"Love is nothing but a biological transaction," you yelled at me and we fought anew over the perfidies of the male ***.
Initially dismayed, I soon understood that
As a girl, you saw your father break your mother,
Her will over the years fusing with his own
As she became shadow,
And then sickly ghost,
Her lucky marriage effectively erasing the stain of her Jewish birth--
As oh so Catholic Daddy
proudly told his friends and relatives.
And even though you tried to fight Daddy's self-importance,
He was always there behind you, squeezing you between his fists,
molding you, as he imitated his god creating Eve,
Casting you into his own perfect image of chaste and chastened womanhood.
And when your mother decided to permanently leave,
Daddy forbade you to miss her,
Celebrating, instead, his own resurrection with a new project and a new wife.
Twice.
You thought you could resist,
But Daddy's benevolent advice
about your plain face and lumpy body wormed into your fragile psyche and
cracked you in two, leaving you raving and disjointed.
Daddy eventually joined his sky-Father
And you wept, vowing to forget and remember his legacy.
And now you live, addled and alone,
A basket of pills on your dresser,
Fanatically frustrated yet terrified of a man's  touch,
Angry yet wishing Daddy was here to save you.
And as the years passed and your friends married and divorced, you
convinced yourself that you had
escaped a woman's fate , not
realizing that you had offered up your own heart and soul  years ago as a suitable offering to His eternal memory.

Yes, Daddy made ****** sure there would be no following act.

swings drifting
in the ever cooling air
stars sliding down
and down

The monkey bars are for
climbing up and joining
the sky and the stars
to slide down again

In this playground
no one plays
until the stars come out
and the sky is dark

In this playground
there is no one
who is there to play with you
and you play all alone