By Steve Soskin   intersys@cruzio.com
Date: 15 January 1998

Love Is!

 Love, frozen in the arms of time's rigid confines 
 Bound by society's rights and wrongs 
 Pleas for understanding unheard by mute-rigid culture 
 To live within these bounds is painful 
 To love within these bounds, torturous 
 Two souls reaching, as one, for love's 
 precious possession 
 Only to be beaten by other's evil thoughts. 

 Love, that most powerful of all emotions, 
 is powerless 
 in the face of society. 
 Why can not those binding confines 
 be broken? 
 Why must society's mores be so rigid? 
 What right has society to stop love 
 when it cannot stop war? 
 Damnit! 

 Let us not waste tears on what cannot be 
 But rather rejoice in what is 
 What we have had, what we will have. 
 Let us not dwell on what might have been 
 but rather on what is allowed to us, 
 For most people are not even allowed that. 

 Love is allotted to a few special people; 
 those that can truly understand its pain 
 and its glory 
 For without that pain there can be no love, 
 merely companionship. 
 To say "I love you" is not enough 
 for it reaches far beyond that. . . 
 into 'friendship' and faith 
 and understanding. 

 To hold you, for thoughts to merge as one, 
 to caress you, 
 look at you 
 embrace you 
 is but a facet of love. 

 I, with humble and sometimes trite words, try to 
 explain and exclaim my love 
 but it is impossible 
 to bind a soul to paper. 

 Love Is!