*****

Recorded Reading (2:35): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/36mer3t05af2wpgfgevm1/Really-Love.mp3?rlkey=n3aec8w7lvcazrhevmemgraxv&st=c6cb8dzo&dl=0

*****

Really Love

Don’t numb out your feelings
Keep them on alert
Let love make you happy
And its opposite hurt

Let it make you angry
When some just don’t care
Rewarding all your loving gifts
With a super’ior air

Let yourself be outraged
The way we treat each other by
Don’t let a friend continue
Inner schisms to deny

Forget that overused adage
On not taking it pers’nally
Oh, take it, brother, sister,
As pers’nal as can ever be!

True love isn’t, in face of its
Opposite number, all serene,
Or thrown out of the Temple
Had money changers never been

Yes, it’ll get you trouble
Yes, they will point and shout
Yes, probably accuse you,
Before they see you out,

Of having been the cause
Of your own dismal destiny —
Just don’t let it make you, friend,
As one of them, yourself, to be

They cannot understand
Why you won’t bargain up your soul
To keep your body housed
And stomach respectably full

In the eyes of those around
Whom you should secretly despise
To whom should, just as soon as truth,
Be telling clever lies

Or gossiping about to others
Early, long and late,
Talkin’ ’bout those folks you ought to
Dearly love to hate

Slogging from your crabby bed
Past your programming TV
To show up at the workplace
Currently fashionably

Ignoring the potentials
In all of human history
To manifest one narrow band
Of possibility

All robotlike together,
Nor tolerate the one
Might have exposed a little less
Or more skin to the sun,

Or covered or uncovered head,
Wore this color or that —
Folks, I was eight years old
Last time I thought that’s where it’s at!…

Don’t listen when they tell you,
My deeply feeling friend,
That you your truly loving methods
Any small wise need amend

Do not with jaded cynicism
Fashionable flirt,
Put back your heart upon your sleeve
And really love — get hurt!

*****

This poet/editor is physically disabled, and lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level.

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