Modern Romance

Modern romance is a an ironic lagoon

The circumference of the body of water is debatable, varying by observer

For some men the thirst to drink of such lakes is enormous,

Others are satiated by sips like a cactus  

I find the notion of romance to be most paradoxical

I am by species grown to be most cacti-like, surviving on dribbles of experience

Most notable in the grand-reservoir of sporadic conversations

Say once every six to ten years or so, beginning at thirteen and now thirty-four 

So carrying the one and factoring in the extrapolation of marriage

I have had five real conversations; as with the espoused accounting for two

Therein this is not of grand diminishment as of those two conversations

One was of great length and while the other far more brief

Was ever so impactful by its truncation  

So in, one can often devise the relative importance of something to define it by its antonym

Clarity is reached in such ways and the noted other four conversations shine out

As all the more valuable in comparison to the mundane silence of my allotment of other days 

However, my thirst is not cacti-like at all, I am a poet and thus the overtures of Shakespeare

Wrestle in my gullet to call out sonnets to balconies and bind into heated tempests to express

The valleys and maelstroms of desire and sculpted emotions molding inside me

In gallery after gallery of domestic production;  

The sunsets and morning calls are perditions of intricate aching passion

This is numbed by the drugs of the pen to leek the blood to the leech

To drain the vile and appear faint as Juliet to be a thing that is not what it appears

To administer its own survival, hoping upon hope, knowing all the while

How such things inevitably conclude 

This is the pioneering of talking, of bearing words upon air and parceling

Them about candor and inebriated repartee, this is how social graces are exchanged

And in this lottery I am like a late comer to the tower of Babel seeing it fallen

Dumbfounded in knowing every other language but the one being spoken 

Nothing registers in what the flesh has adapted to survive; the evolution of modern romantics

Seeing puddles where there were oceans, where women are asked to be so masculine

And the romantic overtures of men are dulled into lethargy of cynicism bathed in the rank

Of hopeless desperation, that trying and wanting is a buffet of famine  

Distance, criticism, exclusivity, and the pillar of condescension are the aphrodisiacs

Of modern oceans cradling a pittance of what was of romance in this world for a modern

Dribble speckling dribble cascading the dry bones of humanity

Knowing not what forms our marrow 

For it is love, oh sweet love, romantic panoplies of interconnection dancing in the expanse

Separating delusion from illusion, field from dust, all seeded in the talking

Oh the foul-beautiful dangers of sardonic silence mock this sandy plain!

I beseech dear rain-god exist, change it all and exist for the nutrients to renew this soil! 

Humanity is bleeding from rooftops passing guesses at the era of record

Shakespeare could not exist in times such as these; the public would deem him mad

With his sonnets locked in a sanitarium of folly; give us Justin Timberlake and Bieber

King and prince, give us Beyonce and Taylor Swift, Queen and princess  

Give us sexy back with a ring on it as if a woman’s volition is of such miniscule priority

In modern times, give us baby oh baby and whatever the hell happened on the bleachers

Candy-floss marketed commercial images of love dying, shrinking into a vampire

Of its colors of flesh left wan and pale gyrating to a download  

I so wish the oceans would fall from the sky and left to deluge this valley

The cities to sit in sprouting words on top of words of burgeoning discourse

Of ripe forests other than these and dear Ophelia could find a home at long last

And dearest Romeo would find his bride awoken