Ain’t No Cure for Love

Ain’t No Cure for Love - context Summary

From Various Positions, 1984

Ain’t No Cure for Love was published on Leonard Cohen’s 1984 album Various Positions. The song/poem frames obsessive, unshakable desire as incurable, mixing erotic urgency with religious language and domestic detail. Repetition of the central claim reinforces inevitability while images of doctors, rockets and scriptures contrast human remedies with a love beyond remedy. It captures Cohen’s late-20th-century voice: spare, devotional, and wryly fatalistic about attachment.

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I loved you for a long, long time I know this love is real It don't matter how it all went wrong That don't change the way I feel And I can't believe that time is Gonna heal this wound I'm speaking of There ain't no cure There ain't no cure There ain't no cure for love I'm aching for you baby I can't pretend I'm not I need to see you naked In your body and your thought I got you like a habit And I'll never get enough There ain't no cure There ain't no cure There ain't no cure for love There ain't no cure for love There ain't no cure for love All the rocket ships are climbin' through the sky The holy books are open wide The doctors working day and night But they'll never ever find that cure for love Ain't no drink no drug (Ah tell them, angels) There's nothing pure enough to be a cure for love I see you in the subway and I see you on the bus I see you lyin' down with me, I see you wakin' up I see your hand, I see your hair Your bracelets and your brush And I call to you, I call to you But I don't call soft enough There ain't no cure There ain't no cure There ain't no cure for love I walked into this empty church, I had no place else to go When the sweetest voice I ever heard whispered to my soul I don't need to be forgiven for loving you so much It's written in the scriptures It's written there in blood I even heard the angels declare it from above There ain't no cure There ain't no cure, there ain't no cure for love There ain't no cure for love There ain't no cure for love All the rocket ships are climbin' through the sky The holy books are open wide The doctors working day and night But they'll never-ever find thatcure for love