Flytrap and Honeydew

 Spent a good twenty or so years
Trying to participate in the drudgery
Called marriage...
Don't get me wrong,
Some people do fall in love
With a partner who supports them,
Understands them,
And doesn't sabotage or emotionally abandon them...
It can happen...
But, for me,
It hasn't happened just yet,
Not when it comes to "holy" matrimony...
I've given up on that idea...
Not asking for pity...
There were some beautiful moments
Lodged like diamonds
In the substrate of organic refuse and silt
Deposited on the river bottom...
There were brief flashes of light,
Fireflies intermittently flickering in the darkness...
But that darkness
Was still oppressive, overall...
My chosen partners took their dissatisfaction with their own families and childhood out on me,
And injected their own trauma and pain
With surgical precision into my veins...
Maybe they didn't realize they were causing pain,
Maybe they sometimes did...
In either case,
The end result was dried mud veins branching out
To protect termites from the sun...
Holes propagating through the supporting structures all the way down to the pith...
Catastrophic system failure of the institution was the eventual outcome,
Every time...
Irrational dreams of forever...
Some socially indoctrinated drive
To feel incomplete without a partner...
The edges of organized religion...
The inability of apes
To grow past simple biological imperative
No matter how much our technology
Draws stars in our eyes...
We're passing time until we die...
Metaphorically scratching in the dirt
Not even knowing what we're looking for...
Driving blind...
Hoping for the best...
Energy trapped in physicality...
Frozen light
Compressed into dust motes
That make up every particle of our being
Whether that be physical material or disembodied quantum fields...
Flesh or soul...
In every possible outcome of every possible story...
True life and blindsided...
The shake and the shimmer, 
The glitz and the glam
Of experiencing life
Makes you forget what you really are,
What you used to be,
And where you really came from...
The jaws slowly closing like a hydraulic press,
Nowhere to go but out
Bursting perpendicular to the direction of applied force...