I’ve been thinking about…

A long time ago when the Earth was green and I did a zine, I wrote a poem about liking the idea of pirates. I complained of men now being inconsequential to their own lives, hiding behind the weaknesses we claim balanced the genders, made us equal. So now we’re both equally afflicted: not with living but with a zestless path of employment, marriage and procreation, repeat. Our wild spirits stifled within the impracticality of their survival in the nowadays. The new man is half the man he used to be. And I am half the woman: the assumed inward complexities now a finely mapped marketing demographic, the fodder for expository, scholarly and Harlequin romance novels alike. To dissect a specimen cannot remain whole.

Between this idealism of sailors and pirates, both rust-stained and ring-wormed, truculent exaggerations, I feel a strong nostalgia for these times I never knew. My current expectations of humans transcend multiple epochs; they’re imprinted with history; in the gaps, spaces, places; before the sharp edges dulled.  I seek the sharp in all. In books. In songs. In me. In you.