A rough one in need of work: "Ode to Tom Giving Up Masturbation"
The card deck is shuffled and he tells me to say, "I am your queen if you are my king." But sometimes I'd rather have a joker in my hand; far more presentable. I'll let him be the ace in my hole two of a kind mind you, after our full house has emptied out. Royal marriages are affairs of convenient livelihood; passion enters not into it. Produce an heir, mission accomplished. Is this not fulfillment?
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Procreation is our *modus operandi*; Man's human nature, the only guarantee that life was worth living, and even then, only for posterity's sake. You and your petty mortal achievements fade as your headstone crumbles to rubble, perhaps to be re-mined for cement in new sidewalks that some small sliver of your personal brand of DNA may walk upon, unaware of the words the stone once bore that your friends found sufficient to sum up your existence. Remembrance is a pitiful thing to the eye of time. Even I, a queen as surely as I am a knave, forget. And these are the moments worth remembering:
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not the ones that draw me nearer to when my heavenly womb will be filled with some holy star-child who completes my life-purpose and renders pointless my lifetime of lessons learned; but rather, the moment when you've rolled against me in your sleep, and I wake briefly to the comforting contact I've been forbidden, and you tell me later that you smelled my hair, and you approve.
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Or, when you forget, for a moment, to make fun of people, and you can indulge in laughing at yourself as you feel the effervescent *belongingness* fading again.
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I want nothing more than what is impossible: to be a seagull flying through the rain to bring you a pretty rock I found on the beach.
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I want nothing more than to forget about that fiery feeling of wanting genitals smashed together so we can unabashedly bask in moments of being perfectly ourselves, with all of the flaws that entails.
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Watching a girl with a crown of flowers tentatively climb a tree, exhaling gasps of fear, I am reminded of how I want the world to fucking love me, sans the fucking. And I am reminded of the people I have allowed to become my world.
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The sun goes down, and clouds of gnats appear, swirled about by eddies in the wind. They'll harm nobody until they achieve sexual maturity, and then they'll grow needle-like proboscises, ready to pierce humans, stealing their blood for their Satanic rituals of egg-laying. I'll have no part in it, if I can. But I seem to get blown into to swarm anyways. There's nothing for it but to be alone, and what a sorry state of constant painful self-reimagining that is.
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What I want is not a good fucking. What I want is a hand to hold, a wordless whisper of friendship.
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I'm alone in a park, sitting on a bench, with a lamp illuminating the cherry tree branches that reach over me, stretching for the next tree in line. Every tiny puff of wind sends a petal into my lap, and sometimes I wonder if it's the airplanes overhead that are shaking the flowers loose.