Pure Love Give Away
We can no longer
sustain this gambol
It has burned through
Our Pure Love stores–such as they are–
we now offer for free
Our Pure Love stocks, bonds, and futures–come what may–
we toss like candy from fire trucks on Main Street in the clear sunlight of a July 4th parade
Pure Love for free
Pure Love for free
Insofar as we can
Dear God
Where’s this Pure Love
that would transform us?
We can’t remember anything
except catechisms and formulas
the gray windy dropletting fog day
has
neverminded all our ambitions
We were in the wrong?
Outside the heart?
Beyond the mind?
Forgetful of the center?
If Pure Love could overtake
could win could guide could show the way
What would that feel like?
I used to wander along the edges of a tidal pool salty cool lapping through granite smoothed round but still sandpapery. The shaggy brown star-fingered poppy-sac seaweed swooshed in and out with the tumbling water as it filled a little depression and then retreated, leaving just a wet curvature, then returned and once again overtook. I used to wander along the edges where the sun traced every stone, every sparklesand, the dark bluegreen water and the tips that glinted the light. Now I wait for salvation, exiled by something wrong within a poem we tried to write. We’d wanted a way out. Out of everything except the gentle edge of a gentle beach beside a gentle sea; and some kind of violent grownup love. Which longing was the more selfish? Which input the more disastrous? To hold forever to the quiet safety of a a childhood moment long before you’re called back into the blanket, spraydown, walk-in-small-barefeet along the hot sand, over the low, white, rough concrete boundary wall, onto the hot blackfadetogray pebbly parking lot, and upon a damp towel in the hot-and-sticky plastic-and-vinyl car? Or to wail desperate-dog for a corresponding shape that would somehow touch right through to heart/mind?
It doesn’t matter. For a hundred years we’ll now ride the ridges, in the high thin mountain air, our long-legged Landstriders tossing themselves and their small helpless riders through the purpley blue splashed on one side with reddening yellow, on the other with bleeding black, and swirled all through with puffy curdling strafing white. It doesn’t matter. We’re tired again; tired like children falling asleep against a hot sharp tight-weave polyester seatbelt and into a sticky blue, diner-vinyl seatback, our exhausted, sun-enriched little hands instinctively sliding away from the superheated metal buckle. Yes, we’re tired; we’ll let the monsters have their say while we slip away. Does that make us monsters too? And are we even allowed a return to innocence, into sleeping dead away like a fallen tree?
Our Pure Love factories, mills, farms, forests, fisheries, wells, and the like: all abandoned. The pitter patter of Pure Love marketers, brandsters, production and logistics managers: all turned to sudden dust and swept up and away by a lightly cycloning breeze. The Pure Love we leave behind, free for the taking. If, that is to say, we managed to build, grow, harvest, or mine any. Ah well, let it ride, let us ride into the cool collapsing day. We weren’t able to figure it out; couldn’t make sense of it; could find no good response to this thing called life. And so we leave, not life, but the living; not friendship, but the fray; not love, but purpose; for purpose we have none, nor can we get one, given what we’ve become, tiny puppets vaguely representing mythical children’s tales, fleeing the scene on the backs of long-legged, round torsoed, giant-eared steeds from a movie we half-recall from a world that must’ve somehow been though now it clearly isn’t.
Will looters come for the Pure Love?
No point. It goes everywhere and nowhere of Its own flawless accord.
Will hoarders fill their basements with It? Stack It around their bed, into the hallway, kitchen, dining room, living room, leaving only a narrow bath from bed to fridge to toilet to door?
Again: no point: It is already in all those places and more.
Farewell mighty halls of industry.
Farewell clacking typewriters, and clanking presses.
Farewell grand champagne speeches overlooking well-groomed smiles draped in black tuxes, exquisite rolling-flowing dresses, plush red carpet,
Farewell
And so they disappeared, BW & AW, they quit the scene; you can’t sell Pure Love; no one can, not even the elastically spinning Bartleby Willard of the explosively poignant Wandering Albatross Press.
Author: BW
Editor: AMW
Reason: