We Love For Real

We love active-verb-real.
That real. As rain creates
mud. Sloshing boots.
Stuck. Heads-together,
no words for the hard
or the stumbles. For the pain-filled
where-did-God-go days.

You? Getting through college?
Let’s be honest. I might’ve made
it a tad easier
with my paper markup magic
when I didn’t know
what you were trying to convey
or even what you wrote.
So you’d play video games and say
fix it up any way that sounds good, baby.
And I did. We love for real.

Through all those you’d-hold-me-
when-they-told-me-I-might-die days.
My couldn’t talk, or walk, or
hide-from-the-clock.
The rocks through the march.
Years and years of it.
2013. That’s some PTSD-forget-that-shit.
And I would PRAY. I would pray.
Those prayers were answered
by you getting cancer eight months later.
Not enough cuss words
for how fucked up that was.
But we love for real.

We love in the dark.
In the dirt.
In the shame.
In the my-skull-is-attached-to-a-drain.
Where wildflowers bleed into the horizon.
Where weeds foreshadow the dying.
Through the poison. The frightened.
The left-to-the-stars-to-fight-it.
We love in bleak. We love in mess.
In the blessed. It’s our poetry.
It’s how we love. For real.