Love and Its Discontents

Love poem from a cynical perspective

Love and Its Discontents

How do you make the one you love
love you?

So many just boldly pursue.
How tragically they fail.
They chase post-haste,
though misconstrue
Unwelcome truths tell-tale.

Some know nothing at all to do.
They drift gentle into the night,
never having had a clue
they lived but never knew delight.

They know not why the strongest men
get weak
then to the ground will fall,
Why folly'd be the thing to bring
the undoing of all the wisest of all,
Why beauty seen deposes kings,
and brings the brave to greatness' call;
Those steeped in power, wealth and health
will gladly give their wherewithal
for just a meager fleeting chance
to even once feel such enthrall.

Can none escape captivity
once caught ablaze by fancied gaze?

Does touch with all intensity
always succumb to stark malaise?

Whose constitutions, stern and stoic,
are like a stone they claim,
their manic and foolhardy hearts
all crumble just the same.
Heedless, stricken by some putto
playing cherubs' games,
No less will they languish
nor in anguish less remain.

How do you make the one you love
love you?

Oh, if they only knew all of the things that you would do.
Together you'd create something that's beautiful and new.
It may not even matter in the end if it were true.

Perhaps the question's undeserving of so much ado!