Cliches..!

Love and sex are two of the reasons you got into this mess.
Either from excess or the lack of.

You did get to a point when being naked with someone
didn’t necessarily mean anything sexual.
A cuddle, sticky kisses, a lazy erection.
There were days when those served.
But memory is entangled with pain, and the fact
that those relationships ended is an immortal paean
to a particular brand of it.
Love. Love is pain. If it wasn’t, life wouldn’t be this suffocating.

Break-ups and rejections always create dents in the psyche.
They have made you doubt your better qualities
and magnify the worst.
You’re just as finicky, judgmental, and nervous
as any other human. Swayed, smitten, broken – all of these done
so easily. But you loved and you loved hard.
It was the only way you knew how to do it.
So what’s with all the broken glass?

Everything seemed easy at 16, for a guy to get guys.
The shadow of sin always marked something delicious. 
You could find them in corners without breaking a sweat,
and man was the world cluttered with corners.
Seduction was a natural potency, and older men possessed
a grim weakness.
In its center was a Catholic schoolboy teeming in the void,
fucking anything he could wrap his mouth around.
Anything as good and intoxicating warranted an addiction.
It was a path that couldn’t be helped.

But it was over as you aged.
The world, however, insisted on remaining 16.
Youth was an addiction you couldn’t hold.
Nomadic was a lifestyle your vigor could not buy.
And so love begins to only exist in the stories you write,
because they deserve the hopeful endings you don’t believe
in anymore.
Everyone around you believes in sex.
You trust skins more than hearts.

Three great heartbreaks at tender 25.
The energy you used on “trying” to move on could’ve
been spent frolicking on a sex swing,
and you could’ve probably gotten more
from the post-coital high.
Or maybe a quintet in one evening, several hungry
lusts consumed in a row.

You hope.

Every single time, someone manages to shatter it.

Until finally, you wake up at 33 and decide
it’s not worth moaning about.
There are other moans worth looking into.
Everyone you’ve ever loved fucked you over, and you them.
And so men becomes the coldest turkey you’ve ever quit.
Really, how much pain do you need to learn the lesson?

You’ve worked so hard to find your cave.
You should just stay.
Then again, can you?