Parabola

            As a young man I crept into the palaces of female minds with exceptional charm, perceptive aphorisms, witty retorts, dashing showmanship, and adventures in creativity.  My mind is seductive, no more than my body is, nor my unyielding chivalry.  The soul of a woman is a treasure chest of fantastical possibilities, and a unique imagination swarming with tangents that overlay a magnetic charm conjures the keys to unlock it.  Their secrets are tender and secure, safe inside the vaults of history, and when you have this magical key, the only way to unlock their hearts and hear them is simply to listen. 

I’m the type of man to attract the odd ones, the misfits, and even a lesbian or two.  The women who think I fit the mold of a typical suburban beefcake are quickly surprised and sadly intimidated.  Within these walls of cerebral matter and powerful masculinity there exists a fragile being, a being who has seen much of the world, and worlds beyond this one.  I like to think it’s my mysterious aura that draws women to me like bees to honey, but no, a handsome body is the only thing that makes a man mysterious.  It’s always the quiet handsome types who steal the heart of a woman in old Hollywood movies.  If I were an ugly man, most women would be unsettled by my need for privacy.  They would likely think me to be a creep with a dirty secret kept hidden away from the world, a secret such as being a killer, a rapist, or a drug dealing con artist. 

Now all that’s left are broken fragments, unwritten dialogues, bits and pieces of the women I knew from the past.  They’re all scattered about on a canvas that I haven’t completed painting yet.  Wheels and angles, angels within wheels.  Parabolas and soft-spoken words, inverted diagrams, atlases of hairless skin, cacophonies of screaming glass, words in the end that were left unspoken.  They’re scattered, moving about in a torrential storm of psychotic abnormalities, abnormalities that defined my lovers, abnormalities that made me love them.  I wish for this shifting atlas to be engraved on my tombstone when I am dead, though I know that no artisan could possibly draw it.  I feel old and beaten as the autumn draws near, as if my life had already passed me by.  Now I’m just waiting, waiting for those lost pieces of the cartographic puzzle to find their way to me, the colors that will allow me to complete my painting of the right woman, and wondering if she even exists.  Thus, with a whimper I feel the zenith of life’s parabola inching past me, and I can already smell the roses ‘neath the rocket-rimmed rainbow, waiting for me in bloom on the other side.