February 11, 2025: "Sex Without Love," Tuesdays and Thursdays, "Dentistry"

So, today was . . . not a bad day.  Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester are a sprint, from the time I wake up until I get home at night.  I haven't taught a four-day-a-week class for many years, and I find it difficult switching gears so many times in one day, from library to college to library to college again, and then, possibly, back to the library for an evening program.  My mind is doing backflips to keep up, and I'm not finding a whole lot of personal pleasure in the schedule.

Sharon Olds writes about being responsible for your own happiness (sort of) . . . 

Sex Without Love

by: Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the    come to the     God   come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

It's kind of a revolutionary idea, even in the sexually liberated time in which we live--sex for pleasure, that's it.  That's what Olds is saying in this poem--don't mistake the priest for the God.  You are responsible for your own pleasure and joy, nobody else.

This idea applies not only to sex.  It applies to life, in general.  The day you hand over the reins of your happiness to someone else, you have given up agency over your life.  Everything--pleasure, sorrow, hunger, lust, love--doesn't belong to you anymore.

So, me bitching about my miserable Tuesdays and Thursdays is a direct result of me choosing to be miserable.  I could opt to be excited or energized or happily challenged.  Instead, I've picked dread and exhaustion.  I need to cut that shit out.  Considering all the terrible things that are going on in the United States at the moment thanks to Agent Orange, my crazily busy days are chump change.

Saint Marty chooses to live the dream, not the nightmare.  Here is a poem he wrote about a nightmare, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem about a recurring nightmare.  Do not begin your poem "In the dream," but instead, launch straight into the telling:  "My parents and I were driving from Kentucky to New Jersey, but suddenly the car veered left, and I was on a roller coaster made of Jell-O."  For more inspiration, read some of Charles Simic's poems to get yourself in a surreal mood.

Dentistry

by: Martin Achatz

The first tooth pops out
like a cork from a bottle

of Merlot, my mouth flooded

with blackberries, plums,

notes of clover and cedar.

The next tooth turns soft

as melted butter, drips

down my chin as if I'm

at an all-you-can-eat

crab leg buffet.  Number

three shatters when Morten

Harket hits the high note

in "Take On Me" on Q-107,

four and five lost to

raids by ICE agents rounding

up undocumented incisors.

Six and seven become

hummingbirds, hover, drill

the air tornado green.

One by one, teeth migrate

from my mouth, perhaps

because they no longer

want to grind words

into poems anymore.

Instead, they join

a cloistered order

around a monk's tongue,

feasting on silence.