BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: LOVE & SEX

"Quite a few women told me, one way or another,
that they thought it was sex, not youth that's
wasted on the young."   
                       Janet Harn

EXAMINING THE THOUGHTS OF THOSE WE LOVE

"When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown."

Marcel Proust
**

D.H. LAWRENCE

D. H. Lawrence –
Censors often showed great abhorrence
Toward Lady Chatterly’s Lover,
But drooled over it from cover to cover.

**

BEING IN LOVE

”Being in love is also a kind of learning, because 
it
 is concentrated, not desultory, living.”

Clifton Fadiman. Entering Conversation. Cleveland:
World Publishing House, 1962.
**
CHRISTIANITY & SEX

“ Good little Christians were all taught that sex was 
a gift of God, but that was the last we heard of it. 
After that. The functional word was dirty.”

Wilfred Sheed
**


OF LOVE & WINGS


"Wings in traditional poetry are the merchanics by 
which Eros swoops upon the suspective lover to wrest 
control of his person and personality. Wings are an 
instrument of damage and a symbol of irresistible power. 
 When you fall in love, change sweeps through you on 
wings and you cannot help but lose your grip on that 
cherished entity, yourself."

Ann Carson in Eros the Bittersweet
**

GUYS & LADIES

"But chicks don't know that guys are like dogs. You 
know, you can take a dog, you beat the shit out of 
him -- pow! pow! -- but he'll keep coming back. Ladies 
are like cats. You yell at at a cat once -- Siamese 
cat - and phsst! They're gone."
                                 Lenny Bruce

**
WOMEN,PHYSICS, & CHEMISTRY

"Women are physics and chemistry. They are matter. 
It is their bodies that tell the fraility of men. 
Men have not their cellular, enzymatic wisdom. Man 
is albuminoid, proteinaceus, laked pearl; woman is 
yolky, ovoid, rich. Both are exuberant bloody growths.

Richard Selzer. Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art 
of Surgery (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976)


About Opsigamy

When using a rare term such as “opsigamy,” getting 
married later in life sounds out of the ordinary. 
But in fact, the practice is already common, especially
 among celebrities. George Clooney was known for years
 as Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, but he settled 
down to marry at 53. Barbra Streisand married her current husband when she was 56, and Harrison Ford married when 
he was 67. George Takei was even older when he wed his
partner of 20 years at the age of 71, almost the moment 
same-sex marriage became legal in the United States."
"
Word Genius Website (March 31, 2023)
**

"The fact that sex is directly linked to money
only through prostitution represents the devious
way in which society deals with truths."
                             Kate Millett
**

LOVE POEM

The trout, according to Jeffries,
“Looks like a living arrow,
Formed to shoot through the water.”

This summer
I have watched grown men
Wade for hours

In hope of achieving one.
Then when the trout
With spots resembling

“Cachineal and gold dust,”
Had been “killed” then
Let go again,

An arrow thru water,
The unhooking of the barb,
This freeing

Into cold &
Swirling mysteries vast,
I thought of my own long marriage,

Inborn with tiny breathings.


Louis Phillips