Personification 8: Love is a Whore

‘Love is a Whore’ comes (if you’ll excuse the pun) next in the Personification series after last week’s ‘Love is the Nurse’. From care to caress in just seven days. A series of poems should play like a symphony: light and shade, calm before a storm, “there should be sunshine after rain” (‘Why Worry’, Dire Straits).

“Just remember, the sweet is never as sweet without the sour, and I know the sour.” – Vanilla Sky, 2001.

This sonnet depicts sensual love as a whore – an embodiment of sensory and sexual stimulation. Because this whore could be either (or both) genders, it made sense that this personification of love should be “a hermaphrodite”. And “high-class”? Well, being a bit of a snob, I found the concept of a “high-class” whore more alluring than one providing services between two wheelie bins in a car park out the back of a Wetherspoon pub.

Love is a Whore
Love’s a hermaphrodite and high-class whore
Whose perfumed sent is cocaine up your nose
Whose unzipped flesh unhinges your locked jaw
Whose every sway dictates where your gaze goes.
Love’s dressed undressed or dressed for your delight
In threads that dredge up long-forgotten gems
Glimpsed by a junior diver with keen sight
But ignorant of links ‘tween roots and stems.
Whore Love’s song’s sweeter than a siren’s psalm
And its plump lips electrify taste buds
Love tingles skin like seas of Tiger Balm
And a monsoon, turns arid bush to floods.
	This Love’s intoxicating opium
	Its addicts are left senseless, blind and dumb.