Love Is...? Poem 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 soufflé 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,
achieved only by a few…