(Dedicated in crazy love to the poets John Lennon and Indigo Kalliope founder ulookarmless (CJC)
The poem of crazy love below was written some years ago, during the George W. Bush administration. It's funny how even when everything is rapidly going to hell in a handbasket, love, careless love, will walk right in as if it owned the place, as if nothing else mattered.
. . .
If Only You'd Be My Squeeze
If only you'd be my squeeze,
I'd defy all the powers that beeze.
I'd break Murphy's Law,
Sock George Bush on the jaw,
Give Dick Cheney the bird--
Go ahead, say the word.
Your wish is my rule,
I’m your fool.
Why, to fetch you a tunafish sandwich
I would hop on one leg to Fort Stanwix!
(Who says that you’re easy to please?)
If only you'd be my squeeze!
If you'd just say you’ll be my guy
Before I go nuts quite completely,
And pull half my hair out and cry,
If only you'd kiss me quite sweetly,
I would fling my hat up to the sky!
It would float all the way
To Irondequoit Bay,
On the breeze,
If you’d please
Be my squeeze.
If only you'd be my ska-weeze,
Do you want me to kneel? Ow! my knees.
I'd madly adore you,
And try not to bore you
And be your sweet lover
And smooch you all over,
I don't ask for much,
Just your voice and your touch
If you'd just be my sweet sweet patootie!
If not... take me outside and shoot me!
© S.H. Dougherty, 2003
Apart from the mention of a few public figures, this is a little short on politics. One thing love and politics have in common is that they both can make you crazy. In the above verses, which I wrote while driven crazy by both, the trappings of "bourgeois romanticism" are not absent. If erotic love could be purged of the trappings of bourgeois romanticism, I'm not the one to do it.
Keeping the State out of Love's business has long been a left position. The visionary poet William Blake (1757-1827) saw the state and its church as oppressive entities arrayed against human love and its innocent joys.
The Garden of Love
I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.
Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to be chaste.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And 'Thou shalt not,' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
William Blake, 1794
Bourgeois romanticism is something long understood by the political left as a dominant ideology that masked patriarchal oppression, the tyranny of enforced heterosexuality, and a system of laws regulating sexual behavior and reproduction as a means of policing and controlling the masses, all in the service of the capitalist state.
This thing called "love" occupies a central position in capitalist consumer culture. Movies, TV, advertisements, and popular fiction all propose that "love" is the answer to just about all personal and social problems. Bathing themselves in love's aura, these media sell you products and a way of life that have little to do with love, sweet love. Ugh. Who would accept a dozen roses and a diamond solitaire from Zale's to uphold exploitation, oppression, and militarism?
Keeping the political right from using state power to enforce a monopoly on defining acceptable relationships is love's business and ours. Many of us have personal hopes for a life and a set of relations that can be shielded from that domination, and even asserted counter-culturally in the face of it.
In our private lives, however, we still like the roses and the lush lyrics of love. The trappings of bourgeois romanticism persist; they are also part of our private language of love. Images and emotions are used to sell us a crappy economic order and bind us to its rules, but we co-opt them in return. Love is not mocked. Love aligns itself with the forces of the Left. Love, though strait-jacketed by rightwing moralists, co-opted, commercialized, commodified in consumer capitalist society, and forced into prostitution to sell toilet paper, frozen pizzas, panty liners, and state terrorism, is by nature subversive, a revolutionary. Love has its conservative aspect. Love is a stabilizing power, the weft of the fabric of society, or would be in a decent society. For love, we often put up with shit that we might otherwise rebel against. Love is the glue that binds us together over the long term. But I came here to speak of Crazy Love, love as a a rebel, a fugitive, a refugee, a pauper, a hobo, a beggar who gazes back at a king.
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
W.H. Auden, 1937
Fashionable madmen still strive to interdict any form of love—interracial, same-sex—in favor of one state-sanctioned kind. Auden wrote about love, not that it makes the broken, mortal world whole, but as the portal or lens through which the cosmos becomes, briefly, intelligible and morally inhabitable, our home.
Unrequited love. Many poems are about unrequited love, something one can relate to when young or old. How fortunate we are that unrequited passion is possible at any age! This one is from a cycle called Madrigals of Love and War, which is full of martial imagery, fortresses, arrows, trebuchets and stuff like that. I grew up in a Cold War America in which my political leaders, intent on global domination, plotted to win the Third World's hand from its Communist rival by the hearts-and-flowers approach of foreign aid, often for the benefit of miserable dictators. When that approach failed, love-offerings of High Explosive and napalm supplanted the bouquets. I naturally learned early to imagine both love and politics in bellicose terms. The following draws a parallel between importunate love and the counterproductive effects of military force in a struggle to "win hearts and minds."
A heart ferocious and reclusive
A heart ferocious and reclusive
Never loves when it is bidden.
When pressed, it grows still more elusive,
When sought, more resolutely hidden.
Advance, the sought-for one retreats;
Besiege, bombard, he never yields.
Storm his walls, swarm his streets,
He will flee into the fields.
From hiding, he will watch his towers blaze,
And hidden, mock the thwarted victor's gaze.
© S.H. Dougherty, 1996
Love, hopeless, hapless, clueless love. Tainted love. Fake love. True love. Ultimately mysterious love. Let Auden have the last word on that.
If I Could Tell You
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
W.H. Auden, c. 1940
Dear Reader: What is your favorite poem of love? Post it in the comments!