i once said: you can't be an artist and raise a family, and as proven by many who've attempted both feats to make one or the other lacking, if perhaps both - the best example of such a scenario is the much tragic case of james joyce's finnegans wake, his daughter, and the duration of the writing process... paris 1922 - 1939.*

i've never been into love poetry, well, once i too wrote
watermelon mush about heart and longing,
the darkened rooms of my adolescent self,
ugly blue of the wallpaper later covered entirely
with glossy posters of the ones i adored
on the music scene (honestly,
not even a niqab slit of blue to
be seen) - and then i experienced
love, maybe infatuation,
or the rite of passage into carnal
opulence of the woman's shape
untouched by the coarse treatment
of cubism and picasso -
but then the hydra popped her second
head from the torso -
this head and neck started wrapping
itself around the first head, the first
being that of naiveness and inexperience,
the second head of boa, of experience that
knew of jealousy, of feminism sexism
chauvinism, the second head knew all
about the dark ebbing waters of spite
and revenge, and yes of *** too -
and soon enough the hydra's first head
breathed no more, it flopped and
dangled under the torso of the conquering second
soon decayin and falling into an abyss
of heavy shuffling foot-stomps;
but the question is, will a third head
rise and do likewise with the second head,
the head that spells out genuine companionship,
that's mature, even more hardened as to
avenge the naive head of wonder-lust sought and
the paradoxical thirst for the taste of something
it had no place on the tongue palette for
speak about with history's resignation and experience?
but i doubt it, i've seen that head, and it's a head
with many problems and is self-defeatist
in terms of idealising love once more,
it has obligations, chores, children, mortgages,
car insurances and life insurances, fears
from the television at 7pm news blasts on
about jobs, markets, the migrant crisis;
the second head would simply let this third
head look at it in a much quizzical way;
don't get me wrong, i'm all for the third head
of this hydra, but it's too weak for
the first of idealism to re-emerge, with all those
very basic and demanded thrills,
i'm not condemning it, but i'm also not embracing
it - selective promiscuity, a methodological
promiscuity set aside all such hopes -
but let's say less promiscuity, and more chance
opportunism - no, not the adventure seeking
casanova type.