If men are Martian and women are Venusian,
And no one seems to be able to communicate,
How in the world did we populate the Earth?
Make babies and procreate?
All I got to say is thank God for body language!

Though some men still think red means go,
And no means yes, and pushing and shoving
Is just rough housing foreplay, so what’s a girl to do?
What are women to do, but especially,
The girls growing up surrounded
By alien predators lurking?

Not all boys, not all men,
But enough for young girls and women 
To band together to tell their stories 
At sleepovers, over drinks, and during coffee breaks
To strategize how best not to get harassed,
Molested, raped by these pretend invaders,
I wonder if boys and men are having similar
Conversations about how best not to rape?

When you finally do find a man,
And bring him home,
And deem him not a predator,
You still cannot seem to talk to him,
He seems to think that he is logical,
And that your feelings are too emotional,
And everything you do from the way you walk past him
To the way you do the laundry is sexual,
And when you finally are in the mood, it is inevitable,
It will be during the football game that he waited all week to see,
And no amount of rubbing his thigh,
And whispering questions in a low sensual tone
Will distract him from living vicariously through
The snap of the pigskin between the thighs of
The representation of modern-day warriors,
And because we cannot communicate,
We are foreigners living in the same house,
In the same bed, inside each other,

Then the little aliens come,
And the communication breaks down further,
As we realize we do not know what we are doing,
We band together, praying for an alien abduction
After six months of three am feedings,
But we fight over everything,
No fight too petty for the sleep deprived
Joyous new parents of a vomit-soaked poop monster,
You have one goal, keep the little humans alive,
Executed in drastically different fashion
The dangerous half assed way and the right way,
And depending on if you are a man or a woman,
You will disagree on which parent you are, 
and who your partner is,

Congratulations! You survived the parenting mission,
And you are kicking your kids out of the mothership
Into the big bad Universe to explore
And try to communicate better than you did,
And you are stuck with your partner alone
For the first time in eighteen plus years,
Only to realize, he is still rusty with his Venusian,
And you are still struggling with your Martian,
Because somewhere along the way,
You stopped trying to become fluent,
And just accepted it is what it is,
And drifted further apart
Onto opposite sides of the couch,

Sure, you have sex, but it is mechanical, formulaic,
Scratching an itch rather than stoking the fire
That used to burn inside the both of you 
Where each difference you had 
Was a treasure that you wanted to unearth,
 To dive deeper into their mind and their body,

You forgot to ask after year three,
If anything, you did felt good or bad,
Or to explore, and try to plant a flag
Like it was the first time because
What was once foreign, became so familiar
That it was common, and no longer special,
And work and the kids, and life in general distracted you,

Now, your bodies and your minds are temporal,
There is only so much time left with your partner to relearn,
Or perhaps, learn for the first time, 
who they truly are before they evaporate into the ether,
So, what are any of us to do,
But to endeavor to make it our mission
To become fluent in our partner’s foreign tongue,
Both figuratively and literally,
Until our shriveled unfurled last breath


~ By Hyacinth Hale