*I feel it’s very important to say this isn’t a poem, because it violates a lot of things I think are important to poetry. It’s not quite as bad as “instagram poetry,” but it’s not intentionally formed as a poem should be. So I’m calling it a creative rant of social commentary with line breaks.*
Embracing our captivity, we wait
for our one and only,
taking it for granted that our life’s mission
is to find romantic love,
Holding it above career and the self
without questioning our enslavement
to natural selection and the biological need
for procreation.
It colors entertainment in varying shades,
historically accepted as the stuff of novels and stories,
dramatizing a concept of heavy skepticism
but persistent,
almost unconscious,
faith.
Or obsession,
since we insist on finding romance
in platonic relationships,
in the glances from innocent subjects,
in the kindness of strangers,
in the romanticized recollections of the past.
Despite all the litter of life,
on this march to our deaths,
we deem it so important to have a travel companion.
We find it odd when a life hasn’t experienced
this abstraction.
We stack on layers of sadness
onto old maidens,
because a life isn’t worth living if
they haven’t found their One Person.
It’s a Fact of Life.
We call it so
despite all Facts of Life being
fictions of relativity and theory.
And yet
Despite its omniscience,
we still wait.
A societal and cultural insistence on passive,
selfish love,
forming ourselves into a product
in order to be loved
rather than to love.
