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Public Benches
Lusty men and randy wenches
Making out on public benches
Used to be a common sight
In afternoon or moonlit night,
And single people envied, looking
Longingly at two mouths hooking,
Fully unaware, no doubt,
Such “love” would quickly fizzle out.
Yet, today, on public benches,
No one smooches, gropes, or Frenches.
Now they sit on them like thrones,
Staring vacantly at phones.
Online porn and social media
Give them sexual acedia:
They’ve shelved away their steamy dreams
To stare at butts or laugh at memes.
Who thought I’d miss the sight of petting
That soon became a shotgun wedding?
For never in my nightmare fears
Did I imagine I’d go years
Not seeing even just a smidgen
Of romance, once our land’s religion,
Now replaced by online feeds
As it replaced the Christian creeds.
.
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Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland. His poetry has also been published in Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, New English Review, and many others, and his short fiction has been published in several journals as well.
I like tetrameter couplets, and these ones are arranged expertly with alternating feminine and masculine endings. Also, many of the lines are trochaic, which adds an extra punch to the piece.
Public petting (in the past called “spooning” or “sparking”) has disappeared for a number of reasons. LBGT partisans insisted that it was unfair that heterosexual couples should have the right to do so while gay persons should not. So a general consensus developed that nobody at all should do it. Also, a great many of the more recent generations seem to have developed a real disinclination to have in-the-flesh sex at all. That may be fear of disease (deliberately stoked by a health-obsessed frenzy and the worship of medical professionals), or an infantilism that refuses to grow up.
In any case, the cartoon illustration from the early 1900s shows how much more relaxed everyone was in the past.
Media – acedia is a great rhyme!
Thank you Joe! I’ve adopted the use of patterns of masculine and feminine rhymes from traditional French poetry. I’m glad you like the trochaic lines and the media/acedia rhyme as well.
I’ve read that about recent generations too, especially in East Asia: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex
A rare case when a Christian complains about too much chastity…
Interesting!
Well, what good is something that leads to more chastity if the price is to extinguish the natural impulse to marriage?
In some cities sitting on a park bench might be considered suicidal — no wonder you don’t see it happening much these days.
True! I know I wouldn’t feel safe, and I live in a fairly safe area.
I’m glad to see someone address this subject, which is really off most people’s radar. In places like Korea and Japan, this is leading to virtual autoextinction of those nations. Our sexual inclinations haven’t been suppressed; they’ve just been redirected to impersonal and sterile outlets. This is also indirectly a critique of prudishness; PDA (as we called it when I was younger) is the sign of a healthy society. You give us these thoughts packaged in a rhyme and meter that sounds deceptively lighthearted.
Thank you Adam! Yes, that’s why I had to write this. I haven’t seen such a thing in many years. As for what’s happening in Japan, I posted a link to an article about it in my reply to Joe. I wrote a flash story imagining that happening here, called “Artificial Everything” and published in New English Review.
Josh, I love the way you make a grave and grim point about today’s society with a toe-tapping rhythm that begs to be set to music. Your end-rhymes are top-notch and the linguistic scenes you paint conjure pictures of a world that now seems eons away from the “new-normal” world of today.
Thank you Susan! I’m glad you like the rhymes. I remember that world so well, and yet, it does seem eons away as you say.
Josh, sorry to be late to your poem. It’s an interesting subject which I would never have thought of and you address it skillfully and entertainingly. The rhymes are noteworthy for being both clever and unobtrusive. It reads smoothly so as not to detract from the message. Romance does seem to be a thing of the past and this pains me but does not surprise me. In a world where marriage has been severely marked down, where it’s nothing at all to refer to someone with the trivial term “baby daddy,” where commitment has been replaced by convenience, what room is left for true romance?
Thank you Brian! As I mentioned to Adam, I wrote it because I realized I hadn’t seen such a scene in many years. I’m glad it reads smoothly and that the rhymes are good.
It’s true: once man-woman relationships have turned into fornication and then maybe a “marriage” that lasts only as long as their sexual feelings, romance turns into a bad joke. With so many marriages ending in divorce, I can see why so many young people are turning away from marriage. Just the existence of the word “baby-daddy” shows how fatherhood has been trivialized in our culture, and motherhood only slightly less so. (Note to readers: marriages in which birth control is never used are far less likely to end in divorce.)
To quote Dostoyevsky: “The West has lost Christ, and that is why it is dying. There is no other reason.”