An Ode to Love Songs

What is this feeling called love? We get an education in it from song titles.

It’s a crazy little thing. Tender, sweet, and strange. It’s tainted and it stinks, but we’re addicted to it. It’s our drug. We’re love stoned. We’re crazy in it. It’s all we need, provided we can get enough. We would do anything for it (but we won’t do that). We can’t buy it, because it don’t cost a thing. We keep it locked down. We don’t take it to town, don’t throw it away, and don’t flash it around.

Once we’ve lost that loving feeling, we won’t want to live without it. That’s the power of love. It will keep us together. It will tear us apart. It’s stronger than death, and we will kill for it.

We’re nobody until somebody loves us, but nobody loves us when we’re down and out. Fools fall into that love below. How deep is our’s? We rock the cradle of it. We hate ourselves for feeling it. We give it a bad name.

Love is a battlefield, it will conquer all. It bites and it hurts, especially the ones we feel it for. Stop in the name of it. Love vigilantes take no prisoners. We look for it in all the wrong places. We wonder if it was ever love? It must have been. All is full of it. It’s like oxygen. It’s in the air.

Babies do it. Puppies do it. Muskrats do it. Radars do it. We do it on trains, we do it on roller-coasters, and sometimes we do it in shacks.

Is our love strong enough? Can we prove it, justify it? We think we love you. We know that sometimes that just ain’t enough, but we can’t get enough. All we need is love, but sometimes even love is not enough.

Love is patient. Love takes time. True love waits. We’re waiting for a real love, no ordinary love, one love, not a bizarre love triangle, but a love supreme. We’re waiting for it to lead us back. To lift us higher and higher.

Maybe we don’t always feel it eight days a week, but Friday we’re in love.

I’ve written many a love song back in my day, but following piece is one of the scant few with the word right there in the title.

Love in Lowercase

Did you hide a word inside your cough?
Did it get stuck in your craw?
Did you lose it in the nails you bite?
Did you drop it in the blouse you claw?
Did it almost fly out the pod bay doors?
Did you catch it with your tongue?
So careful not to say a thing
A thing you can’t walk away from

You love in lowercase
From the middle of a run on sentence
You love underneath your breath
Like the meek wait on their inheritance
You kiss with just your bottom lip
Hold hands with just your thumb
You love just like you sing
From your throat and not your lungs

Did you kinda, like a, sorta, maybe
Have a noun for those adverbs?
Did you get lost in your commas?
Did you see the sentence for the words?
Did our moment last a little too long?
Did our conversation hit a lull?
When you said you needed to be “Single”
Did you really mean “Available”

You love in lowercase
From the middle of a run on sentence
You love underneath your breath
Like the meek wait on their inheritance
You kiss with just your bottom lip
Hold hands with just your thumb
You love just like you sing
From your throat and not your lungs

Chance favors the bold
Those who yell when they pray
Those who love in CAPS LOCK
Those who mean what they say
You love in euphemisms
Call me cute, with eyes so blue
You love just like a mad lib, baby
I fill in the blank you too

I fill in the blank you too