Rob Jacques
HIV/AIDS 1980s
I’m thinking of the life of a man looking back who asks
was any of it real, now that he’s locked inside his history.
— Stanley Plumly
The imperative to love is the imperative above all else.
One should not die because one eats, breathes, or loves.
Nature is blind in practice, so an act of love can kill,
viruses leaving lovers dying even as those lovers commit
an act of life. But humans are unkind, finding cause
to shame and blame, punish and condemn arousal,
allowing love to languish in disease’s jaws, seeing
lovers’ anguish as retribution for violating toxic laws.
Human beauty in flower never outlasts its hour in flight,
nor does elation linger in bliss for long on its high plane.
I know only this: to love ardently and die are related acts,
the conflicting mystery of which isn’t life’s to explain.
I know only this: to love recklessly is the best way to love
even though nothing of the lovers can afterward remain.
In the darkness over our fate that is always illicit love,
in the darkness of mass ignorance and crass acts of hate,
in the darkness of culture’s willful misunderstandings
regarding the exchange of bodily fluids as lovers mate,
I lie supine in bloody diarrhea, prone in reeking vomit,
I who only wanted orgiastic orgasm finding myself alone
seeking easily pleasing death, though I’ll refuse to atone
for my desire, cursing damning culture with my last breath.
Love, I speak of you in the first person, family and friends
speak of you in the second, while prigs speak of you
in the third. Together, love, we live and die. It’s our fate,
for never to have made love is never to have loved life.
It is with ourselves we mate. Nature or culture kills us.
We return to Oblivion victoriously voluptuous, you and I.
Rob Jacques is the author of War Poet Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Amsterdam Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Healing Muse, and Assaracus. He lives on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound.