I am "teh sucks" at writing anything romantic, but part of my novel demands it. This was tremendously uncomfortable to write, and a bit of a departure from my typical style, so I'm hoping that by pushing my limits as a writer, I captured a sense of love effectively.
___Heaven could be, for me, just another evening online, chatting about science or ethics or politics, feeling like you’re close even when you’re hundreds of miles away. Memories like swimming in the creek on hot summer days, building fires with sticks and tinder on cold winter nights, or flint napping in a gorge we're not even allowed in give me little glimpses of what happy might be. I fondly recall protest signs and leaflets, two twin thorns in the side of the circus, rodeo, war. Bushwhacking through brambles with a smile on your face, offering me first scavenge on a deer skeleton, or playing your didgeridoo - how could I not be dazzled? My undignified enthusiasm in a darkened bedroom while David Attenborough spoke of pelicans was shameless, I admit, but was elated to have your attention.
___I vividly recall the first weeks after I met you, fawning like a school girl for the first time in my life at your passion, your knowledge, and the free-spirited joy you exuded. That intensity of attraction hasn’t waned at all some eight years later, only growing despite all logic. I’ve never been one to indulge in those foolish feminine fantasies of things that will never be, yet I can imagine leaning close by your side, binoculars in hand, bird watching on the coast of Oregon. I fancy congratulating you about new grants and publications for years to come. I dare to think, despite myself, of licking vegan cake batter from your fingertips in the kind of home that has scores of books and not one television.
___But that is all I dare to pursue - the rare privilege of your company when circumstance permits and these silly fantasies that are, like so much else, unrealized and unrequited. For the one thing more terrifying than the realization that I can’t forever be the eager supporting cast in the play of your life is the thought of cutting short our precious friendship by pushing the issue. And so you remain my dear beloved friend.
Now - crappy AR poetry! (By poetry I mean lazy, pretentious crap that could be better conveyed in prose!)
The Greatest Show on Earth
How is it "family fun"
if our families were destroyed?
Can this be "conservation"
when they tore us from the wild?
How are we "educational"
in any lesson but callousness?
What is "humane training"
with whips and bullhooks in plain sight?
How can you marvel at our intelligence
but still treat us like "dumb animals?"
How are we not enslaved
when you call yourselves "masters?"
So
How is this justifiable?
Death of a Goldfish, Birth Of A Liberationist
Our neighbors had a tiny golden captive
in round glass confines on their patio.
The bright glow cooked him daily,
the dark chill froze him nightly.
Marinated in waste
he circled endlessly.
I watched his gasping, gulping breaths
with little else but empathy.
The glass reflected my inaction:
something hideous, something monstrous.
Pleather shoes and hemp purses,
tofu dinners and protest signs.
I talked a lot of "rights."
I made no "rights."
Every day the little fish suffered
until his belly greeted the sky.
"Free at last, free at last!"
And something deep inside me snapped.
In youth's protean morality
I rejected "theft" and "property;"
Inapplicable to sentient life
for they only lead to sentient death
My outrage spilled fourth like water
blooming 'round shards of broken glass
scattered across the patio floor.
A fledgling abolitionist
took wing liberationist.
I was my brother's keeper;
now I am his warrior.
I don't talk "rights."
I make rights.
Until every
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