Love Poem: Struggling Love
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Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

Struggling Love

I know
you know
you stole our property,
our mutual possession,
our sense of co-ownership,
of belonging together
to grow our health forever.

I know
you took it for your sole ungrateful possession,
to use for your self recreating purposes,
not a subject for open communication,
further evolution of whom we were becoming
together.

You know
I know
you stole our mutually co-arising trust
in cooperative objectives and views and color-filled perceptions,
you removed our room for cooperative gratitude,
replaced with anger and fear of future isolation,
divorce.

We both know
with deeply resonant intuitive integrity,
this critical event in our relationship cannot redeem,
re-direct,
re-connect,
our co-arising healthy trajectory
without mutually acknowledging
our sense of excommunicating loss and suffering
to have stolen
and to have been thereby co-laterally severed
from co-expansive gratitude,
replaced by co-condensing anger burning entropy,
absence of healthy wealth
through love's reiterating Commons of communication.

We both know
If I am generous toward you,
if I "gift it forward" in your direction,
and you feel gratitude in response,
and express that gratitude through your deeds
and words
then you redeem and co-arise further generosity of love;
While not feeling and/or not expressing gratitude
in non-response
absorbs and dampens and depresses love
into our co-dependent toxicity of habit
where new creative loving life once grew.

We both are sane
as love will grow in our time
and organically chosen,
integratively intended, places,
relationships,
transactions.

We both are crazed
as other competing loves
still hunt and gather to fill in our gaps
and fracturing losses.

We all trust
our cosmological economy of synergy
evolves cooperatively reiterating gratitude,
human naturally reflected in love's economy
co-arising generosity.

We mistrust
unilateral love, like lust,
so discontenting,
raises encrusted mountains of anger
deep flowing lava rivers of fear.

We respond
with trust and respect and care,
with practice and intent of generosity
until we no longer understand response as gratitude,
until chronic patterns feel empty of generosity returned,
redeemed,
replaced with judgment or apathy
too often swelling into anger and fear,
hunting and gathering and stealing
standing in for trust and respect and care.

I react
unwilling to continue this generous intent
because you steal my trust in our future
as co-arising health.

Struggling but still vigorously healthy love
evolves and sustains co-arising generosity
and mutually reiterative gratitude,
which would be no exception to our daily norm,
our default expectation of nature's rich abundance,
if not for our mutual lack of gratitude,
iconically captured in Win-Lose economics
and anti-evolutionary cultural assumptions.

Love evolves
mutual economic generosity
as synergy revolves co-arising ecological paradigms,
systems and species,
cooperativity creation,
or love falls unrequited,
unredeemed,
stolen and absorbed into competitive mutual immunity,
heading toward entropically co-condensing selves,
cells of apathy and anger,
cancerous hurt and swollen suffering.

Love is risk
which often pays generous returns,
opportunities to invest further in healthy directions,
in relationships of evolving wealth.

We are free
to choose to stop loving
in response to suffering and ignorance and apathy,
anger and fear and hatred,
aimed at us by those we have invited into our trust;
free to stop responding to loss as mutual theft
with further generosity defusing integrity,
honesty,
because we feel too exhausted to survive
feeding toxic co-dependency
where we would nurture healthy co-redemption
of mutual investment in trust, caring,
this grace of cooperatively co-arising generosity.

I do not know
your quantities and qualities of need
for nurturing your healthy life.
If I have not offered generously
in response to your needs and wants and hopes,
don't steal from me what was ours to mutually benefit
and then grow angry and fearful of how I may respond;
extend your generosity with me
just enough to help me understand
what you want
that I might have to give with gratitude.

Love is like a mountain,
majestic and beautiful to contemplate,
difficult to climb to the apex,
and harder still to survive there
to accomplish long-term healthy outcomes,
especially through cold winter nights.

Love presents life's high stakes,
high risks for some nightmares,
high opportunities for some Great Day dreams.