One Stanza Poem O139

I love life –
And life loves me –
But I love life
A little more –
When no love in life –
Is loving me

08.20.10

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Copyright by Minh Tan on listed dated of completion.

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Notes to this poem…

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It may not be an obvious metaphor, but “loving life” here stands for being engaged in it. For me, “loving” anybody by any sort, in one big sense, at least, means being engaged in their lives. That could be your lover, your family, your friends, your pet, etc. So loving life here means being engaged in life, doing and enjoying all the things life has to offer.

That said, then, the poem is about the difference in my attitude towards life when I am not in a relationship. Like how One Stanza Poem #138 states that I have a little more resource on my hands without various demands on life, including those of a significant other, I make use of those resources when I am single. I have more time, money, energy, and so on, and I make use of it. I am always doing a lot of things in life anyway, but I step it up when I have more resources on my hands. That’s because for me, and I would bet for most people, keeping busy is keeping happy, so long as you’re not wasting your life away in doing it like drinking heavily. There are some weak psychological studies I have seen that show this, but I don’t doubt it’s true.

So when single, instead of sitting around and potentially moping about it, I get out to enjoy life and forget it!

The O-series of poems are one stanza poems composed before I got onto writing haiku and tanka, and short poetry while in action or traveling by select means like plane or ferry. These poems are 3-9 lines long with at least one rhyming couplet, and not of the short forms just mentioned. For the sake of elegance, I just called the collection One.