The article I just read says “men who do housework are sexy.” The article is dumb. Decent human beings are an imperative. Sexy is a hundred steps beyond that. Why do people keep writing this crap? It’s as if the entire pay per view media complex is conspiring to keep your expectations low.  These types of articles make you believe that the best you can do is settle for decent – why stop there when sublime is what you want?

Pretending decency is enough to get you off is a waste of your god given creative power. Settling for decent is a betrayal to yourself and your partner. Aren’t we here to challenge one another to be more? Don’t you want to be more? Decent is a low bar. No one wins a championship ring for wiping out the sink, why give something as incredible as your heart for that?

And some will tell you it’s hard enough to find decent. When they find it they just want to rest there at that easy plateau and wash dishes together. They’ll say “What you are looking for is a fairy tale, it doesn’t exist.” But I think, No, YOU are the goddamn fairy tale, and if you exist to make your dreams real, they better be fucking sexy.

Love sits in folding chairs, packed trains, and idle thoughts waiting for a break in conversation

Love sneaks a poem into your pocket that is destined to become a hard pearl of dryer lint;

Love undercooks your steak and demands your praises.

Everything bleeds out;

Love paces, wandering the cracks in the hardwood floor questioning the integrity of its foundation;

Love tears a hole in your screen letting moths and birds and debris in.

Love refused to filter.

Everything bleeds in;

Love keeps you awake at night with worry. Love doesn’t care what you expect. Love waits in the dark, a hard pearl of dryer lint;

Love scribbles in your margins.

Love crosses out your keywords.

Love sends you to the printer and lets the best part fall past the bleed;

Love leaves you no options. Love doesn’t come with insurance. Love doesn’t carry a first aid kit;

Love waits for you in paper cups and paper cuts;

Love sits in the library and reads you, skipping all the dialog.

It was a mistake to make a parlor trick of her wall walking, the ninja thought, now people thrilled at the silent sound of her footfall before she dispatch them. They died with delight in their eyes, her employers wouldn’t like that.

Still, the party had been extremely edifying for the ninja. It was nice to be seen and appreciated for a change. “There’s always such a clamor for the world to recognize and appreciate service workers… aren’t I performing a valuable service?” she thought. She slipped under the fence undetected by the dogs and motion sensors.

“But even the service workers unions didn’t recognize ninjas. Aren’t ninjas in your service as well?” she asked this rhetorically of herself in the silence between entering the shed and beheading the gardener.

She sprinted home across ridgepoles and rooftops, anticipating the night ahead of her. Giddy off the thought of being seen and  admired by strangers. She laughed when she thought of ninja service unions and ninja strikes – silently of course, she was a very good ninja, and she was on the clock.

No one ever bought me a diamond ring, though one did drive across country pulling tiger lilies out of ditches and filled his truck bed with them to be mine.

 

He opened the truck gate and those flowers glowed in the morning sun mightily. He was all salt sweat and tired from days of driving, his weary face beamed in the sun just for me. The birds were singing like they’d been waiting all night to queue up the moment. The storybook beauty of it isn’t lost on me, that morning was right out of a fairy tale.

I wish I could tell you a fairy tale ending, but we weren’t each others’ stories.

Broken hearts will cling to anyone; and my, aren’t I easy to cling to for those that are broken like that. They come to me all raw and vulnerable and I love them, I do… but I know to throw them back. Even a flawless diamond will appear dull and muted if the cut is poor.

And I threw him back, him and his flower bed, all the way back to Carolina. I wish I could tell you it was bittersweet but it’s only that way looking back… Back then nothing stuck and I didn’t want it to, my heart was scared and Teflon, cruel and non-reactive, and his heart wasn’t much better, empty except for daydreams.

Dispersion causes the white light to be separated into multiple colors

I’ve been married twice, and proposed to some times past that; Once I laid in a bed of tiger lilies and pretended for a night that I was a diamond, but I’ve never been offered anything past the daydreams of broken men. I sit with that, my weary face beaming in the sun… the light a diamond reflects is referred to as its ‘fire’ … The remaining rays of light travel into the center of the diamond and bounce off its internal walls.