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Dictionary Lesson (Free verse) by Dovina

When I said, “I love you,” and soon realized its reciprocal, “You love me,” and its result, “We are in love,” and much later, with its contrary, “I don’t love you,” and finally its opposite, “I hate you,” and when, after a long hiatus, its many reverses blured into, “I have no feeling for you,” I realized my dictionary is a history, written ahead of fact, a compendium of devolution.

Dovina 22-Nov-04/4:16 PM
I read your comments earlier, but Poemranker has been down all day, and I’m just now able to send this reply. The pages still come up very slowly, while other sites work as usual.

I appreciate the great amount of time these “novels” which you have written to me must have taken. While occasionally I find something helpful in them, they seem mostly concerned with angry rebuttals that wander from the topics originally set forth by whoever starts them. And I admit to having started some of the conflicts. When I said, “You have rambled on and on in hopeful appearance of reasonableness,” I meant that you seem struggling to appear reasonable, hoping so much to succeed that you often deviate from the topic you are trying to debate, and leave yourself open for defeat.

While I could refute most of the points you have made in the comments above, I’m going to mention the few things that I find helpful and which I might consider changing in the poem or in my way of pondering life, the two being related.

I did not know that I “have the idea that philosophy is some kind of useless dangling separate entity existing in its own rather stale ether and having nothing to do with felt life,” but to the extent that I do or did, I should change or have changed.
The contrary of “I love you” could, as you say, be many different things including, but not limited to “I don’t love you.” The Bush administration’s position on the Iraq war and the contrary position is a good example.




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