PAD Challenge - Day 15 - Love as the Enemy

It's both the halfway mark and Two for Tuesday in the WD 2014 April PAD Challenge. Half the month is gone! Wow! How quickly! And that means on fifteen more prompts after today... Let's see how that goes.

Today's prompts were to write a love poem and an anti-love poem. My love poems usually have some hint at both love and anti-love if you think about love as the absence or loss of love. I'm not sure what that says about me... They are opposites that co-exist in life. How can one appreciate love without having known the absence of love? Besides love is never perfect.

I've written so many love poems, I often wonder if I have anything left to say about love... Yet, there always seems to be another one as I live a life built around love. If you'd like to read more of my love poems, I have a whole collection, Love in Silhouette: Poems, available.

In both of the poems I wrote today, I explored the importance of love to life and living, but I decided to share my anti-love poem with you.

Here is my anti-love poem...

 Love as the Enemy

I saw love as the enemy
Love felt like nothing but a distraction
I wanted nothing to do with love
No matter how genuine the presentation
No matter how heartfelt the romantic gesture
I turned my back on love
I saw suitors as an attempt to curtail my ambition
I thought love and career couldn’t live in harmony
I despised love with intense passion
I rejected love without even a first thought
I dismissed love as unnecessary
I refused love when it was offered
I left love in tears
It had no place in my life
Love offered me nothing I sought
Little did I know my aversion to love
Reflected back an aversion to life
For to live one must find love within one’s core
T. L. Cooper is an author and poet whose work aims to empower and inspire through an exploration of the human condition. Her poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared online, in books, and in magazines. Her published books include a collection of short stories, Soaring Betrayal, her Silhouette Poetry Series, and a novel, All She Ever Wanted. She grew up on a farm in Tollesboro, Kentucky. She currently lives in Albany, Oregon with her husband and three cats.

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