Love???

Love is a funny thing

Many splendored

But funny all the same

Lifetimes spent in the pursuit

Sagas written

Rivers of Ink

And millions of trees

Lose their life

Describing the death throes

Of unrequited love.

 

Somehow

Only unrequited love gets celebrated

Look at the great lovers

Romeo and Juliet

A silly adolescent passion

But Oh what an end

Tristan and Isolde

The Laila-crazy Majnun

Wandering in desert

He could have been

Earning a living

Feeding orphans

Or even composing poetry

Anything else

But being stoned by crude villagers.

 

And while all the world

Loves a lover

The immediate world

Friends and family

Progenitors and guardians

Rarely do

So a Heer is betrayed

A Sohni dies

In a raging river.

 

And funnily enough

Its not even love this thing

Which it is supposed to be

A momentary glance

And voila one is tormented for eternity.

A summer passion

A monsoon madness

Or worse just a winter warmth.

External fickle

And entirely unreliable

 

But it serves it s purpose

Of feeding the poor poet

The ballad writer

The story writer

A villain becomes easy to invent

The script writer can save the world

And have a happily ever after.

And frankly after the dragons

Have been killed

The ogres defeated

The trolls beaten

And evil stepmothers banished

There cannot be an exciting life

In the mundane

Specially since it is to be spent

In the company of a torrid passion

Not a real love.

It is easier for great love to be

Greatly unrequited.

 

For "true" love

As the books write of it

Is just a thunderbolt

And more dangerous.

A silly mirage

Which nevertheless

Everyone chases

And fails to see

The reality

In the face of what it is meant to be.

 

And so thousands sigh

Commemorate a saint

Of Roman times

A kitschy pink confetti

Marking anniversaries

Tracking breakups

And Writing poetry

Mostly painfully bad

Or carving hearts on trees.

And there is not much to live up to

Come on the analogies

Of the moth and the flame

Are hardly conducive

To anything lasting

More than a night

And even that marble folly

That monument to Eternal Love

Is just a cold tomb.