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David Kirby: Sex and Candy
Candy is to children what sex is to us, because when
you were a child, candy is what you thought about every
waking moment. It was something you couldn’t get from yourself
and for which you depended on the kindness of others.
It’s what you hid from other children when you did get some,
what you devoured greedily when you had it and lamented
the absence of when you didn’t, what was bad for you if you had
too much, and so on. But now that you’re grown, while candy
retains its allure, now it’s sex that you think about all the time,
what you hide from other adults when you get some, and so on.
So would a divinity student say either candy or sex is a belief system?
Maybe they’re practices, like Buddhism or Quakerism,
rather than belief systems like Roman Catholicism or football.
Certainly sex was a practice to this fellow I used to know
in college who had all these elaborate schemes for getting women
and who actually succeeded at them, not because the schemes
were any good—for the most part, they were pretty dumb,
as when he got excited when he saw that one object
of his desire wore a wedding ring because that means
they “do it,” as he explained to me, or when another smoked,
a sure sign of a moral flexibility—but because the schemes
were a bridge between his desires and their fulfillment,
a way to get from point A to point B, as it were,
just as he must have had similarly-successful schemes
for wheedling candy out of his parents when he was a kid.
Now it goes without saying that sex is a more complex field of study,
as I realized when I asked a nonagenarian German gentleman
of my acquaintance what single thing he’d like to have now
from his student days, when he spent his mornings reading Goethe
and Schiller and his afternoons dueling with sabers and his nights
emptying stein after stein of lager, and the old gentleman,
who’d been retired for more years than he’d worked
and who still had the scars from saber cuts on his cheeks, smiled
and pointed toward his belt and leaned close and whispered,
“Ein Steifer!” and you don’t have to have a Ph. D. in German
to know that “Steifer” is one of those words that means pretty much
what it sounds like! But while he was talking about sex,
I also think he was being not only funny but also nostalgic
for his dead wife, just as we are all sentimental about those
whom we love, yet when we look around, where are they?
Perhaps they are eating candy in heaven, just shoveling it in.
Now let’s say they’re waiting for us because they want
to have sex with us—heavenly sex!—though in the meantime,
they get to have all the candy they want. But when we get there,
they won’t want either one, and neither will we,
and instead, we’ll all want that thing that’s better than either sex
or candy, the thing that we got just a glimmer of once,
like a firefly in a distant meadow that we saw one night
as we were stuffing our faces or pulling somebody’s pants down,
and it’s got a name, that thing, we just don’t know what it is.
~~~~~
Copyright 2025 David Kirby
David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. His many books include More Than This and Get Up, Please (LSU, 2019, 2016).
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This fella had me till the end. Humans are never satisfied. They always want more. I think sex and candy in heaven would be fine.
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Me too, Mike!!!
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Fine poem again. Lott of good “tricks”.
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Oh yes, David Kirby raises cleverness to the level of enlightenment. I love his work.
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How I love this poem. Another reason NOT to be afraid of crossing the river! After reading this poem, I’ll make a note to myself to bring my frying pan to Heaven, just in case Kurt Brown ate too much candy while he waited for me. For I WILL hit him over the head. But just once and not too hard, for sure!
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Hahaha. Not too hard.
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David and his firefly take us to a deeper place than Marcy Playground here. Thanks!
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Oh, yes
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As usual with a poem coming from that super-talented household, this one is at once marvelously funny, overwhelmingly accurate (at least for this octogenarian male reader), and somehow profoundly humane. Great post, Mike!
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David and Barbara are the dynamic duo!
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Growing up in Houston, we’d heard of a local stripper named Candy Barr. One highschoolguy I knew snuck into her performance, but said she was past her pull date. I’m not so sure the preteen women I knew were that interested in candy. When they got older they were not that interested in sex either, at least with me. But that mysterious thing we secretly long for in our future realm of sweetness? That in heaven the curfew will be way later, or the gumball machine has better flavors.
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hahahahaha!!!!
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I’m pretty sure that’ll be the case, Jim.
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I’m pretty sure that’ll be the case, Jim.
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I trust there will be that thing you intimated at the end, David, and it will make everything else disappear right before our eyes and “down in our hearts,” (as Wm Stafford would say), else we might not have arrived. The other great thought about all this is recollection, so essential these days, to us, and I wonder with the complete Phantasmagoria of the Ring Nebulae, our first sight of a black hole, will we remember to remember?
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:)) yeah we know what it is, and so do you… :)) just haven’t said it aloud since an angel whispered it… into our infant ear!
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