Bad Poetry: Let Me Explain Some Things

(All kinds of other poems on this theme are linked at Rosemary Nissen-Wade's blog hop, with the Neruda poem as inspiration...

https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2020/08/weekly-scribblings-32-i-explain-few.html )

If I'd put more time into this I could probably have written a more encouraging poem about men who work, as opposed to an "explanation" for the ones who don't. I didn't. These grumpy half-assonant lines commemorate a long, sultry morning in the Friday Market during which eleven men tried to flirt with me, two more made big shows of not, and I had a lot of time to reflect that if any of them really wanted to attract me they'd stop trying to act like teenagers and try acting like men, as in mature and responsible, with bodies toned by purposeful activity, and minds...oh who cares, they're not The One For Me anyway. A few of them are married, for pity's sake. Can anything be more pathetic than a married man trying to flirt with other women just because that's the only way he's ever learned to make conversation?

Meanwhile other women act as if they felt the same way I do. Middle age recapitulates high school. Just as all the girls used to ignore most of the boys and trail after the few who had jobs or cars or vestigial mustaches, now all the unattached women in my generation seem to ignore most of the men and trail after the few who have jobs or vocations or businesses. And funnily enough, though there are lots of women sitting at home and rocking slowly in recliner chairs in front of television sets, those women seem to be lamenting an alleged shortage of men. And some of them are still married to men who are trying to flirt with women who have jobs, vocations, or businesses.

To all the sad old men
who think they're supposed to flirt
with anything that suggests a skirt
to their old bleary eyes:

It's not just what you're given,
it's what you do with what you got,
but unfortunately a lot
of you hardly seem to be living.

Men pensioned off at fifty
seem to have an idea of a life
that's probably cost them one wife
or more than one, already,

television and take-out food
and for "occupation," lawn care
done on an air-conditioned riding mower
that feels just like that recliner chair

that looks so remarkably like
an extra-large padded coffin
to sink into, and doze off in,
and never wake up. Or be missed.

The women they're all running after
have in common with the men
whom the women are running after
a different definition of life.

Between seeking "tall, dark, and handsome"
and seeking "old, rich, and sick"
middle-aged women find winsome
men who still think and still act.

Though there is no shortage of bodies
flab forms on bodies and souls
the practical mind no longer controls.
We like men who take care of business.

I find attractive only
one man, who, although tall and dark,
when asked the secret of attracting women
as he still does, said truly: "I work."