The Dangers of Love
Poems by Mike Stone from 2022
“What is this monstrous thing
That intoxicates and confounds us,
That leads us to dangerous precipices
And pushes us over their edges,
That is so beautiful and desirable
That we prefer it to life itself …”
Available on:
Kindle (digital): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B8WBB4H9/ ($8.99)
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This book of poetry is dedicated to all those gentle souls who have been wounded by love and survived.
There is no promise of hope that everything will work out in the end, no words of succor or justification that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and no heroic poem such as Homer might have sung before a prescient chorus.
There is only a haphazard chronicling of the chimerical forms love has taken and the wounds it has inflicted on us again and again. The reader may recognize the face of a loved one in one of love’s innumerable forms or wince at a familiar pain from one of the wounds inflicted on him or her by love.
Most of the poems in this book are about the vulnerabilities, risks, treacheries, wounds, and tragedies we take upon ourselves for love’s sake, like the title poem, “The Dangers of Love”, about how love sometimes comes only once, perhaps more, but maybe not at all, “A Terse Note”, in which love is too big for a heart to contain, and “Love’s Fool”, about how love wounds you, changes form, and then wounds you again.
There are other poems in the book, like “Felled by Beauty”, about how allowing yourself to be vulnerable to love is proof that you have a soul, “Approach Avoidance”, in which the marriage that didn’t happen does happen, and “Daskalos and Aphrodite”, in which the god of education asks the goddess of love what lessons can be learned from love.
“The Dangers of Love” is Mike’s ninth book of poetry.
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