6 Definitions for Love

a premonition by color; a signal in the haze. kagogo


if i love You
(thickness means
worlds inhabited by roamingly
stern bright faeries

if you love
me) distance is mind carefully
luminous with innumerable gnomes
Of complete dream

if we love each (shyly)
other, what clouds do or Silently
Flowers resembles beauty
less than our breathing

ee cummings

*___*___*

The problem with love is in the definition... which in this rare case, happens to match almost precisely the reality. I choose: you. this. that-one. today.tomorrow.never. I choose it knowingly (we are here concerned with a sort of conscious, knowing love... not the madness that often precedes). I choose this., this door here: (__), this is the one I want. I can see that it is a little rusty around the hinges (she's moody in the morning). I can see that it creaks more in the summer (she's useless without her coffee). I can see the paint is chipped off a little here and here (she hates that I love southpark). I can see that there's been some bloating from water-damage (she thinks those ugly shoes are not-ugly)... but, that's what I love about it. T_H_A_T_ is what I love about it. I love those precise qualities (the rust. the hinge. the bloating. the scratched paint). A sort of content understanding of fault.

____(1) Love = content appreciation of fault(s)

and.... that's what makes breakups so hard. She always was too concerned with what people thought. (i know.) see? Isn't it good you don't have to put up with that? (in the late-evening, when i'd get up for water, i had to open the door slowly, but it was ok, it was such a nice sound i liked to let it play lento). Also, her parents hated you! she never even really told them about you, I mean, the whole time, they didn't approve... she didn't even tell you! (in the summer months, the door wouldn't shut. usually i'd step into the room first, then bump it with my left shoulder- couldn't be the right, my CD shelf was on the right. it got to be a habit, after the first rains came, for weeks i'd close the door easily and still tap at it with my left shoulder. my lips to her lips). See? q... not all women will require soo much from you. (you're right. but she was my door. and i like(d) the shape. and the sounds. and the bumps and bruises. and it's true, sometimes, when i'd rub my hand down her face, i'd get little splinters in my palm. i'm still trying to get a few of the last ones out... but... whenever i pull one out i cry to have lost the pain)

Love is that by definition.

____(2) Love = the parts of you in me

and... I'm scared. It sounds alot like I'm saying: Love = picking your favorite natural disaster., which by the way, is exactly what I'm saying:

____(3) Love = picking your favorite natural disaster

which for me is earthquakes. They come to me in kisses. Between lips and lips are cities of r_u_b_b_l_e_ (we'll come back to Neruda in a moment). I feel them in certain kisses. I feel it when certain people look at me a certain way. Sometimes, sometimes it just happens when you're laying holding together... (for example on a certain yellow-couch, sunk deep into its cushions so the television- nothing is visible anymore. Maybe the ceiling. A moment later that goes too. Now just your eyes. It's all I see. what is this shaking? do you feel it?) I can tell you what it is, it is the forces of the earth shaking hands with the fingers of an outstretched heart. Simple. I learnt that in a physics book. It is a geologic reality. ancient as mountains the seas spit out. The atoms of the universe are held together by love. The mountains, the particles that stop the moon from looking like a dust-bowel. Light, even light, which alters when I'm looking at certain children's eyes.... certain old men's. certain friends. certain book-covers. certain sea-scapes. certain pointed ballerina-toes. certain photographs (time has no dominion. I'm sorry to correct you Dylan, but if time has no dominion, then death certainly has no dominion, time time time! T_I_M_E_ has no dominion. It should read like this:

____Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
____And time shall have no dominion.

____(4) Love is timeless.

I know to a certainty, that certain love-full eyes will be clear to me when I am bodyless and mindless and too full of soul to know what to do with daisy's. One day, perhaps distant, perhaps near, I'll have that final epitaph chiseled into the cheapest stone my loved ones could find:

here lies blah blah,
he was ok.
he did what he could.
at very least...
never mind.

I'll urinate, my soul will, by the plot (I want to encourage the roots of the tulips to sprout through me as soon as possible), I'll wave a last goodbye to a few darkly dressed, sticky eyed people, and lift off. It'll be interesting for once being the cloud looking into the window-seat. Hi little girl. Do you see me?
yes.
you're not scared?
no.
why not?
you have funny hair. it makes me smile.

And so it'll be that I'll take with me, up into the cloud-village, a knapsack full of (at present about) 4 pairs of eyes. a few heads of hair (sometimes, i can feel them between my fingers). I'll take a few miniature hands. I'll take my sister's wit:

- You have a big zit on your cheek.
- yeah? you have a big mouth on your face.

I almost can't wait. This is the other thing:

____(5) Love = something that exceeds.perfects the body

I mean both phrases. I could have broken it up into (5a) and (5b). Love exceeds the body. I love your eyes, but... somehow, they cleave my skin and cartilage aside. somehow they communicate to me in the language of tornadoes and earthquakes and babies laughs (the most powerful force in the known-universe). Love perfects the body. make-love. If you have, you know what i mean. If you haven't... then go find out. It's well-worth the eternal-damnation I might receive for my perfidy (mar I owe you $5 for using that word, in the meantime, look it up). I can't wait. I can't wait to ditch the body and love purely. To be divested of this heavy skin, these gigantic hands... these weary feet that hurt most mornings (there are speckles of mud and dirt on my feet, the grime of stardust still under my toenails). I'll love you like a cloud. inside and outsides will mean less. rain makes me feel like that sometimes. the ocean. mountain ranges. small-enough to know it.

enough. let's end with Neruda, he wrote the textbook on love. No one knows more about love:

____(6)
____Between lips and lips there are cities
____of great ash and moist summit,
____drops of when and how, vague
____comings and goings:
____between lips and lips as along a shore
____of sand and glass the wind passes.

____Therefore you are endless; gather me as though you were
____all solemnity, all made of night
____like a zone, until you are indistinguishable
____from the lines of time.

____Advance into sweetness,
____come to my side until the fingery
____leaves of the violins
____heave gone silent, until the mosses
____take root in the thunder, until from the pulse
____of hand and hand the roots descend.

____from Pact (Sonata) by Pablo Neruda