Love Is….?
by Carey Lenehan
I feel, therefore I love,
yet
what is love but a diverse melange of base ingredients,
clumsily blended by inept hearts,
left to prove, fatly risen, slowly roasted,
to create
a loaf of an entirely different texture?
I know that I feel, or rather,
I know that something feels,
but what are the essential elements, the ratios
and the cause of their cohesion?
Need, attachment, pleasure, security, happiness, dependence,
addiction,
even lust, of course lust… mostly lust,
and yet
none of these alone are love and any, at a moments notice,
on the spur of a thoughtless word,
pushed from the ledge of a selfish act,
can show the Janus face.
Resentment, isolation, pain, uncertainty, anger, freedom, aversion,
even,
repulsion.
So are these too, the raw ingredients of love?
Love is the ultimate souffle of all emotion,
finely blended, carefully prepped, just the right ambiance required,
baked to perfection by good chefs, so easily spoiled,
by ineptitude,
deflated by a moment of bad timing,
by the slightest misjudgement,
a change in altitude, a draught of the wrong air,
ready to collapse at any second, ruined,
by impatience,
all appeal lost in disappointment,
the delectable made
inedible.
We think we know what love is,
but by any other name, it would be the same,
a secret recipe, undefined, intransigent, ephemeral.
Love is the sum of us all,
we are the division of its parts.
A single poor calculation and love becomes
another invalid theorem,
a vague subtraction in the hearts of the old,
a burning multiplication in the loins of the young,
a desperate need for addition,
inclusion,
from the mouth of a child.
We cannot know if the love we feel,
is the same
as anyone else,
without tasting all, how can we tell the difference?
True love,
that relentless enigma,
like any great dish, attempted by all,
but achieved only by a few…
Silent Sleeper
I love you best when you sleep, when your teenage rancour is stemmed, when the assumed poses of your evolution fall away and you are the same as you always were, baby faced as on that very first day, ageless, perfect, silent. When you sleep, all cries of need are ceased, no longer filling my ears or hurting my heart. The accusations of my failure no longer clang upon my guilty conscience. The heat of your anger is doused upon a dewy sweat and once again you are just a sleeping child. When you sleep, I can be your mother, not your opponent I can cover your helplessness with love and protection, keep an eye out for marauders, listen to the sweet sonata of your steady breathing and know you are alive, safe, loved, but most of all, perfectly silent.
Growing Pains
Growing Pains
by Carey Lenehan
*
Miss you, in the long moments
between tick and tock
Between rock and hard place
Where the empty vessel
my life has become
Echoes most loudly
*
Think of you, in the milliseconds
Between each sturdy heartbeat
Between the long and the short
of a relatively meaningless trend,
downwards
Toward zero hour.
*
Love you, in the moment
Between the laughter and the hate
Between the knowing it’s too late
To change
what you think of me
And start anew.
It’s almost over, this crazy ride
Where each day I feared, the gas would run out
Well before the end of the freeway
And we two would be
Stuck on a hard shoulder
For eternity and beyond
*
So forget me, when it’s all over
Between the growing and the leaving
Between the hope and the grieving
Live your life in freedom
And please remember, amidst these minutes of fail
I have loved you every moment I could
Temporal Displacement Syndrome
by Carey Lenehan
Was I born at the wrong time,
unwanted, ill-fitting and out of place as I am,
in a world that doesn’t get me and which
I simply don’t understand,
Where death and cruelty stalk unchecked and I,
emotionally bludgened by endless injustice,
scream soundlessly,
surrounded by a herd
with such different ideas,
consistently flocking the other way
whilst I stay,
perplexed, on the open plain,
watching them go and wondering
why they want to?
Was I born too early,
meant instead for some distant era in the far future,
to a world grown well beyond the age of true enlightenment,
when peace is actuality
and common sense of the logical kind
is at last harnessed to a shining morality
of second nature to all, no matter
what colour their skin or shape their bible,
when respect for ALL life is a given,
and malice once and for ever banished from our
Oh so human hearts?
Because to me, anything but this belongs only
to a barbarous species
of which I want no part.
Was I born too late,
meant instead for a time of chivalry and valour
when the Gods and half Gods drew their places in history
on the edge of a sword blade,
eye to eye,
face to face,
not covertly through a long distance sight,
killing reduced to recoil
by dispassionless cowards incapable
of honest courage,
merely drone killers for a soulless elite
delivering death from the shadows
no longer heroes lining up
for an honest battlefield?
I dream of a time of real equality
with no differentiation between X and Y,
no rules seperating rich from poor that do not give
equal penalties and rewards to all.
Where starving children are a historical horror,
when profiteering and abject greed are no longer
our primary goal
When champions do not aspire
to base desires of material enrichment
but work towards the common good, unfailingly.
When we all do.
This is the world I was meant for.
Was I born at the wrong time?
Were you?
Poles Apart
© Carey Lenehan
We ran in the same streets, but we walk in different worlds
You and I,
poles apart, thinking, not thinking about understanding each other,
no chance of ever, seeing eye to eye
Equality unequally distributed, you see you
at the top of the food chain,
whereas I,
a mere reflection of yourself,
am somewhere down deep in the pond
Skin, stature, sex, sin, sisterhood,
you will never see what I see, only
the walls of the world
that fence you in to conformity
with me
on the outside because I,
dressed in the threads of exception,
find conformity too straight a jacket
You see the world numerical, divisible, distributable,
Whereas I,
who came from the earth and never left,
perceive symbiosis, unity, the absolute
art of the whole,
that radiant goddess
from whom you cut chunks
and pretend there flows no blood
You cannot make us alike, because of a deed,
a slash of pen on paper
You drown in misconceptions as we circle each other
swimming in different waters
bound only by a name,
same same, but different
You have lost the real world as you count profits
and study the Nasdaq,
allergic to green grass and fresh air
but I am still living there,
treading the wet earth between my toes,
watching the seasons change,
listening to the fading heartbeat of your cash cow
My earth will take me back when I am done
but where will you go to my brother?
Will you be divisible too?
Will your company count your profit and loss
and the trees
mourn your passing?
Will the pipelines shed a tear, will your office be refilled with
a clone of you?
Will we be equal?
Can you ever, be my equal?
