Carry on Loving

Everything should prepare us for this work

To carry on loving

When the small bruises and vagrant aches of betrayal

Outnumber the bashfully smiling echoes of dewy joy

When the daily, dismal disappointments make the teeth of that mendacious

Smile, worn for another's sake and bad at hiding it, grind one another into

Angry whispers and incompetent, sore diners

When the most valuable, dignified, savory parts of your strange role

In this obvious costume party disguised as nakedness

Have rotted and begun to smell, though most noses seem so used

To the stench that they would be made of pure surprise if the cool

Air were rinsed of it and wriggled fresh for the first time in centuries

Carry on loving

If you allow it to be throttled by the grimy hands of evidence and reason

You will cease to look into the eyes of your mate or your colleague or your fan or follower or avid voter or customer or pupil

If any difference between the last two survived the pandemic

And catch sight of someone you would not wish to live without

With whom you are about to do something valuable and important

The memory of doing this with this other, daring doer

Could be woven into the parachute that both of you deploy

Every time the plane of mood begins to dive earthward

With the ebullient willingness to suffer all of the petty bullshit

For the sake of an abiding, lustrous, nerve massaging moment

Worth everything we patiently endure with bitten tongues and nods

Sweating and praying on board

It can be saved

But not without the bloody love

The stage that used to throb with miracles

Becomes as dim with neglect and mopped by despair

As any high school janitor's closet in nineteen eighty three

Only the zombies of long dead situation comedies

And productions smilingly approved by propagandists

Caper and drone and make the stage groan anymore

If love is gone

Carry on loving

For only that will cause you to protest with frothing outrage

When the mark of corruption stains the smallest segment of the skin

Of the beloved spouse, or school, or temple, or parliament, or factory, or purveyor

Of fake minds with an appetite for bearable jobs

But once you have given up loving

You will simply adjust to the corruption

Just to survive until you can find a map of the exits

And choose the one that's nearby and comfortable despite the weather

When the only refugees of bomb pulverized love have found scarred refuge in your crowded memory

When the present never lives up to its name

When the future is an egg from which only dread hatches

When you forget the honeyed kisses and wistful, flimsy banners of fantasy

When you cannot stop remembering the minute their tone turned out to be a chameleon

Brushed with ecstatic affirmation at dawn and petty, contemptuous scorn in afternoon

When regret is a giant and pleasure is a dwarf's remains under its implausible foot

When you obey like a slave and answer with the husks of meaning to avoid a fight

When you do anything without even the confetti left over after love's unembarrassed, wildly lit orgy

You will do it with the style of a machine

An essay or a poem or a story or a manifesto

Dropped by its digital dam--she's incapable of any feeling whatsoever

She has no way of knowing what it is like to be

Writing without love is page defilement of some sort

Ranging from the awkward groping of adolescents covered in confusion's sweat

To the sort of thing Cossacks did to shrieking innocents in fragile villages

Leading, or commanding, or managing, or instructing without love

Has more in common with animal husbandry than a veteran marriage

Made impervious by the scar tissue of patient faith and mutual respect

Preaching or proselytizing or playing or coaxing advertising into pharmaceutical strength

Without love

Is a harvest that kills all of the trees for one season's gleaming fruit

Everything is supposed to teach us to carry on loving

For if we do not

It will not be worth doing so anymore

You will only learn

Where you belong

When you have come at last

With polished bliss, and not even early gossip about regret

Buzzes in the graffitied parking garage of your mind

Once you are there

Carry on loving

Especially when it seems that you love in vain

The patient's beyond hope, soiled and raving at ghosts

In a bird's egg, baffling blue paper gown that does not hide everything it should

When your sacrifices seem invisible and your mistakes

Tremble under floodlights of condemnation fit for a prison yard

When the adrenaline slathered, atavistic need to chew your leg off and lurch away

With that leg of which you were so fond left ragged in the trap

Bite down on the knowledge that if every, decent animal like you

Abandoned love

You know, the one that made the square static of mundane routine

Into the undulating technicolor ribbon of your laughing dreams

Abandon this church or classroom or cafeteria or convenience store

Or marriage or party or nation or novel or globe clutching ideology

Knowing that a goodly portion of the abandoned

Dies coughing with wide-eyed shock when you do

Oh, this deserves the name of urgent necessity now and again

But never mistake exceptions for successful assassins of the rule

Carry on loving

Or froths of round, shivering worlds will be defiled

Without protest

In your face