Everything Leviticus

Love one another.
John 13:34

It isn’t love – this
closet-enforced living
with clothes hangers
and dust bunnies
winter coats and
old shoes not worn
in decades

It isn’t love – these
autocratic laws*
leaving autonomy and
freedom and well,
the normal,
on a window sill,
like an un-watered
plant, leave it
long enough and
it will wither
and die
this isn’t love not –

the arrest and
conviction**
when even
words are second-rate
citizens and irony falls
victim to the
jailer’s key

It isn’t love
when death***
is the only answer
to a nature that
runs in a different
lane sings in
a different key
but with a melody
so beautiful it
rings in the stars
just the same
it isn’t love

when you kill it.

4/2022

*Russia provides no anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people, nor does it prohibit hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

**Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was arrested for gross indecency and sentenced to prison from 1895-1897.

***Matthew Shepard (1976-1998) was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured, beaten and left to die near Laramie