Love’s Who and What
by Odin Roark

In a world where institutionalized convention
affords little emotional purchase,
and commitment outside institutional blessing weighs heavy
on the social evolution forward,
some would argue there’s little comfort in moving forward.

So it is,
whether of man and woman or same sex marriage,
acceptance of refugee desperation,
or compassionate political rightness trumping self-promotion,
our species continues to struggle with its basic inherent quality…
love.

Panicked love brokers of halo driven missteps
mount their marbled pedestals of self-deceit
and preach their continuum of tried and proven failure
to those of vacuous preference and little understanding.

Who might they be,
these carnivorous angels of stealth-like imagination,
these habitual sleight-of-hand merchants
of twisted inducement in three-piece suits
or cloaked in ritual vestments of proselytization,
whose power of enlistment beckons you buy
into the promised sacred delusions of a virgin-laden tomorrow?

What mutation of species thrives on the suffocation of will,
who sentences the innocent to sacred prisons of perpetual flesh,
where long-term pain of born-again ignorance
is sanctified in the form of eternal bliss?

And who are those that reject the empiricism of Darwin’s iconoclastic discoveries,
seeking rather the barbaric allegiance to the supernatural,
obviating the science-supported nature of man,
proffering rejection of both life's neighbors and partners
born of fragrances poised in unpollinated flowers
awaiting visions of untrammeled dreams
and the concertos of sensorial memory
tethered to a cloudless ether of joy and innocence?

Can we not see ourselves…
the purpose to love’s who and what?