimming in dirty lakes.
With tire swings you put your hands on.
And the tree we swung from.
That love is a word is an understatement.
A consumption.
You know it’s there
When a person reminds you of a place,
And a place reminds you of a person.
And you go to that place,
Surround yourself with it.
As if the two can be interchanged
And you can be surrounded by them instead.
But only the feeling of them.
But that is the right hand definition of love.
My left hand says love
Is all about the alteration of time.
When life moves slower in loneliness
And faster in presence.
But that is not love,
Because in love there is never loneliness.
Not felt at least.
Not in the same sense.
A feeling of absence
But always mutual and thus curbed.
My hands disagree with each other
And with my heart,
Who says love is not a word,
Not an emotion,
And not defined.
The question of what love is
Is the answer to what love is.
Love is a tire swing to me,
And a picnic to you.
Love is a nothing and a something.
It is reality and anti-matter.
Love is love,
In every sense of the not-word.