What They Taught Me About Love
I was born one day to mom and dad
And they taught me a little thing about love
Love was the sacred, unconditional thing
Between a parent and a child
That never wavered, changed, or disappeared.
I started school when I turned five
And they taught me a little thing about love
Love was about sharing
About never being selfish
Always just a part of the community.
Then I was nine and my brother was seventeen
And he taught me a little thing about love
What it sounded like to make love to the girl
You took to prom, but call out the name
Of the Quarterback before you ejaculated
And what it looked like to see mom and dad
Pretend not to hear.
And then I went to middle school
And they taught me a whole lot about hate
What it meant to call a kid a faggot
How to hate everyone who was different
How to hate everyone around me
How to hate hate hate myself.
But then, out of no where, in high school
I met a girl
And she taught me a little thing about love
That faggot wasn’t really synonymous with stupid
That hate was for people who didn’t understand
That she was beautiful, and I was beautiful, and
If we wanted
We were all beautiful.
In high school I met a girl
And she taught me how to love
How to kiss and how to touch and how to feel with every inch of my body and LOVE it.
And how everything they had taught me
Before
Was wrong.
In high school the girl I met
Taught me that love was something beyond prom
Beyond one man and one woman
Taught me that love was something beyond giving
Beyond the stupid notion that taking was selfish
Taught me that love was
Beyond unconditional
That in order to love one had to
Hate a little, too.
And that no matter how many times my parents said
That their love was unconditional
Regardless of my sexual orientation.
They would always hate me a little inside
And a little too much on the outside
And that is what I have learned about love.
4 comments:
I actually laughed out loud when I read the bit about the quarterback. Really. Just guffawed all by my lonesome.
It's good. I like the first half the most, it seems a little more didactic towards the end, but that's probably because it was in the frame of a school project. I give it mad props.
Thanks Charles. I like this poem a lot better when I read it out loud anyway--from what I've heard, it has a bit of a different meaning, and I think it becomes a bit more continuous and flow-y.
But I'm glad I could make you LOL, everyone loves that verse the most. Which doesn't surprise me, although originally that wasn't how it went at all. The idea that the brother was gay, too, wasn't something that I thought of doing until the very end of writing the poem :)
Damn it, Charles said everything I wanted to say...
Oh well; nice poem, Renata.
Why is it always endings we fuck up? I had no idea how right on Rita Mae was about ending poems sooner than we think. I need to cut the bottoms off, like, everything I've ever written, ever.
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