Love - don't get me started
You might as well quit now

For it's a one-way trip
A banana-skin slip
All the way from perfect pleasure,
A new-found treasure,
To divorce-court perjury.
Open-heart surgery,
From libido to libel
All the hate in the Bible
First you're lost in her eyes
Then you learn to despise
It might take a few years
And take all your tears...

But Love - looking back..
Yes, it was worth it 
Happy now?
Christ I deserve it

Throwing myself from the wooden bridge,
I got a splinter.

First the illicit thrill
Becomes routine habit
Run of the mill
Like you're invincible.

Once, your heart beated
Feverish, hesitant,
Now you swagger, unheated,
The cheat can't be cheated.

The check-out girl, Lizzie,
Is trusting and smiling
Then she turns away, busy
And you're suddenly dizzy.

To your pocket inside
Go the chocolate bars -
Though it's undignified
There's a strange kind of pride.

Then - out of the blue,
In front of the world,
One day she asks you....
And what can you do?

...But collapse to your core
Like a worm-eaten apple
Pray to fall through the floor
You are Named, evermore.

Oh - the shame! she's disgusted
You're a thief, you're mistrusted
All that shock and self-loathing
For those moments you lusted.

Poor girl, she won't be aware
That her face and her voice
Will feature forever
As worst memory, lowest nightmare.

You'll be chilled to the bone
And you'll ask yourself "Why?"
Without job, wife or home,
Foolish, guilty, alone?

The love of a woman -
Although precious,
Is still external,
A wonderful, glorious view,
A panorama to be seen,
All outside and good...

But Hannah, my only child,
She is internal too
Part of me,
An extension of my flesh,
A bond, not mystical or imagined,
But physical and emotional.
Loving her is natural,
Painful and exquisite
I am in her eyes,
In loving her I love myself;
My own childhood, my needs,
Are in her innocent face;
Her laughter is my own,
Her cry is my sorrow.

My sense of loss compounded:
I feel her feeling of loss,
This inevitable separation,
This "best way":
How it hurts!
She may blame me,
She may feel rejected,
But she is not,
She will never be rejected.

If only that one fact
Could resolve all emotions.

When Auden wrote Atlantis
A poem of elegance and grace
If he'd put it on this website
It would have sunk without a trace.