What Love Is (Again?) Poem by RIC BASTASA

this morning, you are talking about love
and how you think it is a feeling that sometimes hurt and make you not
easily forget
how time heals and leaves a scar just the same
how you were stoned one time by an uncaring lover
on your head
and since then no hair grows in there

you start with feelings of tenderness shaped like a very white ball
pure and hanging on some ceiling with a very sensitive string
always ready to fall
and fell
always willing to die
and died
how each thread of suffering, that feeling of finally being junked
have become a cloth, a veil in your face, and how you finally covered
yourself with its blanket and how you walked away
to get over with
such an overwhelming sorrow

others tell you that you have been wrong because love too is
a choice
a selection of this and that, a filling of the blanks like a test of life
a quiz
where you get scored and rated and judged and declared either to be a winner
or a loser

lest you forget, one poet who said, that love is not a noun, but a verb
not even just a silly adjective
or some sort of an adjective to another adjective a decor on your thought
or just an idea to be conceived of
from an accident of love at first sight, the giggle and the crush
for after all
love (again, i must tell you) is a responsibility
the capacity to look at the apple of eden and not eat it
the patience, not just the pleasing or the appetite
the way to obey a commandment: to always want the other to be happy
and put yourself last
in the line of those hungry and thirsty and those who want to find meaning
in the other
the beloved, above all yourself, the lips that want to kiss and refrained
because love is always the drive to be strong
and right and
survive