Love & Desire

Men with pens have sweated reams – volumes – about our desire and love for women. In Jeff Gere’s “Lei Queen Contest,” we see the power a woman’s love has over a man. Jeff, a legendary Hawaiian storyteller, reveals this in a conversation he had with a huge, tattooed Samoan guy, a dialogue he accompanies with ukulele band and falsetto singers.

Russ Allison Loar’s poem, “What Men Want,” shows us, with large smiles, some truths about man’s attraction to woman, and his easy bedazzlement by her.

Donna Julia, a key character in Lord Byron’s epic poem, Don Juan, was twenty-three when she wrote “Donna Julia’s Letter to Don Juan,” a lament of woman’s plight. Remember, this is a man writing what his character, a young woman, feels. Did Byron get it right?

Julia’s letter faces Shakespeare’s lyrics, “Sigh No More, Ladies,” from his play, Much Ado About Nothing. In the second verse, The Bard rhymes “heavy” and “leavy,” and in the chorus offers cheery advice to the lovelorn.

To some, Philip Roth’s story, “The Chaos of Eros,” is about a man’s aging. Others see it as the tale of an older man’s attraction to a younger woman, and still others, one of her attraction to him. Your take may vary. In any case, Roth stages a coup de littérature in the paragraph that begins, “She turned around… .”.

I issued a second call for submissions because the first hadn’t delivered a story of joyful love. “Can a guy get a happy love story around here, please?” I asked looking skyward, as I clicked the call into cyberspace. A day later, an email with Jon Pearson’s “A Busload of Banjo Players” arrived, an ecstatic love story to answer my plea.

It’s hot in here.
You who love and you who desire:
grab a fan and flip the page.


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6 thoughts on “Love & Desire”

  1. One cannot spend too much time discussing the evolution from lust to love. I’m so glad you’re on that. It really is the crux of the matter. It of course bridges the psychological, biological, and spiritual.

  2. Will be interested to read this when it becomes available, if I’m still here at the time, and Trump’s out of office, and hopefully, on trial. I’ve always been a very horny guy, but stayed faithful to my wife for 58 years, until she passed. That was over a year ago, and after a long downward spiral. I’m still trying to adjust to life without her. We’d argue a lot, but it was always over something that interested us both. WR

    1. I’m very sorry to hear of your wife’s passing. Adjustment to being single must be a difficult one to make after so many years of marriage. My hat’s off to you, William. And thank you for this comment.

  3. I recall a song in the ’90’s with the line “you make mistakes when you let your little head do your thinking”, and I’ve made those mistakes. I’ve also been lucky in real love two times. (I’m widowed and remarried.) Keep the stories coming.

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