We were put on this planet to love. Not to make scads of money or win at thumb wrestling or drive cars fast, sales up, and folks crazy with petty demands. Yet ask someone to define love then watch as they bumble. (They’ll fumble, I promise.) Plus we each know full well what love means exactly. No one lacks that knowledge though a few do forgery it.
I have known the touch of love, as well as the rasp of its lips, the heat of its breath and the tangle of its hair, the power of its grip and the thrust of its demands, the sound of its release and the quiet that comes with its absence, its departure, its betrayal, its impostor, its death. Wait one second. We all know that love cannot die.
We are here on this planet to love in our living and by love I mean multitudes – physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, fleeting, forevermore, none common, none quite familiar, perhaps prompting calls, paintings, paragraphs, lines, fragments, poems, both rhyming and not, both measured and hot. This too is a love poem. This too will count.
I am fully aware of the scope of love for at 50, I’ve supped on the gamut. I’d go so far as to say that I’ve been love’s victim, its champion, its convert, its student, its constant fool. Every now and then, a new love arrives. New look. New shape. Every manifestation is unmatched a priori; every love that lasts past eye contact changes along the way.
We’ve been put on this planet in love despite AIDS and herpes, two-timers and serial killers, jealousies and insecurities; despite cruelty rooted in vengeance, meanness advanced in the tween years, the coldness of self-protection, the fashionable shrug to the starving world. Yet here the world is. Here is love. Here you are. Here’s your chance.
Love has wings and its own agenda, a vision in HD despite being blind, a sweeping gesture that’s made with precision, a viciousness that asks us to fucking be kind. Is it so hard to be fucking kind? Love is the best thing that we’ll ever find in our elusive ever-present, forward-thinking, backward-looking inevitable insubstantial selves. Hello, self!
Love is better than… you name it. Love has more lives than an ancient Hindu cat. Love can be declawed, slack-jawed, and unlawful, damaged, ravaged, savaged, sublime, bruised, misunderstood, misapplied, undermined, cheapened, lost and found then lost again, defaced, deformed, devil-horned, shopworn. You get the point. It’s why you were born.
We were. I have. We are. I am. We’ve been. Love has. Love is. Get to it.
BIO: Drew Pisarra is the author of You’re Pretty Gay (2021), a collection of short stories; Infinity Standing Up (2019), a collection of poems; and VOICEOVER (2022), a dance-theater piece co-written with Jerry Mouawad for Imago Theatre. A literary grantee of Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation and Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators, he recently read at The Whitney Biennial as part of a two-day event hosted by A Gathering of the Tribes.
