FIVE INNOCENT MERRIMENTS OF BEING IN LOVE AGAIN WITH BEING ALIVE

CHRISTMAS 2019

by V.B. Price

For Ryan, Talia, Sophia, Mercedes,
Jody, Amy, Keir, Helena, Chris, Deanna, Toria,

and, as always, for Rini

I. DANCING WITH TIME

Entropy dismantles everything. Nothing is spared,
vibrant life or crooked malice. Our homes
run down, so does our despair and the intolerable
sufferings of fear. Confidence wanes and joy
can play itself out, but so does terror, exquisite pain.
The single truth that change never touches,
until it’s all over, is the mystery of
perpetual emotion, the spontaneous new,
infinite jolt of falling in love with being alive.
Even entropy itself runs out of gas. Only
the gravity of love changes without
diminishment as the everlasting source

of goodness that entropy clears the way
to refresh, again and again, never ceasing.

II. IT LOVES YOU BACK

When you fall in love with being alive,
life loves you back. What doesn’t love
to be loved? What doesn’t feel humbled
and ecstatic with the luck of not being left
unrequited? Love the sun and it lets you see
its green and growing edge moving through
the darkest human history like a forest moves
renewed across an ashen void. Falling in love
smooths flaws, sees genius in oddity, morphs
blemishes and bulges into sweet slopes and curves,
restores trust and withers grudges with just
the fascination, the single focus

of adoring curiosity. And life itself
always knows it, and gives you back all it’s got.

III. NOT A SICK JOKE

So many 2x4s careening through the fog of chance
— is this a cosmic sick joke played out in the rumpus
room galaxy of an infernal brat? It’s not credible
that the entirety of it all is a prank and mind
a shaggy dog story with homicidal malice.
It just doesn’t compute. Is it all without value
when the cosmos creates in us the expectation
of value? Focus, she always said, on what
doesn’t hurt. Forbear, adore, fall in love
and you will see all the rest, what’s not
disordered, like you would see your child,
your lover, the mountains, a stormy sky,

see the cosmos like that, as a cherished soul
not a perverse, random and vindictive pest.

IV. TOO BEAUTIFUL TO RESIST

Dawn light opalized through mountain cold,
how can you resist the bare beauty of the world
once you see it, once you know it will be everywhere
you choose to look, if you choose to look? How can you
resist not falling in love with everything
beautiful and kind, compassionate in its strength,
how can you resist touching the smooth,
long flow of time as if it were warm sea foam
around your ankles, or over there, running
through the meadow, shooting stars
invisible around her, daughter of the weather,
grand in her childhood and in her blood bond

with you, the gift of generations — how can you resist
falling in love again with being alive?

V. SPLENDOR, MIRTH, AND GOOD CHEER

Being in love, we can see the truth of life
for what it is as it happens. Imperfection, pain,
blindsiding bad luck, all exist in spacetime
as fun does, as flesh and blood hope,
mirth, and quanta darting and effervescing do.
It is all inconceivably pointless and purposeful
without end. Is pain more powerful than humor?
Is irony more truthful than skin and bone love?
If misery is more convincing than warm breezes,
of course suicide is the only rebuttal. But add up
the totals. Cruelty and evil exist. They are random
shrapnel shredding peace for a while, but are not

equal in power to the gentleness they disquiet
as they vanish passing through.

Broken Angel Press
1 Byron Hollow, Doris Haven,
Black Hole,
New Mexico
Trumpless, U.S.A.