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?