Love Is Lust First: An Autobiography of Passion

By David Amadeus Panckeri

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is right! Unrequited love is what moves the earth and the sky for me. And maybe for you.

I hope not all of your love remains unrequited. To gain anything worthwhile in life, one has to risk much. This book is an autobiography which delves into the pain as well as the nobility of the pursuit of love which can only occur once in a lifetime. This book contains 55 poems, all of them springing from the deepest emotions of my life.

This work centers on passion in its many guises, from love to lust. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that there can be no limits to desire and no regrets unless a lover does not follow his/her heart. For the fortunate person whose love has been taken to the limits and then been fully reciprocated finally by a lover, this book might not make a lot of sense. To those of us who are still believers in finding our missing halves, I hope this book inspires. To those who have become discouraged, rejected, or too timid to listen to your hearts, I ask you to read this book and stay open to the possibility that your lover could walk into your life as early as the next minute. Your heart will tell you. Listen to your heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465328625

Book preview

Copyright © 2008 by david amadeus panckeri.

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Contents

DEDICATION

Introduction

In Appreciation

Poem One—Love is Lust First

Poem Two—Serendipity

Poem Three—To Alessandra

Poem Four—Sorry

Poem Five—My Independence Day, 2004

Poem Six—Sunday with Ally July 18,2004

Poem Seven—"Richest, Finest Wine"

Poem Eight—Same Sure Love

Poem Nine—"Sunrise with Alessandra"

Poem Ten—"Birthday Poem, September, 2004"

Poem Eleven—Tm Jealous"

Poem Twelve—Desire

Poem Thirteen—How Do You?

Interlude—December, 2004

Early 2005 Interlude—Alone Again, Naturally

Poem Fourteen—From Another Lifetime

My Heart Attack

Poem Fifteen—Sanity?

Poem Sixteen—"Never is Our Passion Wasted"

Poem Seventeen—That Secret Place

Poem Eighteen—lnvincible Love

Poem Nineteen—"You Turn Heads"

Poem Twenty—Please Join Me

Poem Twenty One—Poet of the Particular

Epilogue

Before Alessandra (B.A.)

Poem Twenty Two—"Need, Faith, Grace" to K.

Poem Twenty Three—Sacred and Profane

Poem Twenty Four—"More than Just A Word"

Poem Twenty Five—Wilderness

Poem Twenty Six—Thoughts of Long Time Apart

Poem Twenty Seven-Be With Me

Poem Twenty Eight—Giving Thanks

Poem Twenty Nine—Ramanujan and Donne!

Poem Thirty-Winter Rain

Poem Thirty One—Heidelberg, May of 1971

Poem Thirty Two—Alone Together

Twenty More Years of Passionless Marriage—1984 to March, 2004

Poem Thirty Three—Profane Rays

Poem Thirty Four-God’s Grace

Poem Thirty Five—"She Came to Winter Too Early"

Poem Thirty Six-Father’s Day, 2004—For Julianna and Laila

Poem Thirty Seven—Ladybug

Poem Thirty Eight—Eleanore’s Meeting

Introduction to Spooning

Poem Thirty Nine—A Spooning of Don Quixote

Poem Forty—A Spooning of John Steinbeck"

Poem Forty One—"A Spooning of Walt Whitman"

Poem Forty Two—A Spooning of Henry L. Mencken

Poem Forty Three—An Extreme Spooning of Ernest Hemingway

Poem Forty Four—"l Shall Be Free—To Albert Camus"

Poem Forty Five—"Waking Shadow—To Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy"

Poem Forty Six-Borne in the USA

Poem Forty Seven—"Arbeit Macht Alles Frei"

Poem Forty Eight—ldyll Dusk

Poem Forty Nine—A Gift Seized

Poems Fifty—Old Age

Poem Fifty One—Mere Paranoia

Poem Fifty Two—Hope for a Time Machine is Foolish

Poem FiftyThree-A Song

Poem Fifty Four—The Long and Short of It"

Poem Fifty Five— Am Not Dead Yet

Author Biography-

DEDICATION

For Alessandra, wherever you may be. Please, Ally, follow your own heart.

Introduction

The journey you are beginning here with me is going to be strange at the least—and perhaps even more? What I have written is my emotional autobiography which very well may be eccentric but which aspires to resonate with any reader of any age who loves and lives with unstinting passion—and damn the consequences. It took me 55 years to realize that a life without passion is a living death.

My subject is NOT myself! My subject is passion. I am not going to bother with most mundane details of my life. I’d rather now seek to share with you the passions of my life. As is obvious from the table of contents, I have written nearly half of this book to an extraordinary woman, Alessandra Gabriella.

I encountered her online in a Yahoo pinochle game on February 27, 2004. As my poems detail, my encounter with her was more of a reunion than a first meeting. Both of us with the passage of time agree we were both each others’ lover in another lifetime. She is my Cathy and I am her Heathcliffe, & so far we are playing out that tragedy flawlessly. Our very first words to each other stirred ancient and supernatural feelings and desires which time has since honed to a fearfully sharp edge.

I also have included some of my earlier poetry dealing with topics I feel deeply about, such as the death of Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Holocaust, the cruelty of poverty, whifle ball games, and the humor of gender differences, including the pair of two’s hands we Adams have been dealt in contrast to the royal flushes given to Eve in the Garden (Please see Poem Fifty Four)! Alas, not even ONE of my woman friends who has read that poem agrees with its premises.

Not even one woman pities poor Adam! Women just continue to merrily crook their fingers and play out their flushes. Men can just go out into the storm and reload.

Though this is an autobiography of my emotional life, it will not by any means be a chronological account. As the passions in my life have fitfully come and gone and then returned, so will I arrange this book. Just as Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes in his masterpiece, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, I came late to the realization that unrequited love is the only force which can move Heaven and Hell. And love IS lust first.

The title for this book was given to me as offhandedly as mentioning today’s weather forecast. Dianne and I spoke late into one long winter night as she passed on to me her opinion that, of course, I HAD to agree that love is lust first. I told her I had never heard more honest and wiser words so succinctly stated! Her words did slash through all the games of pretense and deception that lovers can of times employ with themselves to rationalize a deepening relationship.

I pondered Dianne’s four words for weeks afterwards and realized how right the teens and young lovers were and are (as I was, too, for a time as a younger man) in their unbridled and even unseemly (to some) public displays of affection. As if lovers even have much choice in the matter?! Why is it that as we age, our passions wane and then desiccate and blow away as sand? Why is it that the sense of wonder we had as a gift from God as children is obliterated by time? For me, I see myself now (as the final poem states) as but just a few brief steps from where I began as a child.

I AM a Rip Van Winkle of Love. I publish this book solely to WARN others against wasting 30 years or even 30 minutes following their heads and minds and brains and thereby forfeiting (perhaps forever, as I may have done with Alessandra) the joy and passion that comes with encountering a partner your heart and soul will love forever. Or, at LEAST, I implore you to have no regrets that YOU did your very best to help make your dreams come true. It is obvious that to gain much, one has to risk much. After 59+ years of my search for Alessandra, I can say without qualification that the greatest pain in life comes not from a broken heart. The most profound hurt would be a feeling of regret. I DON’T regret one second of the time Ally and I spent communicating. If I NEVER meet Alessandra, at least I KNOW I gave her my absolute best effort describing my honest passion for her as she allowed me to share it. The rest is up to her. It is her turn to follow her own heart.

I may have ultimately screwed things up with Ally, but above it all, I love her and only her. She cannot deny that I have told her that from the first day to now in a thousand ways and with millions of words—spoken, unspoken, written and unwritten. Ally has never told ME anything but that she loves me, even as recently as September 29, 2007. Her soul at times may be timid, but it is extremely honest. I depend upon her honesty to believe in her, and she has never let me down—not once. She has only ever affirmed HER love for me, and this is going on four years. So, I still smile anyway, Ally . . .

I am almost a man of 60 now, but I am really just 30 as I explain in the final poem of this work. My youth lies in my future / my past a brief vignette . . . could be my credo, though I hate the thought of the ostentation of declaring any kind of credo. We are really just lonely people living to find love. Alessandra also has told me she believes there must never be any artificial barriers or limits imposed upon searching for love (and lust). Following one’s heart takes, most of all, courage. When we had first talked, Alessandra was 28 and I was 55. And she told me she didn’t care—and neither do I.

My story begins with Dianne Brennan’s words & ends with my realization that I have tasted paradise / and I shall again. I hope my readers enjoy my annotations for each poem, which are insights I always wished poets such as T.S. Eliot had done, rather than leaving work for readers and critics to sort out or to just guess about the often murky and always uncertain events/thoughts which may have provoked and INSPIRED a certain poet’s works. I do think that altogether, my poems without annotation might be interesting. However, the autobiographical information given to the reader should greatly help amplify an understanding of the passions which drove me to of times pacing sleeplessness until I HAD to write down the ideas and words of the poems of love in this book.

Lastly, I hope my readers continue to love and to NEVER