When I write about love and its effect on me I start here - with the bloodied heart - with a sense of being under and a desire to kill for want of this love that has awakened my heart. Love in its four quadrants - love with its fifth element - love transcending all, creating all - making the big and small its play things. You told me - what if you could open upon the love that is here in the larger sense - love that includes the cats and my love for them? Cats and cat love I struggle with for they remind me of the great goddess - her perfectly sublime love - the juicy purr and the tooth and claw that bite and destroy. I am terrified of love and what it does to me - to those lovers who truely open themselves to its taste - who have blood on their lips - their own and others. The pouring out as a libation is what love calls from me - to surrender - to let go - to hold nothing, grasp desperately at none - And yet be fully in the fire and storm of what she asks of me. The whirling dervish - the mad hat piano man with child entwined around my ecstatic body while the ivories are pounded - life in charge - no looking left or right - staying with what has come and wants all of me now. This is how love keeps on keeping the fires burning - each turn and each eye - and each heart and each mind being rewired in the force and consummate presence of love. It is in the face of the lover - in the presence of love that the world changes - like magic - like the alchemist at work - taking base properties and making them into gold. We have a short time here - a short time - and I have only love in my heart. Only love - you keep reminding me, bless you love - to have come upon a love that I will give my life to - to have felt the flames lick at my soul - this is what I say yes to today - today, now, now.