I Wonder What Love Is

I wonder what love is because I haven’t had it at all.

I wonder what love is,
what it feels like to feel that feeling,
what it feels to be loved,
what a real relationship entails,
I know nothing of this almost-extinct art of dating someone.

I was born in an era where
sex is loved, but people aren’t.
And while I found countless men to lay bare with,
I never found one I could lay my soul bare to.
I never felt more, nothing more than lust,
it wasn’t even that I didn’t try to feel love,
I was just too unsure of how it’d go.

Sure I had relationships, but they weren’t real –
just like the orgasms I faked through in order to not hurt the other.
No boom box under my window,
no carnations, no roses, no flowers at all.
It was just me, with my guard held high,
paralleling their egos, trying to see which fell first
down to the ground, near the hopes and dreams
of a time lost long before the fights.

Throwing stones in a pond,
to see that the stones had magically disappeared,
I’ve lit a thousand flames with no intentions
of feeding them through.

I wonder what love is sometimes,
when I lay awake at night.
I wonder how it’d all be, if someone wanted me
as much as I wanted them.
Maybe the thought of my empty emotions
haunts me more than those calories.
But is it worth the risk? I asked a few
broken, damaged, woven and mended souls,
who had courage to walk on hot coal,
once again
and all of them seemed to say yes,
all of them seemed to smile –
the thought of love to them was divine.