A Place We Call Love

Winter with you snows proposals. Promises crunch under foot in autumn bursts of colour on park pathways, orange into red into yellow. Summer with you spouts kisses, wet with spit on a teenage first date - there’s no drought here. Our Spring blossoms into the shape of hearts along stems, with rings upon leaves. There’s a fifth season here in this place called Love, where it is forever night, forever alight with eyes for stars. Here, Love is smell: sweaty with tinges of panic. Love is touch: secretly caressing feet under tables. Love is sight: mirror, water, glassy reflections. Love is sound: a shriek, a sigh, a laugh, an intake of breath. Love is taste: exotic yet homely, new yet known. Love, here, is a sixth sense: only truly sensed when found. Our place called Love rhymes and dances within itself from place to face to lace to pace and the beat-de-beat-de-beat of a heart, from love to dove to above to cove to... stupid English. In this place of ours, Love is a verb... to love, to kiss, to wed. Love is an adjective here... I am in love with you. Love is a noun, too... an abstract, intangible thing as well as a proper title, a capitalised place. Love is a city in this country of ours called Love, a destination for tourists honeymooning - lovers in pursuit of magnets or t-shirts bearing a slogan that Love does exist after all. They send postcards written in red, ink from beating and bleeding hearts. Love has a body here too. A voice offering a myriad of truths, a sex as yet ungendered but passionate and open and massaged, exploded into an altogether new being. It finds itself upon a bed that spins, spins, spins and turns on fingertips and tiptoes. Is Love the question or the answer? The chicken or the egg? Well, there is a place called Love. I’ve seen it. Reserved under lock and key for you and for me. Us. Here is the place.