Love With Benefits
Could you love
an old white redneck
with HIV,
inhaling too much medicine?
Could you love him
if he were able to listen
without judging,
but commiserating,
curious about nuances,
finding dark humor
transcending rumors
of ego’s timorous tumors
and climatic anthrocentric tremblers?
Could you love a sad house-bound poet,
with too many kids of vulnerable colors,
multiculturally married but intergenerationally separated,
haunted by recurring adoption-denied nightmares?
Abandonment
follows suffocation,
nutritional neglect,
drowning embryonic surf,
tidal pools propelling salty dissonant dark love,
organic compost fueling embryos toward resurfacing light.
Could you love him
if he could know what you feel,
and why
and how,
and when,
and where we might care to hear
and feel and dance and breathe
this sacred opera again?
Could you love simplicity
if delivered with truer festivity?
Could you love
us becoming right now?
Could we love
exchanging anger management
for love’s coop-proactive opportunities?
Could you love
these ones you are already
miraculously with?
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