C'MON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No one else has anything to say about me, about how wonderful I am?

...

Hello?!?!?!??!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????????????????
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I want you.

<:|

^ Why yes! Yes I am wonderful!

I am also sexy.

Who would like to discuss me for a while?

Please, tell me all the wonderful things about me! Me! Me!

Oh, I truly am wonderful.

Here is a list of things that make me wonderful:

--My beauts
--Hi.
--I like the color red (a little bit)!
--I use a lot of exclamation marks.
--My beauts!
--Oh, I am a colorful character. Very colorful.
--I can't sing.
--I can't dance.
--I CAN play the piano.
--I CAN draw.
--I CAN take amazing photographs.
--I CAN bake.
--I CAN write amazing tomes!
--I am so, so friendly! So friendly!

What do you think, my future husbands and wives?

Sigh. No.

Trust, humility, and faithfulness* are parts of love. Love is a series of actions that do not change if the subject of that love changes; that is what "unconditional" means. No matter what flaws a person may have, or may attain, love sees beyond them always.

That said, unconditional love is impossible for a human being to achieve without God.

* Those being the approximate, conceptual opposites of jealousy, pride, and infidelity.

And yet... none of you said anything until I commented. Interesting.

Guess why that is? None of you can recognize a decent poem when you see one. I have suffered reading some of the poems posted here, and let me tell you, no Keats, no Brownings, no Eliots reside here. The closest to those I've seen here is the gentleman in question.

And, no, his poem would be much improved *without* that line for the reasons I stated.

Sorry, poetry--real poetry--isn't just a bunch of emotional fluff. It's structure. It's imagery. It's art. Real poetry might actually take time and be somewhat difficult, even unpleasant, to write; it might actually force you to think (gasp!) and write and re-rewrite, then write again, your thoughts. Some poems take years to write. The ones that take less than years, less than weeks, must come from an exceptionally gifted mind. Guess how many people meet that qualification?

Harsh? Well, reality often is.

Love is not an emotion. First of all. Love might *involve* emotions, but love is not itself an emotion. Love is closest to an action. Perhaps love could be called "a conscious act of will."

That quote came from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Clearly, you missed the point, or attempted to repeat the point, and failed. So, you've forced me to paraphrase Shakespeare. Thanks.

Even just looking at those two lines (which I quoted before), "love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds," no one could put the notion more eloquently or succinctly. When a person changes, love remains steadfast, through "tempests," through trouble, all kinds of trouble. When a person alters, love does not alter. That's eternal, unconditional love.

Hmmm, no, there really are only two options. Either you love someone or you don't. Pretty simple. There may be a lot *surrounding* a situation, such as jealousy or pride or infidelity, but none of those things represent love; so, they must represent hate, and I'd argue that they do. Love is pretty black and white. Either you're striving to love or you're striving to hate; just as you're either striving to live or striving to die. There is no in between.

I should know.

*Bump*

You might want to look this over. It's pretty incredible.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOF!
Did that ever STING!

What beauty! What beauty!
Didst my buttock put forth!

Lo, into the air the stench doth proceed
from betweenest mine cheeks!

THOOF! THOOF! THOOF! THOOF!

Ahhhh, man.

Gassy. Passy.

I Did Fart, The Poem

Yah.

This is the best poem written on this site. Period.

It's abstract, but evocative. Subtle, but clear. The image of a door as a metaphor for possibilities is terribly cliche, but it is given a new face here. This not in comparison to the great Romantic poets--Browning, Keats, Longfellow, Poe, etc.--but compared to the whole of mingle, that's a pretty accurate assessment.

The only line I *really* don't like is "maybe she would breathe again." I think if you got rid of it completely the poem would be greatly improved; that line completely broke the momentum and mood of the rest of the poem. It's also trite and meaningless and everyone says they can't breathe to be dramatic. Everything else was pretty okay.

Yes. You can forgive. Forgiveness is a pivotal part of love.

"Love is not love / which alters when it alteration finds."

If God can forgive any person completely, so should we. It's still a choice; you can hold your hatred against extreme evil inside you and let it destroy you, or you can forgive; you can love. Those are your options.

That description seems true: Love that runs deeper than our flaws.

I disagree with the second part: Love can endure even the most heinous acts. If you think about people who commit gruesome crimes, like murder, how their loved ones, much of the time, do not abandon them amidst their turmoil; their love endures. Even less extreme scenarios, like someone you love leaving you; your love for that person doesn't just go away. If it did, life would be exponentially easier, but exponentially shallower.

My beauts!

Same thing. :)

I will eat your souls.

Note that I didn't say I personally ascribe to the idea.

I am going to punch you all in the teeth!!

Yes. Unconditional love does exist. But you won't see it in any romantic comedy or basically any of the mainstream media--"media" meaning "books" (a term used very lightly for most recent literature), movies, T.V., the internet, etc.

Where you'll find unconditional love is in families. You'll find it in churches. You'll find it in soup kitchens, hospitals, disaster relief organizations, hospices, in the work of EMT's, soldiers, missionaries, social service workers, nurses, CNA's, and, most of all, in the lives of everyday people of all kinds and professions. Sometimes, very rarely, you'll find such love between two people who are married, along with romantic love.

I say "married" because no other word adequately captures a true, lasting, self-sacrificial, strong, deep, mutual relationship--even, dare I say it--a life-long commitment.

I see all this in other people's lives, many other people's lives, but not in mine. And that's entirely my fault. That said, unconditional love is still possible. I see it every day. I believe in it wholeheartedly, but I don't think it's possible for me to execute it anymore.