Tuesday, May 19, 2026

It might have been enough February 3, 2013

 


 

I can’t blame her for how I feel. I let my guard down, knowing what I could have had back then, but blew it, knowing now I would never have become “the one,” her insatiable need never able to be fulfilled by someone like me, always a temporary arrangement, my back just another rung on a ladder to someone else, a stepping stone; a man like me needs to learn his place in her world or have no place.

I still see her face when I close my eyes, as vivid now as when she sat across from me, forbidden fruit, dangerous but tempting, yet always just out of reach.

I can’t blame her for stoking up this fire in me, when I laid the kindling there first, desperate for the right match to set me ablaze, as she ultimately did, she more than just another face in the crowd, someone filled with a potency I could not resist, but should have, and even now, thinking if I had kept to that high road, I might have retained my place, if not as lover, then maybe a friend, and now, thinking, it might have been enough


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The right quest Sept. 29, 2012

  

They say you only know who your friends are in the midst of conflict, the hand that holds your elbow when you struggle, the word whispered in your ear when you come near to giving up.

But what do you do when you’ve already won; who do you trust?

What is it that inspires you to this “serge to fight?”

Are these shadows you box against?

You say you’ve gotten used to the smell of dirt, having fallen so often, exhaustion dragging you down, and still you rise, torn and bleeding to resume the struggle – instinct telling, you’re not done yet, even though you keep telling yourself to give up, you never will.

It is not in your nature to surrender without a fight, even when the odds seem overwhelming and the whole world dead set against you.

The world refuses to understand you, though a few doe, those true friends you’ve hand picked who pick you up with you call, and treat your wounds, and feed you words of encouragement, telling you again and again, you’re quest is right


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The sweet scent of roses April 6, 2013

I prick my finger each time I try to pause and sniff what is beautiful in the perfect world, where everyone has a two-car garage and plastic seat covers and drive to places most people in my neck of the woods would walk to. Only unlucky workers walk, the maids from the bus stop side by side with the nannies. Men come in pickup trucks trailing trailers full of garden equipment, leaf blowers where a generation ago they were forced to use rakes, piling up the remnants from the previous fall so they can no longer burn, as laws prohibit them from filling the air with fumes we used to love smelling as kids, now instead of piles of leaves, we get big orange bags.

Gardeners plant rose bushes or fill trellises for grapes, men with gnarled and bloody fingers, gloves unable to hold back the bite of thorns, or is it the sticky touch of the rose they resist, not even appreciating the scent, as if sweat mingling with it all ruins even that for men and women who labor their lives to maintain the houses with fancy lawns and picket fences, roses that in any other time or place would smell so sweet.








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House husband material (Cuck 3)

 

 It took ten years for my Ex and I to talk about those final days before we split, those nights out with the girls that ended up with men, in back seats of cars or sleezy highway motels.

“If I was getting what I needed at home, I wouldn’t have been looking for it elsewhere,” she said so matter of factly, I felt like a cuck again, but refrained from mentioning how she sometimes brought some of those men home, screwing them while I was at work, she telling me they had no other place to go, which was why she insisted I let them sleep on our couch. I’m sure she would have moved them into the bedroom and put me on the couch, if she could have found a way to justify it.

“You had your nights out with Hank,” she said, suggesting I might have been doing what she did while out on the town, when I stayed loyal, even when she did not.

Jane, on of the girls she went out with, did not warn me about what went on, how my ex acted like a slut in the clubs near the mall, and sometimes took on more than one man at a time, and often many more men in sequence during the long night, I catching a whiff of cum and cologne when she got back home.

During those nights, I took care of the baby. When I lost my job, she suggested she might get a job instead and leave me to become a house husband.

She told me I was good at cleaning, doing dishes, and other chores. She was extremely disappointed when I resisted.

“You’d look real pretty wearing a French maid’s outfit,” she said, while later I wondered just how far she would take it, dressing me up as a sissy for the amusement (possibly pleasure) of her male friends.

I suspect she might not have left had I agreed to her terms. She really wanted a life in which she had total control.

“I’m sure you would have had a great time walking the baby to the park everyday,” she said during our recent conversation, suggesting she still felt sad about the turn of events. “You might even have gotten lucky with some of them.”

I didn’t want to fuck lonely housewives; I wanted life to go on as it was supposed to, husband, wife and baby.

It took me a decade to get over my failed marriage; she got over me right away.

“The way you get over a man is to get under another man,” she told me.

Why she had contacted me again was a bit of a puzzle, since she’d had a string of men after me (including several additional ex-husbands), but assured me none of them were anything like me.

“You know we could make it work if we tried,” she said, with that same glint in her eyes, as if she already pictured me in that French Maid outfit, and was already calculating how good life would be if she could once again bring her male friends home, where I could feed and entertain them, maybe hiring me out to those lonely housewives she envisioned me with long ago, or perhaps to the parade of lonely house husbands.

I felt the same twinge as I felt back then, intense jealousy over the men I knew would be fucking her, and a pending “what might have been,” over me serving them when she got finished.

“It doesn’t matter who you fuck or who fucks you,” she said. “As long as you fuck.”

This made it clear that even after a decade, nothing fundamentally had changed.

“I think you would look very pretty in a dress,” she said as an afterthought. “And I’m sure some of my friends would think so, too.”

Needless to say, we never got back together, although from time to time, I still wonder what might have happened if we had.

 


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Two Marys Sept. 7, 2013


 Christ had two Marys in His life,

 the virgin and the whore,

He loved them both,

the woman who became his mother

by immaculate conception

the woman who bore witness

to His death on the cross,

both Marys residing in most women,

giving choice to which they might be,

often fluctuating from one to the other

when we foolish and lustful men

 (sometimes women)

 go back and forth from

wanting one or the other,

 sleeping with the women

 who look up at us on our self-created cross,

 yet aching to spend our lives with the other,

 the Madonna who we need to mother our children.

 How does she do it, being both,

 when once she becomes the one,

men won’t want her for the other,

except for those rare men

who like Christ

willing to embrace both as holy.


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Monday, May 18, 2026

Pursed lips in a dark street April 9, 2012


 
She put the napkin

 on the rim of her glass

to tell the bartender

we would be back,

 a tiny smudge in the corner,

 a stain of lipstick to match

 the smudge on the glass,

 like two sets of lips

 embraced in an ever lasting kiss,

while outside,

in the still chill of the end of winter,

 she draws deep draughts

from the cigarette

she says she hopes to quit,

 lipstick smudging

the filter as she inhales,

while I watch her every move,

 the fingers, the lips,

 the billows of smoke

that rise around her face,

adding mystery to her already

 mysterious eyes,

all of her surrounded by

 the darkness of the street,

 weak bar light emphasizing

 the purse of her lips,

the glint in her eyes

the long fingers

lifting the cigarette

 to her face

again and again and again.

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Gennie in a bottle May 3, 2026

  

It is still the same urgency, and the same question as to how it might be resolved, no one to relieve it but myself, and that often a disappointing resolution, dripping out instead of a gush, despite the same effort and heat, like a Gennie in a Bottle that promises to fulfill all my wishes, but if I rub too hard or for too long, what pops up is only a ghost of what I want. Do we leave it, refuse to stroke it, let it brew on its own, this potency I crave, must appease, or have it bring me to my knees, not her fault, she’s just the match that lights the fuse to something that has always existed, waiting to explode, this Gennie in a bottle, this urgency that consumes me.


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