Posts Tagged ‘The Many Faces of Love’

Dimensions of Love

Love has the power to touch every part of your life – every part of your being. This poem is woven around this theme.

No matter how brutal or beset with fear, love, if only for fleeting moments, reaches beyond oneself and includes. Your body and mine merge. You and I have extended beyond the narrow boundary of ourselves and dared to want another person, to need, to admit we are not self contained. Clumsy as it may be, lovers want, offer, take, give. Without love, there would only be containment, isolating and isolated . There would be no need to take in what a lover offers, there would be no absorbing and growing from the infinite richness of another being’s difference.

Am I the cell that swims toward my lover’s waiting egg? Am I the egg, wondrous and radiating with life, waiting my lover’s treasure? If I am these, and this is love, then in our embrace, in our passion for each other we burst asunder, and all the million years of compact life we carry is given to each other. We die, to give, and form new life. We leave ourselves behind to reach toward a miracle. Mystery and wonder incarnate and are made real in our commonplace. A child has come.

Am I a baby and mother, bound to each other intensely with potent needs, prompted by fears and passions? Baby or mother, breast or mouth, my yearning sucking squirting love, is still the same old mystery. Still body to body. Still wet and penetrating and absorbing and nourishing. Still full of needs met and shared. Still calling us to break open and admit our need for each other, to feel the longing of another for us – calling me as the mother to give myself, to feel something, somebody beyond myself – to take in who and what they are and know their difference – calling me as baby to know that I will die without YOU – that I will shout with all I am to hold you and suck you into me – that everything I have is yours – and I must grow to see another being than I exists and calls me to relate and take their very soul and body into me that I might grow.

As a youth, love takes hold of me and in its urgency grows courage in me to move beyond my parents and expose my vulnerable self to a stranger. Love teaches me, if I am brave enough, to leave behind all that was safe in home and family. With persistence beyond believing it stretches me toward caring for this stranger, absorbing their behaviour, satisfying their needs, toward becoming more than I was. As difficult, as fraught with pain and anger, as open to pettiness, yet love carries on leading us toward bursting asunder to take in another being and become more.

To make love is to face all that we fear, all that we hold of past pain in us, all that we store as the most ancient secret of ourselves and of life, all that is beyond our little self to know, all the rivers of creation and joy, all dying and rebirth. To be penetrated, to penetrate, to fall through each other into our past, into the place of genesis, the Garden of Eden, the wonder, the sin, the fear, the hope – the transcendence. To hold each other – to look upon each other – to touch – to kiss – to linger in each others arms, open to each other – and this in a world so guarded and suspicious and at war. Can there be anything more wonderful or strange? Can there be any greater promise of a future for us? Can there be anything more physical, more spiritual, more ordinarily beyond?

To fuck, to shag, to have it away with each other, as common as this may seem, has in it the power to transcend beyond anything else in our small lives. Vast differences in age are leapt over by the drive to sex. Skin colour, political differences, religious intolerance, gender opposition, intellectual variation, age, culture, class, distance, time – all melt before sex. Not religion, not philosophy, not police, not war, have done so much to bring people together, to show them how to live and learn from each other, to prove how much they need beyond themselves.

Sexual love, the drive toward parenthood, the drive toward giving body and soul to another being, the drive toward facing more pain, more heartache, more challenge, more dependence, more responsibility than you have ever faced before. Sex, the drive toward the tenderness of holding and nurturing an infant. Sexual love, the energy that fires one to work day in, week long, year after year to provide. Sexual wonder, the teacher that opens eyes to see all natures creatures building homes, feeding their young, striving, giving themselves, dying, to bring life – that links us with others through understanding. Sexual togetherness, that moves beyond parenthood to slowly absorbing you into me until I am enriched and made more. Sex, where you and I are wet with each other, shining eyes, smiles, sharing sweetness and wordless wisdom that runs out into the lives of others.

Tony Crisp

Cupboard Love

My love is like a cupboard,
She is full of wonderful things,
Of memories, laughter and crying
And gentleness that love brings.
She has poems and books within her,
And walks, from her childhood years,
Things that people have told her,
And aloneness of night time fears.

I love to look in that cupboard
To see the things she has there,
Things we have done together,
Things that we can share.
Sometimes she shows me pictures
Of wonderful things she has seen.
Or times, when we are quiet,
In other hearts she has been.

In that cupboard are men and women,
Whose lifetime she has shared,
Or sometimes, carefully hidden,
The stardust she has snared.
There are bluebells that she gathered
As a young, young girl in a wood,
And paintings her feelings canvassed
When on womanhood’s brink she stood.

I wish you could look in this cupboard,
At all of the things I can see.
But you can’t, for you lack her loving,
And that is the magic key.

Tony Crisp

Blood Connections

Together.

From distance.

Moving carefully nearer to touch.

Being apart to being a part, of you, merged, connected.

Melting of the edge, the resistance. For this is the dangerous place, the life exchange. This is the meeting and the merging, the place of blood flow. The open petals, the secret flower revealed. The giving the receiving. The laughter the tears. The enfolding and enfolded. The return of trust. The precious place of renewal.

And so with you I am once more connected. Beyond the moments of merged bodies, of loving wetness, into the subtle joining of nerve endings, of veins, of being. Underneath the common day, where even thoughts are shared. Into the twilight zone of each other’s yesterdays and tomorrows. This is the jungle where we were slain. The cave where we were born. It is the earth where things are buried, perhaps still with life, not merging with the soil. It is the temple of Possibility.

So newly met. So freshly coupled. Then suddenly the tenuous link stretched across miles. From the shadow jungle I hear a child crying. And far away my married life bides with another who called her across the land with attachments formed long past. Is that attachment still alive?

I wait, as I have learned to wait long years, even beyond time. The tenuous link aches. I feel the old scars. Strange how once cut, new blades precisely find the mark. Is this the circle of my life that I must dance again, aching to know I have not been abandoned? Fearing old links are stronger than the new?

A few words are all I need. An assurance I am not left. No call. No assurance. Can old links be so absorbing? The link begins to bleed. Pain troubles sleep. Is something so life giving forgotten so soon? The days become long troubled feelings. No call. What have the movements of the planets got to do with this? How does the rising price of petrol explain it? I have no answer.

The nerve endings rip apart. The veins are torn. The subtle body breached in painful sundering. What life has joined together does not part easily. Life screams that each partner should need each other equally. I hope and I hope and I hope she will hurry home. The evening comes, the house is empty. Old links have been too strong in giving satisfaction.

I cannot help but think that if I visited a lover from my past, it would be cruel to withhold assurance. I wonder why?

Survival is all I know. It is a life lesson. Distance the balm that heals. I must go.

The madness has gone from old wounds. They no longer leave me crouched in the corner unable to eat or sleep. But the skin is thin on those scars. I must learn to stand away from care-less-ness.

Strangely awful that with such love for each other we are such tormentors – I for she, and she for me. This is the dangerous place. Blood connection.

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Tony Crisp

Black Power

Well, slit my drawers,
If it isn’t Henry,
Standing up for me again
Like a gentleman!
Ain’t your wife
Good enough
For you Henry?
Can’t you let your worse
An your best hang out
With her in your bed?
So here I am again
With my legs open
For you to dive in
An cum alive again.
Jesus – what it is
To be the black
Power of Creation!

Birthday Gifts

It was her birthday yesterday,
And I had bought her a gadget
I thought she would enjoy.
Music on one of those
Tiny things you can hold
In the palm of your hand;
Whole orchestras and
Bands of music.
So this morning
As the sun was shining
Into my door
She came and thanked me
Holding me close
And telling me
She had been crying.
So as she was in my arms
I told her I loved her,
And she wept
As I wondered why
Her own father had never
Said those words to her.
And there I was
Holding someone else’s
Daughter close to me
Who had been so hungry
To know she was loved.
And I could feel the
Ease of it,
Knowing neither of us
Would use what we
Had given to each other
As a hook to hold the other.
Neither would we take it
As a lever to manipulate.
Therefore it was whole.

Tony Crisp

You asked me if I am satisfied

When I can see your love reaching to me,
Experiencing it as your desire to be with me,
As you’re happy kisses,
And soft confidences told,
I am satisfied.

Your love is a balm even in my sleep,
Leading me to wake on an ocean of calm,
Feeling complete.

And by love
I mean the mutual eagerness
To share each others presence;
To be with you in simple things
Like buying the groceries
And laughing as we
Choose an ice cream.
I mean the respect we hold
For each other –
The pleasure felt
In walking side by side.

I am satisfied when we share a task
And find harmony of action
In our togetherness.
The empty rooms
That were in my life,
Are filled with soft colour and music.

To know we have some future together
Brings a peace that flows out of me
As warmth and happiness to others.
That too is satisfaction.

Time after time each day
That tide of pleasure rises in me
And I feel whole.
Then, to hold you skin to skin,
To feel the tenderness of lips and tongue,
To enter and be surrounded by your warmth,
Encircled by your arms,
And look into your eyes as we blend –
That is satisfaction.
The joy fills me,
And does not need to spill out of my body.
Yes – I am satisfied my darling woman.

Tony Crisp

Art by Caroline Atkinson

Alone with Love

In my aloneness,
I said to my heart,
“Can I ever find love again?”
And my heart replied,
“Love is not found like a lost purse
Dropped by the wayside with treasure in it.
Neither can you seek it
As you would
A longed for purchase in a store.
Love already exists,
As the kernel of your being.
You do not find love
In someone else,
But in yourself.
If it has been absent,
It is because events
Have led you to close
The windows of your soul,
And forbid its light to shine.
The love you seek,
Is the recognition of the light,
Shining from someone else.”
But the troubled waters of past loves
Led me to seek the wisdom
Of my heart again.
And in my concern,
I asked my heart,
“Love is such an uncertainty.
How shall I know when I have met
Someone with whom
I can find the giving
And the receiving,
Of each other’s needs?”
Quietly my heart replied,
“Where there is love,
Two people grow together,
Without effort.
Where there is no love,
People grow apart.
Only the dependencies
Pushed upon us by our pains,
Our jealousies,
And our poverty,
Hold us in a relationship
Where love has died.”

The All American Girl

She wears a baseball cap,
Tennis shoes and tight tan pants
While she cleans her home.
You know her face,
You’ve seen her in the supermarket.
But originally
She came from Italy,
Or was it France?
Maybe San Salvador?
I saw her face
Painted on a wall
In Pompeii.
I guess she could have
Come from anywhere
To become
The All American Girl.

Once I met her
On a moonlit night
And I saw her face
Against the stars.
She looked so young.
But I had met her
In Pompeii
And Alexandria.
She was a woman then,
And I in love.
But now she wears
A peaked cap
And has a pony tail.
Now she speaks
In ways
The North Americans use.
But I know it’s her
Smiling at me.
I knew it as I saw her
Framed by the stars,
Old as time,
Except that now
She is the All American Girl,
With an amazing butt,
And deep brown eyes.
The same dark eyes!

You must have seen her
In the Coke adverts?
That sparkling smile,
The complete female,
The latest version of woman,
Everything streamlined
And up to date.
But she is as old as time,
And is all women.
I saw her face in Herculaneum.
The All American Girl.

It Ain’t Your Love

Maybe you think you’ve got love.
You think you’ve got love?
Well, let me tell you
That something could happen
That could knock you on the floor.
When you hit the floor,
Your love might shatter
Like a broken glass.
And you thought you had love.
There is a love bigger than that,
Stronger than that.
You got so clever about love
You thought it was yours,
Until you got knocked down.
Then perhaps you begin to see
It wasn’t yours in the first place.
It was simply flowing through you.
You don’t control it.
Love belongs to life.
It comes through you
When you are giving and caring.
But it can get broken
As soon as you believe
You own it or try to hold on to it.
But love never disappears.
Perhaps its stopped coming to you
From a particular person.
But that isn’t a problem.
Sure as hell, if you love life,
Its going to come at you
From someone else,
From a dog,
From a child,
From the clear blue sky.

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