Love Capacity

This is a very personal poem. Going through life wondering why I could love fully like others. And this summer, I found out why. I was mostly gay. I'm not a top. I am the little spoon. And I did not even know that a higher level love was possible. One word -- WOW.

I have always felt that I cannot love

I can like

I can infatuate

I can serve

I can help

I can live with a woman for 10 years

I can live with a woman for 20 years

And still be the 75% man

I have floated through my life

Thinking I knew what love was

And feeling that I could not offer that love

That my heart

Though caring and generous

And full of meaning

Yet missing something

And I went out and looked for feeling and emotion

To fill that central gap in my life

And yet I still had no meaning

Because I still did not have the capacity to love

So on that day

Where I became me

Fully and truly

I did not expect to my capacity for love to change

Only expecting a change in scenery

With my cold center still within me

And as I began to experience

The initial wafts of what could be

the overwhelming joy from just a touch

And yearning from a lovers exit

And heart warming glow of a friends smile

I started imagining what might be possible

Feeling my capacity for love and desire increase

And the crescendoing amplitude of my emotional extremes

I realized

Just today

That I have never known what love is

But that I will

Because I no longer believe that it is not within my capacity

I can love more deeply that I thought possible

With intensity resigned as only reserved for some

while I still do not know what love is

Every fiber of my being

Is bending toward it

Compelling and driving me forward

Because I have searched for it my whole life

In the high places and the low

And having only found well dressed emptiness

In the places I was not wired into

I know that am extraordinarily capable

Of loving so deeply

That together my loves and I

Will burn down the earth

With our passion