A caged heart once
forgot how to love
loosing its skill under
thought, distance and time.
Who and what deserves love?
The world is hardly the place for a person with principles;
an environment where the ugly proliferates
and acts of kindness and love are treated as risk
but no risk is seen in losing love,
the lifeblood of the world I want to see.
Love lives deep in our being
so deep in fact our surface stiffens
– use it or lose it –
and lost it we have to calculating minds
which sever mind from heart
and elevate mind beyond recognition
in a world that needs heart to survive.
We claim that love comes,
treating it as granted inevitability
when in fact love is a practice;
to be practiced in each gesture,
word and the treatment of others.
We are trapped because our love is trapped
in structures that tell us
how to love one another,
who to love, when to love, for how long
what appropriate love is and what isn’t
and where love belongs.
Everywhere!
At home, in the street, in school and at work
(did you recoil when you read this?)
(did you recoil at my image of love which differs
from the twisted idea of patriarchally sexualised love
which we hold as the only Love?)
We must un-twist love,
reshape and form ourselves to its untwisting
so it may flow through us,
– the great torrent –
which flows through each of us
should we permit it.
Notes From Afar 