Existing After Our Love Dies

People talk of finding their soul mate
with the power to bind themselves
together in their minds,
with their spirits,
their bodies,
connected
for the whole of their lives
and lasting beyond eternity.

I have come to realize
that we are not soul mates,
bound by that magical thread.

There is no psychic power
surging in between us
and the outside forces
that have finally succeeded
in pulling us apart
from the sensuous slippery taste
of our forbidden passion.

Yet here we are
together again.

I love you, chocolate.

Stiff as a Board

Women don’t iron anymore,
the lost homemaker’s art
of standing in the heat
of the afternoon
and sweating
in steam.

They have forgotten the arousing joy
mingled with a crisp scent of starch
giving a sense of accomplishment
earned while gently sprinkling
water from a reused bottle
covered with tiny pokes
in wax paper.

They have lost the repeated repetition
of flexing their upper arm muscles
back and forth, back and forth,
with afternoons of pleasure
not given to erotic sex
but the hot steam
of an iron.

It is harder for the modern woman to prove,
at the end of the day to her untrusting lover,
that she is innocent of unfaithful pressing
between newly starched sheets
without a towering mountain,
of his folded underwear,
her heaps of love
for him.