Love Unfounded

Alone you lie,
Whether next to someone or not.
For something sits at the pit of your stomach.
A hunger.
 Unsatiated, unsatisfied, unfulfilled
By what you thought was love,
What you thought was real.
But it was not –
Or it doesn't seem to be,
Not anymore at least.
How strange it all seems
As it worked out so well
Ten thousand times on screen.
And a million songs about it
Framed your every feeling so well,
They all could've been about you.

But where did it all go wrong?
Where is your happy end?
Talk with the troubadour,
Sit with the storyteller,
And you'll likely be confounded
By a love unfounded.
Like getting a grasp of unsolid ground,
Love cannot be summarized in three minutes or less,
Nor can the real deal be caught on a 90-minute reel.
And yet they still try.
And still we buy into their lies.
We're formed by misinformation,
By hackneyed hacks of half truths
Who haven't their story straight.

There's something to it, though,
And that's why we still listen,
That's why we continue to tune in,
That's why we're willing to believe
In something we cannot see,
Nor grasp.
We can get on one's case
For believing in the ethereal,
But that's exactly what we do with love.
But what else are we to believe in 
In this crazy, broken world we live in
But in love?
It keeps us up at night,
But powers us through our days.
It's the only thing worth living and dying for –
But we don't even know the half of it.
And that's why we can never get enough of it.

We only know how it makes us feel
And that we cannot go on without feeling it –
And never do we go beyond that.
So we do what we do best
With such a precious commodity.
We consume it and control it,
We horde it and we whore it
Until we bleed our better halves dry of it.
But it simply is never enough
Simply because of this one reason:
We're having a one-sided affair with love.
Our lives have been based
On an incomplete definition
Off of an idea
Whose thought was never thought all the way through.
We've only been living from a fraction of our souls,
A portion of our true potential.
So how can we know the real potency of love
When we limit our understanding of life?

It'll never be enough to put love in a box
And tie a nice bow on it.
Or to frame it up for you and your friends
To look at and admire.
The only way we'll ever be whole
Is to be wholly open.
And the only way we'll understand love
To its fullest extent
Is to be open to the one who first loved.
What is love to the author and creator of love?
The answer may surprise you.
Love truly is the most splendid splendor
Which needs no window dressing
And cannot be contained.
Not by a box.
Not by a frame.
Not even by life itself.
So why do we try to?

Why do we strain to contain it
And see it not for what it is
But what we want it to be?
The most appealing presentation
Isn't always the most accurate representation.
Nor is it the best.
Love actually may be where you left it a while ago
Lost, abandoned, and forgotten
Because of a misunderstanding
Of something you were not willing to understand.
Where truth and understanding reside,
There, love will be.
Don't manipulate and murder
For a knockoff of the real thing.
Don't pay with blood, sweat, and tears
For what is cheap plastic
When true love is already a free gift
Whose price has been paid
By the one who gives it away unconditionally.
And its rewards can be redeemed only
When you love in return.