What is love?

What is love anyway, does anybody love anybody anyway? ~ Howard Jones

How do we define if we’re ‘in love’?
What kind of love?
Is it infatuation that can leave as soon as it came?
Or obsession, driven by wish and deprivation?
Is it the warm glow of knowing you ‘feel the same’?
Or the darkest of desires, centred purely on possession?

Is it warm, earthy, accepting and gradual
Or cool, liquid flow, intense, instant and feral?
Does it nestle in arms like a warm summer caress
Or is it hard fucking, on bare floorboards under duress?

Is it enduring?
Born of desire,
Tempered in the fire
Of change
Tested by loss and the wane
Of emotion – like the moon
Cool glow
Slows
And yet…
It grows, nutured by want
Need…
Greed? Of heart?

Is it true if we’re apart
We become fonder?
Or is this falsehood
Instead our wish turns to wander

Is love selfish?
Or entirely giving?
A snatched, elicit kiss
Or a last desperate cling?

I have no solid answer
Nor divine knowledge reserve
Because the answers keep evolving
And continually changing

The only constant in love
Is its many forms
To speak of
That which affirms

A conduit to feeling
That very ’something’
Of your humanity
Your vulnerability
That ties you
But looses free

Are we ever
Really
Able to see
What it truly is to be
In love?

One more time, with feeling

I’m bemused… I found, just by chance, a ‘no bullshit’ online dating site. Well – it attempts to cut out the dross and go straight to the passion. So says the labeling on the flashy red package. Forget pink n fluffy: this one comes with a devils’ tail on the end.

For those of you who are curious it’s called Forget Dinner (no, I’m not on commission). Pretty obvious about cutting to the chase…

Needless to say, the swish presentation of a nice-but-naughty, passion filled site of prospective partners, does initially sound above board and kinda sexy. But scratch the surface and the tawdry side does show just a tad.

The one thing I found out is this – the clientelle seem to fall very specifically into two camps. First camp is made up of the eligible bachelors who want a nice fling with loose or no ties, but very occasionally are looking for something more meaningful. The second is similar except these chaps are married. A lot of them are married.

Interestingly, if we’re drilling down into psychological analysis – and I would, being a pro researcher, the married chaps mainly fall into two categories:

1) Bored, unhappy, falling apart relationships – or locked into a relationship because of children, money or religion. They want some relief and some comfort and a little fantasy.

2) The immoralistic buggers who want a bit on the side because they fancy themselves as some kind of high flying lothario and ‘one woman just won’t do’. Poor dears… Viagra should have them plugged in on a battery farm or something.

Personally I have no problem with the majority of the guys on there – although, for personal reasons I wouldn’t touch a married man with a ten foot bargepole… and really, the one who came up with a chat up line “34-DD?” really needed a bat on the nose with a sharp stick.

But I think it goes to illustrate the point that humans really aren’t monogamous creatures by nature, and although we maintain the surface layer of respectablity of marriage and partnership – when it comes to our instinctual, sexual mores.. we really are, still, very feral.

I would emphasise the point that many of these chaps that were in contact from the site were professionals, financially comfortable, happily settled, and simply looking for some hooky. Most were married.

There are exceptions, thankfully, and I will say in this case, at least people are being brutally honest about what they want and not dressing it up with sugary lines. Which is a refreshing change – even if some of them are cruder than a horse’s hard on.

It’s actually a fascinating site nonetheless and I’m actually having fun with this one. It makes a change simply because people for once are being their basic selves without the usual dating bullshit, even if it’s under a nom de plume.

Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more…

Lurkers and Tracers and Missives.. oh my..

/Rant on

You know, The Internet is a very strange place. Oh come on – you don’t need me to tell you that – I’m being rhetorical.

The point is this.. that you can have your little net presence (blogs, social networks etc) for months.. no, even years, and pass banter with other like minded individuals with nary a worry in the world and then you get what I call the crazy weeks. It’s like some individuals suddenly wake up and decide they want to TALK to you.

Now then.. I say TALK.. because it’s more like, tour de force, intense, demanding little missives that come out of nowhere, and God knows why this week has been like this.. perhaps Mars is conjunct Uranus in the Great Star Map and the stellar gas needs to pass out somewhere…

I post a poem.. and get a note of an intensely personal, emotional nature – so personal I won’t post it publicly – from an anonymous guy whose life appears to be falling apart. I mail him back and suggest he perhaps seeks some help from kind counsellors. I haven’t heard anything back, but I didn’t expect to. But I hope, if it wasn’t some kind of twisted hoax, that he really gets the help he needs.

Then I get hit on by a guy making out he’s being friendly until I get the kind of questions that make any girls hackles start to rise.. what colour are your eyes, are you likely to be coming back to my part of the world? ‘I could get addicted to you’… I kindly write back and politely point out that I am only on the network to make friends and am not interested in anything romantic, and really hope that doesn’t offend, and continue on with opening conversation on things of mutual interest. Needless to say I haven’t heard anything back since.

Then over the weekend I get ‘befriended’ online by a rather sexy looking gal out in the States. Her profile has a ‘come hither’ quality to it, which just screams, ‘I could fuck you right now’. Like many hits I get on the site, I register she’s visited and note to self I’ll take a look at her page sometime soon. A day later I get an email which simply states: “Why haven’t you come to visit me?” I respond, with pursed, and bemused lips… that perhaps I might not have sufficent interest to come drop by her page. The dynamic suddenly turns exceptionally hard, aggressive and sexual. I’m not about to get bullied into any sexual hit I’m not interested in. So I bounce back with a rather hard hitting comment that asks why she just doesn’t kick down my door, kick a body aside, wearing silk gloves to hide her fingerprints before landing me on the floor. I get a polite message back stating she’s no match and she’s kindly buggering off.

If I want a dom-dyke in my bed, I’ll make damned sure it’s clear on the plastic sticky label adorning my arse.

Then I get the guy that comes out of nowhere – no ID on his profile, announces he’s got a degree in this, and is reading a book about that..so I respond in a careful, but open manner as one does when just getting to know someone new. He then suddenly wants to know an awful lot about me without so much as a cursory ‘hello this is me’ introduction. Oh yes.. and photos, do I have any more photos of me I could send him? I point out, given I seem to know exactly nadda about the guy, that it’s perhaps, a tad early for me to be posting a virtual stranger photos of myself.

Guys.. and indeed gals (yes, it happens). Seriously, I could write a bloody manual for how standard this is becoming. It’s tired. Because what happens is, you think cos a gal’s on a social site and single, that she’s obviously gagging for it and immediately wants to share her inside leg measurement with you as a prelude for the Biggest Romantic Exchange in History. Or perhaps the Shortest Sexual Shag Episode in History. Whatever.

I know.. I sound incredibly cynical – probably because I am – and the fact that I have fallen for this little patter a number of times now, and I have finally woken up, and smelt the coffee.

If I want chatting up, I’ll go to an online dating agency.

I want friends.. and an honest interchange of opinions.. to discuss matters of relevance – not a butter up and an invite to fuck. I know I sound crude, bitter, almost – but really.. I am not – all I want is honest chat, about common areas of interest. It does happen you know – I have, actually, made some good internet friends – male and female, and am in regular contact with them. Romantic interludes and sexual connotations are left on the back shelf where they’re supposed to be.

Why can’t we just be friends?

/Rant off

Integral

Roosevelt said..
walk quietly,
but with a big stick.

No schtick,
there.

The Japanese simply say
‘do good’

ok bud.

But they also say:
sit quietly by the river and
eventually
the body
of your enemy
will float by you

so

Do I sit nice and quiet
without a riot

and attempt to define…
integrity?

What..
are we?
If we don’t set our own moral line
where we define
What’s right
And what’s wrong?
And before long
we get to say
hey…

My personal philosophy
does not agree

with what you assume
and what you presume
is right

it’s perhaps,
not the same idea
you forsee

and common ground
is no longer found

I step back
and without losing tack
state:
I do not wish to negate
our conversation -
not lost in translation…

But I profoundly believe
(and perhaps you’ll perceive)
That giving in on something so profound
as one’s own moral coda ground

for the sake of an advantage
an estimated percentage…
gain

Is such a shame.

I will step back
my integrity intact

Understanding that perceiving

comprehending…
and receeding rather than aggressing

Is preferable
than selling myself whole (like a ho)
to a lesser goal.

“No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.” ~ Ovid.

It’s a one time thing.. it just happens.. a lot.

I wrote a self indulgent poem. It was maudlin. Quietly angry. And I’ve just deleted it.

Because the one thing I have decided that I can not, and should not be, is that moping woman we see self-indulging her mixed up feelings on a public blog.

Apologies to those who read and bookmarked it.

More creative, less self involved poetry will appear here in its place, soon.

obdurate

The hand forces the head down under the water
The muscles tense, the hands flail
All struggle, and blind grasp whilst under
Head, bursts the surface, gasps… air… inhale

And down… again… suffocating, suppressing
Isolating: the steady, silent hand, unemotive
Holds… measured, calculated, withdrawing
As the fight slows, desire dulls: dimming, passive

The steady stream of emotion, ebbing
Words – once tumbling like torrid cascades
Turn arid, stilted, slowly drying
Feeling – once bright and shimmering, fades

Disappointment: the loose, unconscious body
Limp in the empty void of silence
The animated story, now a parody
Smothered in the vacuum of absence

How, now, should desire still spark?
Yet, still, from this flint, years hardened
Flickers flame within the stagnant dark
And tinder, slow catches, quietly kindled…

A slow burn light of self-will imposed
Draws the spirit back to its feet
Sensate, raw, vital, exposed
Alone, and yet once more, complete.