Harder Love

 
How long,
long do you help others?

How long
before you are no help,
how long before the cost to you outweighs you?

Love,
family bonds,
just because we should.

All good reasons
but not to lose two.

Not to lose two.

Sometimes those we owe
still need to follow their own anchor,

once you've given all the help you could,
once you've given decades,
lifetimes,
all of a parent's heart,

or all a brother can do
to stay indifferent over hate
even if that felt like, to both, to be a lifetime of avoidance, all no better.

There is love and there is keeping the cycle,
going round and round.

There is love and there is making no difference.
There is love and there is hurting through letting be.
There is love and then there is always love,

but how long
before the boat in use is a nod to swiss cheese.

How long before,
if it is ever going to float,
the owner needs to turn on the pumps
and plug the leaks.

How long before,
even if they and you and those you already know can't,
does one go before getting more help?

Too long.

Almost always we all go too long,
far too long,
a too usual too long.

A too long watching other lives live less.
Too long dancing poorly around a problem,

when we should be working in a larger group
to choreograph a starred performance,
and all making it into something
somewhere new.

Something somewhere
somehow altogether new.

No work is without its cost.
No work is not without a chip in the comfort of now,
but living a slow heart-grating peace for sake of not risking worse
is to ensure nothing better ever comes.

But how,
how to find the shoulders
needed to lean upon?

Remember living the what is
is to ensure nothing better.

To live for a nothing better
should be only for the best of times,
if even there.
Everything else is a process
and processes and people die
when they aren't moving.

Love,
live,
but keep
it growing.
Keep it growing
or it ends in regret and despair

keep the love
but make it grow
before it burns out.

Make it
grow.