Sexy Novelization (Minstrel Mondays)

I've always had a prudish streak in me. For whatever reason, I'm not one for a whole lot of hedonism in my life, and find sexuality to often be overdone in modern literature. Yeah, and I'm a Heinlein fan, too; figure that one out!

In a lot of cases, it's not so much the sex that bothers me, but the detached or meaningless manner in which it is applied. In a lot of books, romance seems to be shoved in there as a needless afterthought, and sometimes the relationships are forced. Characters are put into compromising positions because an author is feeling his oats, rather than out of a logical result of the plotline (you dirty writers know what I mean, both hands on the keyboard!).

Maybe I'm making sense to you, or maybe you're scratching your head and wondering what planet I've recently emigrated from. Okay, I admit, it's Alpha-Sigma 3 in the Plantagenet Belt—but don't tell Homeland Security!

Getting on with this week's Minstrel Monday piece, I threw this thing together ten years ago, after reading something that troubled my offbeat sensibilities. To be honest, I can't recall which book I was reading at the time, but the result was this interesting little poem.

The wheels of mental creation
churn throughout a life
filled with deep, dark images
of animalistic thought.
A craft unhindered by prudity,
novelists give in to unsavory desire
time and time again.


So many tales of high adventure,
deeper subtext, or complex characters,
all have felt the sting of
a writer's darker impulses.
The fantasies they can never
make come true
slip through the cracks
of the ball-point pen,
and seep onto page after page.


A good idea destroyed by desire,
but salvaged by the reader's own
sense of strange sensuality.
Carnal nights alone under wraps,
become the basis of a Hollywood hit;
a product of modern imagination
unhindered by moral insight.
Is it the writer's fault
we fall into chronicling
the darkest of nights?
For the writer only delivers
what the critics want.


Hyped into a romantic tryst,
characters who once were friends
are forced into each other's arms
against their personality profiles.
If they could speak,
they'd disown the hack
who makes them so promiscuous.
Yet, the writer remains confined
in his own prison of popularity.


Writing with morality;
what's the point?
Who would read a work of fiction
with sensibilities in mind,
when there's no one left
to offend?