Is / Not
Is / Not - meaning Summary
Love Isn't a Profession
The poem rejects treating love or sex as clinical labor or a cure. The speaker refuses to cast the beloved as doctor or savior and rejects medical metaphors that colonize emotion. Instead anger and desire are presented as legitimate, private experiences that need expression rather than diagnosis or correction. The poem insists on mutual fallibility—"fellow/traveller"—and demands permission for present-tense speech and for feeling without approval or explanation.
Read Complete AnalysesLove is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveller Give up this medical concern, buttoned, attentive, permit yourself anger and permit me mine which needs neither your approval nor your suprise which does not need to be made legal which is not against a disease but agaist you, which does not need to be understood or washed or cauterized, which needs instead to be said and said. Permit me the present tense.
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