Delicately Smashed to Pieces

Love is a blindfolded fistfight in some sleazy alley at four a.m. when you are too tired to fight even though you’ve been taunting this bully your entire life. Love is the elevator music waiting room that you’ve been in, anticipating this fight – seething at this chance.

And the sound of fist and bone and skin smacking skin in a desperate attempt to spell-out some kind of violent sentence is the sounds of two bodies, two lives, and all the disparities you could imagine, colliding to begin a new symbiosis: a new relationship.

Some people go to church, I believe in you and I.

I implore you, paint me a picture of your screams?

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My love,

I watch you sleep. (You know this and we joke about it because it is my guilty secret). But (in all truth): I watch you sleep because my exhaustion is no excuse to lose this moment. Yes, this one. Right now.

(You know this) Your eyes flutter in deep sleep, every now and then halfway opening because you see something more than I can understand.

When you are awake, you sometimes speak quietly (I banter about this with you when you are ready). But even when you are silent, I can feel you – clear across stadium rooms in the dead silent of a sleepy night and early morning. There is something magical about you that is not a trick, but simply because it is not a trick I am apprehensive because nobody, simply nobody has this kind of power without being mischievous.

And then the sun rises, and you are laying next to me. And hours later since our last words, you open your eyes and all I can do is exhale. And then, more than anything else, you are there. You. Are. Here.

Hi, you always say. Simply. Unobtrusively. As though there is no option for anything more complicated.

Your eyes are blue. But sometimes (I must confess) I mistake your kind of color for that composite of every color this universe has ever produced. Sometimes, in my delirium, (it is understandable when you are so many things to me, no?) I forget your name. Sometimes I forget your eye’s color (it is understandable when I have your whole body to look at, no?). Because, really, is there even a descriptor that is worthy of this kind of stamp?

Even cosmologists have missed galaxies when pondering the patterns in the mole-colored specks of life across your back.

Believe me,

I know:

Your eyes are Joy.

Your sounding symphony is Joy.

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When, fucking when, did I cross that threshold between want and need?

And why didn’t anybody tell me that this would hurt?

Why didn’t anybody explain to me this ubiquitous vision – that love is lust’s rose petal decay? Love is sharp and thorny and colorless. This, when we color it red – the color of our blood.

Why didn’t anybody explain to me that Valentine was a martyr? And I am not even that great.

Luckily for me, I bleed this musical reddish, ruddish tone for her and my love, my girl, happens to adore these kinds of petals.

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My love,

Do you not know that everything stands against us? Someday you are going to hate me and my name will not reverberate as music on the hills. And,

Do you not know that they are rooting us on in the same way that a triumph wavers back and forth between success and broken-nosed tragedy?

Yes, this is the same kind of black thoughts that I think in my lonely nights when you are too far from me and I can only find paranoid beliefs in the darkened idea that I have already called the vultures by screaming your name aloud to all, well before we’ve only begun.

(If they care at all) We are mostly entertainment. We are their dreamy, anticipated car crash. That train wreck. That fuselage explosion, that sinking ship on the atoll, that silver screen heart break catastrophe. We are waiting to happen. Yet, we are here, now. We are not waiting for anything at all.

You and I, are alive.

I said that I am not the poet that loves you in secrecy. I am the bard that shouts to the world: You are my girl. The one I love. And this, this is how I love you.

And then I pause, imploring your eyes to mine: I have crossed the threshold from want to need.

Terrify me.

Please.

I am all yours.

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Love is gore. Love is homemade repairs on wounds that bleed, bloody.

Love is all the secrets that you never had the bravery to tell anybody, all bottled-up in the object of your affection.

Love is every kiss and affection and story and everything, absolutely every little thing, that you have saved from every lover before me.

Now! I implore you, tell me all your secrets…

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My love,

You know that sometimes I fuck you. Most of the time, I don’t.

But really, what I want you to know is that always, absolutely always, I wish we had an audience. I want people to see what we are doing, how we are fucking. I want to model this kind of love. I want to exhibit my ferocity. I want to illustrate how a girl loses her breath all while begging for more. I want to show all my universe how I love, passionately, unabashedly, without pretense and without qualm for looking like a naked frog perched above you, squeezing everything I can out of your most perfect body.

Afterall, we painted this museum, together. Fucking, together. I want everybody to see this color collage.

Yes, yes, I know: we are still not very good at all of this. We are still learning. Your orgasms are the gold standard and I am still just a prospector.

Still, you tell me how I fill you up. You tell me how I feel inside of you. And I,

I can barely speak.

Still, I’m waiting for you to scream.

Scream.

Fucking.

Scream.

Please?

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Love is every insecurity, amplified. Made public. Love is your every infirmity naked with the robe of secrecy laying on the floor before you, in this conversation. Love is looking at that robe when you are laying face down, knocked out, and all you can see is that red velvet, crushed – the totality of your vision.

Love is this kind of pure terror with small moments of complete ecstasy. Somehow this is the only arena in your life where, miraculously, the bliss outweighs the terror. That is, if this is not simply an addiction.

A habit.

A fix.

A want.

A need.

A rationale.

Tell me, again, the formula and equation that brought us here at all?

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My love,

I want to feel your love more than know it. I want to hear your words more than listen to them. Like the hum of my father’s Corvette, I want to feel your presence more than I want to know that it is, in fact, a concrete existence in this world.

No, we did not come at this in orthodoxy. Instead, and for some twisted reason, we have arrived at this presence in a backhanded intoxication. For this was not our Catholic blessing – we were not born to be gifted this universal love. We were not promised fast rides and clear roads. We were only promised an opportunity at this fight,

This struggle.

This love.

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My love,

I love the idea of you wearing my cum on your body and dripping out of your cunt hours later, in public.

And I love wearing your mouth’s scars on my neck, on my body like a rifle wound through the shoulder. I want everybody to know that I have fought to be here at all.

I am your warrior. I am fighting for you. Tooth and mouth and scar and blood and perfection at all.

You cried the other night before you fell asleep. When you rolled over in the morning I was a new man.

Your man: delicately smashed to pieces, standing tall.

I am Ardor.

Ardor is the perfect record album and the most beautiful girl in the world, all in one magical night, in the same mystical moment in your life. Ardor is the foggy intersection where all the metaphors of your life run red lights in a strange downtown city that you’ve always dreamt of, but never had a name for. Ardor is that cosmic space where pure terror and beauty meets Joy.

Ardor is having no idea that when you kiss her for the first time, it will be the most perfect kiss you’ve ever had. Ardor is what comes after your terrible nervousness to kiss her at your car, subsides. Ardor is what comes after the painful shyness wears-off and instead of letting her walk away – you chase her across the street and, standing off the curb, you reach up and sink into her lips under a waxing midnight moon. Ardor is that moment when you pull your eyelids apart, enough to look at one another for the first time after that kiss. Ardor is all the words you don’t have in your throat. Ardor is that breathy moment of unbelief.

Ardor is many things.

However, I am fairly certain that LOVE finds its provenance somewhere around that time where you stumble away from the most-perfect first kiss, somehow knowing that the entire course of your life may have just, impossibly, changed – forever. But then again, I may be insane – temporarily or permanently. For I have been infected with love. You know: LOVE. In capital letters, bigger than cities, like it’s screaming at you.

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This is the first time and, in the invisible dark she is laying below me, without any clothes on; naked, nude, and her ribcage is peeled back. It is so black that my vision has morphed into another sense altogether. In my desperate attempt to find her kiss, I let tiny little explosions of light lead me in to her holy lips. My chest is stinging like a heart attack. For this is that moment I have thought about; that moment before my body presses into hers, for the first time. Like the first kiss all over again. A body kiss.

When our lips meet, I can feel her squirming and writhing. Her legs kicking. In-between explosions of kisses, she says that she can’t breath. She tries to articulate more, but words need breath to breathe and she is handcuffed by her swollen lips. Our swollen hearts, so close together. As the intensity and frequency of our kisses escalate, I reach down, cupping her nipple for the first time, running my fingers up and over and down the curves of her lines. With my hand between her hips, I trace up and down her thighs. Instead of aiming for her wet heat, I reach all the down and below – to cup her ass with my hand. And, she has soaked the sheets below us.

My breath goes weak and so I cup my lips to hers and pull the little breath she has, all the way from her chest and into mine. Then, I lean in a little closer and with as much surface exposed as can be granted in our positions, our bodies touch. Alas, our hearts are that much closer to being aligned.

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I have spent years, nay lifetimes, in the forests of my heart’s strings and my head, and my life. I have heard the aspens quake. I have met riparian vegetation in the dead stall of winter, trunks creaking and talking in their rub on one another. For years, I have tread invisible paths in the winds of winter. Then, in one instant: I came into a green clearing where the sounds stopped; summer was suddenly much clearer there and,

There she was. In ancient mythologies, The Fates were said to control the metaphorical destiny of all beings. The Fates are women. Of course they’re women. Out of the winter of my life and,

We are sitting on summer’s empty neon concrete patio. Maples quake above. Light streams in through the branches, washing the girl’s face in limbs and hands and fingers of watery illumination. And I kiss the forehead of the most beautiful girl in the world because anything more may break the spell that I have her under/that she has me under.

We struggle to merely touch the exposed fronts of skin and try to breathe. We struggle against some unnameable, invisible torrent and complete indulgence; and the possibility of nights of sweaty, wet sex fading into the future of days. Because, It is there. This heat. This possibility. That this could happen. More than that, we both seem to know: there is a parallel between our sexuality and the reality of love. There is a correlation born in possibility. That when, come one, so too comes the other. In the least, they are related like twins separated by mere moments from the womb.

On the neon patio I order my last glass of wine for the night and I toast, silently, to The Fates and all the metaphors of the seasons and the light on her face. Then, the most beautiful girl in the world gently leans into me, with every fragility of our green love in full bloom between us and gently she tucks her fingers into my shirt – delicately brushing my chest with her knuckles and gentle hand. I kiss the girl on her forehead and with a light head full of thought, I tell myself: Be careful what you ask for, you just may get it.

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Intimacy is an unnamable torrent which rarely has a voice and typically is an apparition in the rare conversations it does appear within. We have not had sex, yet. But, we have been passionately intimate. For seconds at a time: with our bodies, our limbs, our words and yes – our emotions. Mostly, with our emotions.

It has been gradual, a process, a climb, an ascent – towards climax. As though she is the best lover in the world, she is moving me closer and closer towards something illuminated. As though we are suited to be one another’s greatest lovers – everything, absolutely everything, has been wildly intimate.

The elements that we so often surpass to stand atop our ascent are all the little things that we have relished: learning how to hold her hand; tiny little kisses; sharing the vulnerable legs of our lives and some of the open wounds; her looking at me like in a way that I have never known, ever before.

We lay in her bed, clothes on. She is shy and turns away to undress herself. She keeps the sheet tucked under her as she lays on my chest, listening to my heart – nay my entire life – beat, because: These steps of intimacy take our breath away. Every little thing is alive with a meaning that we feel more than we know.

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I am ardor. I am here. I am now. I am alive. I am blessed. I am love. I am The Provocateur. I am not. I am red lust. I am pure terror. I am joy. I am intoxicated. I am thrilled. I am me. I am here. I am not. I am there. I am with her. I am not. I am missing her. I am craving her. I am aching for her. I am kissing her behind my eyes. I am a little boy. I am the man I have worked to become. I am not. I am better with her inside me. I am thinking of her, right now. I am not listening to you. I am paralyzed. I am taken. I am mystified. I am drunk on her. I am blown away. I am falling for her. I am blown away. I am falling for her. I am. Falling. Blown away. Paralyzed. Alive. Love. Lust. Ardor. Close to her.

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Draw a picture of the perfect girl.

List qualities. Traits. Idiosyncrasies. Possibilities.

Blink three times and then roll over into this moving picture: She is in your bed.

The girl with the coconut hair and the baby powder body has her arm over her head and is trying to sleep. The sun is coming up and you haven’t slept much since the light has come into the room because you only want to watch her and relish in the unbelief, the possibilities, the idiosyncrasies. When she wakes, you will lick her armpit and kiss her morning breath because you are certain that everything about her is perfect. When she wakes, you climb on top of her, delicately and sweetly because you do not want to disrupt the dream.

She touches your hips, cups your throbbing sex from way down underneath, and sighs as though she is in pain. She looks into your eyes as though she had been blind for her whole life, hitherto. You blink three times and the gentle morning touching and delicate smiles become pressing and kneading and prodding and hands move up to throats and the fury of everything you have built together is boiling and the sucking on the skin becomes biting and the playful clit becomes the soaking wet cunt fucking your finger and your hard cock drips with her juices and yours and you finally, finally, finally press your sex into hers and you flip her over and bite and suck on the back of her neck and you are sliding on her slick heat, sometimes pounding into her and her back is arched upward and she is looking back at you with her head raised and there is a hunger in her eyes like there is starvation in your soul and you sometimes stop the movement just so you can hear her shoot heavy, violent jets of breath out her nose and mouth and eyes and ears and still, despite your animal fervor and inability to think about anything else in your life with clarity or duration, still, you do not slide your sex inside hers, for this is as intimate as you can handle with your small grasp right of divinity now, and the day is coming and she has to leave soon and you already miss her anyways and can’t wait for the lovesickness and the sightings and comparisons of her everywhere, absolutely everywhere, because all you do is think about her all day long and the next day until you see her again and feel her lips for that first time, that time.

And you are terrified when she disappears because you may just be completely crazy.

And, in love.

And you want to give her your heart – but you wonder, quietly and with manic breath: have I already given it to her? Does my heart belong to her?

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You are so insane about her and sick with love that you have conversations with your heart when the girl is away.

The strange thing is that your heart replies. Your heart says things like: In the musical 4/4 time of your life, I will skip one beat every measure when she is not around. This silence is where Joy is. This silence is the reminder that this is love. That this is grave. This is your caveat and your achtung! Achtung! Achtung! This is where all the metaphors of your life become real. The lessons, manifest. The blessing, a holy gift.

Each night before I pass into my sleep comas, I praise my heart for its odes and canons and the fight that has never dissipated in its musical pumping of my body’s blood. I picture myself, these days and nights, smiling – for my heart is a fucking poet at the touch of her.

Joy

I wonder if you know that the idea of being raped comes, etymologically, from a sense of being under the influence of spiritual ecstasy. To be enraptured is to be carried away by this same kind of violence. This same kind of ecstasy. Some call it spiritual, others – prophetic. Perhaps, this is the most perfect kind of violence. The kind of violence you find Joy in.

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There is no prescription for love. This finicky four letter word is the prescription, in and of itself. As terrifying as this may feel, it is truth – even before the boil, in the infant stages of love simmering, bubbling.

Shhh… you are skeptical when your chest has been opened, no?

I challenge you to walk away from the perfect girl, with the perfect skirt, the bloody peach shirt and the perfect eyes – that one who has intoxicated you and driven you to sweaty beliefs of how your life can look; and you will understand this truth – that she is love. That, this – and everything she says – is the provenance of love. That, you shouldn’t be afraid of saying this out-loud – however foolish or crippled you feel. However strange you look in that mirror of your own idealized life is only a minor reflection of how powerful the upside to your falling is at all.

When you walk away from her – the only remedy for your love sickness, the only remedy – is more of her. And you know this all the time she is sitting right there, in front of you.

I also challenge you to understand that, in speed comes power. For however fast this feeling has fallen over you, feel not foolish – for the power is only that much greater. And the responsibility…

Shh, just listen to her chatter. Autumn is coming…

When you can barely breathe, the only thing that will give you more breath at all is her. Her breath. Her words. Her utterance of the life that she wants to give and the force that she can impart. Nay, does impart. Does give.

Shh, just close your eyes. You will feel her shiver…

Begin this process that is, at once, yours and not yours at all – and you, the aetheist; you, the agnostic, will gain the understanding that maybe there is a God. Hallelujah, maybe there is something out there giving you breath, granting you life, affording you one last chance, giving you this crosswalk where the girl in the bloody peach shirt gaits across your lane (and she will only look back once)…

Guised by mystery and the guessing of whether or not you are standing on this ground at all, welcome – says the sign – you are falling in love. Whether or not this is the profound love that you constantly sing about – the tag line reads – is up to the cosmos, the reciprocal articulation of you into her and the courage that you will need to possess, from here on out.

From here, on out – look down and recognize this place you may have never really been – and then look up: this is that place. That crossroads. That place we have talked about so alone and in the dark of night.

From here, on out…

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Shh… I know that it is also true that I can continue expounding upon these ideals – when, in fact, all I’m doing is creating nervous conversation – like I did all night long with her. Over dinner. Drinks. Her arm tucked in mine. Her scents wafting in and around us all like a cloak of invisibility along the lights of Broadway.

Tonight, it is true: I could barely breathe. To articulate one long-winded sentence required the might of all my infected body. Sometimes, at dinner, I even stood on my toes beneath the table.

The idea of love, the possibility of true, heartwrenching love may even make you fear lust. I know this only now – only tonight as I am terrified to broach that front: To engage in that glorious cacophonous symphony of finally, holy lord – please, alas: pressing my body into hers. Please. Press. My body. Into. Hers.

For to merely touch her thigh, just above the knee – is more than my body can bear. Tingling seems inappropriate and inexact, when, in fact, it is hilariously about the only sensation that my body has witnessed for over a week entirely, signaling the sure truth that this is more delicate than lust. Alas, love’s fragile arms trump the fiery heat of ravenous lust.

To this end, I have learned something more: Love is the doubling-over of lust on its knees.

Love is this kind of wind, when kicked-up with twice a ferocity.

Love is, Joy.

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I have no story to tell. Only vignettes to attempt to articulate. For I am under a spell.

And this is exactly where my fear raises up, takes hold and screams over the shadows of my nighttime bed: here there is a blessing, and a curse.

For where love spins the highs into even higher bellows – up and above the city, spiraling taller than everything you ever interact with; it also drills the lows into those exact nightmares that you have dreamt of, and sometimes, felt….

Still, I am not going to stand there in that song which calls fear to my door. Afterall,

She has come back, from the east. And tonight, she came back to me – where I was doing nothing more than waiting for her. Where she could have gone anywhere and gone to anyone:

She came. Back. To me.

(to see if we were both crazy, or gloriously: not)

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This is me: Out loud. On my knees.

This is my toast, glasses-raised – to this process at all.

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For it is a certain and true fact that hearts can melt at different temperatures. In different light. For differing reasons and because of invisible broken paths.

In one sentence, the heart can snap. And never return. From the east, or west, or beneath your gaze.

So – the sign says – enjoy this all now. Feel the blessing in the fact that Joy is standing before you at all. That you can feel her. That you are afforded this luxury of enchantment. Of privilege.

Listen close, she has many things to say to you…

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Herr Nietzsche said that where words leave off, the music begins. Here, he wrote, is the importance of music at all. And so I urge you, shh…

Nietzsche wrote to his sister that, in defense of his seemingly overuse of the “dash” – he said that this dash is where I can no longer write, or speak, I am indefensible to the sensibilities of nature, laughing at us for all our mindless chatter and overreach of sensibility. After the dash, Nietzsche said, is where the music picks up…

On a related note, perhaps one of the greatest pieces of western music is Herr Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The chorus to this symphony is possibly one of the greatest love songs ever written – to a girl, an idea; a feeling; a thing – the great, “Ode to Joy”. It is here I begin, and end:

Joy –

Sex as Suicide

“Drunkenness … is temporary suicide.”
– Bertrand Russell

Of all the vices, I cannot think of one which is more violent than: sex – the perversion of sexuality.

Sex is ubiquitous. The addict, the afflicted, is hopeless in concocting an escape route. For to flee from the reigns of sexuality is to evade life.

Tits, asses, cunts and cocks: they’re everywhere. They are everything. They are the symbols of life and death and progress and ancestry and mortality and they are what breeds life itself.

Of all addicts, those afflicted by their sexuality and others’ is the trickiest. The strangest. Because,

For the addict: sexuality is not the drug. Life, and the loss of life therein, is.

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Sex is one of the most violent of addictions because the taking of human life is the most violent act.

Remember: serial killers and other murderers have long incorporated sexual acts with their assaults.

Remember: acts of sexuality – sometimes as they are particularly yoked with love – can lead one to personal death: suicide.

Where Russell found temporary suicide in drunkenness, I have found my moments of suicide in sex.

Sex… is temporary suicide.

Even in my darkest hours: sex has been a violent reconquering of my own life. A reinvigoration. A reprise. A taste of what falling apart at the seams really feels like.

Alas, the most exhilarating of all drug cocktails to violently course through me: Where there is sex, there is death.

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On the surface, sexuality is not something uncommon. It is not a prize, a blue ribbon – an anomaly. Really, what has been conquered is not anything to brag about: it is an impulse. A compulsion. Dogs do it. Chimps do it well, and often.

On the surface, sexuality is our base. Primal. It’s what our internal mechanism is here to do: spread the seed. Propagate the gene. Lengthen the line. Fold toward the future.

Under the surface, in that place where the nerves itch below the skin, sexuality is one of the most titillating endeavors to engage in. What’s more? Intoxicating it is. Pushed even further: Paralyzing. Deathly.

Sexuality is the greatest of all drugs because: it is free. For awhile…

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“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature; I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
– Antonin Artaud

If you go up too high, you come crashing down low. Every addict knows this. The opposite of pure ecstasy is destruction. Nay, annihilation.

Annihilation of what? The self. The one entity we all believe we “have”. On the most desolate, broken and homeless streets – even then we don’t need any money to own this idea of “self”.

In all, that rush, that push, that pull of sex – is escape. Like heroin, cocaine, alcohol – this adventure is about the loss of self. For just as a heroin high enables the user the ability to disappear from the day, so too does sex enable the junkie to retract from ultimate responsibility. Presence. Life.

Implicit in the act of sex – in its wailing arms and pounding torsos and eyes rolled back into the head – is the picture of: pure, acceptable violence. Sex is violent. Not always – but it can be.

And like the addict of other substances, the violence need not affect anybody else – sexuality’s violence can be silent. Masochistic. Sexuality in this form can be that kind of annihilation of the object we all value more than anything else: our “self”.

To this end: maybe the perversion of sexuality is a safe manner of suicide. A non-lethal destruction. A way to crash, to fall, to leap, to die – if even just for a minute. Just maybe, sex is a kind of reanimation of the self that keeps that glass floor from giving way.

Maybe sex is as close as we come to death in this life.

Drunk, Dumb.

I have become so discontented at my prospects for love, that I’ve drawn away from lust. As though I’m a characture portrait artist, I’ve begun working in reverse. Maybe even erasing some of those Casanova superheroes that I’ve always silently imagined. And the women that accompany those ideals at all.

And then, there you are: wearing the perfect dress. You are black hair with musky eyes. Latin skin. Sex is rocketing from your pores. We are sitting over perfect cocktails, the sun falling to our ancient west and your sense of flirtation has pushed me beyond love – to that place of ultimate, primitive provocation. Of those virtues which were long born before me.

More than you know, this table between us has a circumference larger than Pi. Bigger than all the mathematics you were ever taught.

(I infer this, but don’t speak the animal for you to hear.)

Quickly the heat rises and your explanation of a man’s ultimate liquid all over your body is more than intoxication. More than this moment put together in allegory.

(I infer this, but only later will speak about the most provocative of natures we all share.)

And I nod, because I know where you’re going. I know where you’ve been. This kind of sophistication I adore. And ache for. And for several intermittent moments, I even mistake it all for love and something bigger than you and me.

And then, the idea of sophistication dissipates as that watery liquid over me. And I am embarrassed for believing in you at all.

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My friend describes somebody like you as, “Sex-on-a-stick”. And while that phrase alone titillates, what I will learn later is not so intriguing.

For months now, which feel like lifetimes, I have pushed away from these interactions.

For my soul – I know, that fucking place where the light meets the dark; where we all toss and turn in the night – is not satisfied by your provocations. By your large and small grandstands of fashion and strutting and posing.

My friend talks about it as, “the power of skirt”. She says that she and her sisters, as women, have so much more to give. To flirt with. To titillate with. Simply because of the skirt and the sophistications around exhibitionism. And while I believe that my sophistications are robust… I fall flat here. I become retarded. I flirt with you. And then,

I drop to my knees.

As though something greater is before me.

And even as you tickle that Grand Marnier down your thigh for me to lick, I feel like a fool…

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And so, you with your smoky eyes, your heightened sexuality for all the world to see, ask me to come to your place.

A few moments in and we are at that station which topples the insophisticates over. And I assure us both that alcohol makes us do daring things. Still, you ask me to take off my clothes and I soon after am naked, before you – and more than that, I am naked before any questioning ideology that has ever provoked me. I am more than naked, I am blind. And,

I feel cheap.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like a whore. You, my slut. The dirtiest thing that I could ever place my entire sexuality inside of. Within my haste, I am thrilled that you exalt in the land of rubbery protection.

Because I don’t trust you.

I don’t trust that small thing inside of me – which is out and in public, being honest. Being earnest. Reverberating in life’s silent exclaims.

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Fuck you, cheap sexuality.

Fuck you, everything that pulls me into that stupid place of want and desire – just because I know what you’re wearing underneath.

For the fact that you have spoken any of this to me at all cheapens anything you have to give.

But I, stupid boy, climb into your bed – drunk and dumb and beyond myself.

And while you are the greatest flirt I have ever known, I am embarrassed by the progression of our intimacy.

You play your games and really, I’m willing to see how far you will go.

To my disbelief, you go all the way to fall down, back to the bed, legs spread-open – as though you are some kind of missionary. This when you are nothing more than the collection of chemicals in your head.

You are evolution. A species’ invisible, slow progression. You are reproduction. You are pregnant women and menstruation and gynecologists and everything remedial about sexuality. You are rote.

My cock is not excited. My tongue, bored by your sense of kiss.

You are the worst lover I have ever known.

(And now I see and hear and smell your kind everywhere. Everywhere.)

For while you bark at the world around you to coddle you, to caress you, to tease you, to learn how to give you an orgasm, to be a good lover, an attentive lover – you are the furthest thing from a learned student.

+

Shh, I have a secret: I come on your face when you’re not looking. You are the filthiest thing I have ever known and I tell you this under my breath when you are not listening (I don’t want to hear your response, really – your girlie, nervous giggle). Because in this dark place with you roaming behind my eyes – for a moment: You are the biggest thing in my life. And then,

I orgasm. And,

My fantasy of you dies a violent death.

Then, finally: You are the most remote of my addiction and reality, at all. You are gone. Away from me, like a fly, buzzing towards death.

+

In front of your smoky eyes, down wind from your perfume, we talk about the most provocative facets of your being. The biggest secrets. We peel back the paint in the darkest of your corners. We share entire lifetimes in short hours. And I am lead to this place of belief. Of faith. That you will carry me in the same way that I carry you.

But no, in the drunk darkness of your bedroom and its corners, I am lead to a place where I come to know the biggest flirt as the worst lover I have ever taken.

Several years ago and those girls that were willing to speak their dirtiest, darkest fantasies and recollections to me, were the most provocative. The bravest. And for a long while, that pushed me to understand my communications in the most intimate manners. But now,

I am laying in your bed and I feel disgusted: that I am actually dreaming. That I am actually sleeping. That I am worn-out and need a place to sleep at all. Because,

You are no friend of mine, sexuality.

And more than that, you are less interesting in my contemporaries than any book I have ever read.

Certainly, most people grimace at the idea of pornography. They state that it is not interesting. Not really even sexy. Not provocative. They say,

It’s rote. It’s the median. It’s not even interesting.

And so I say: all of these women, all of these interactions – are pornographic.

And I, am a pornographer. By association.

In the mountainous landscape of life, I am but a carver of one cave. One valley. One riverbed. And you, nothing more than wet crease. That decayed den.

+

I find confessions intriguing. And so,

Where you are but one orgasm, one small fantasy that recedes into the backfold of the ambition of life, I am a fool for believing that you have any faculty to deliver the true gems of real discovery.

And so, I have reached for the heavens – toward love, but only found myself receding away from lust. Because of the ultimate disgust – where I am looking at you, my sexuality – in a black dress with smoky eyes, I am bored.

There is nothing intriguing here.

I am safer alone.

I am safer as both, the hunter and gatherer. The only thing that I can rely upon, at all.

Fuck you sexuality.

Fuck you titillation.

Fuck you, boring girls that I continually meet.

For where lust overwhelms, love is about the only the constant that makes sense.

Show me your light.

Fury

I am with furious with the world and let my night lead me to your bed of ashes and cigarette smoke.

I follow you down the hallway into your hollow room. With each step the light lowers and my hunger for pummeling something near me just to watch it fall rises in delight. Just because you are near, I measure my fist in relation to your back, your spine, your head, your nose. I want to make you fall if only because you are a woman and, because of that, you are also the representation of my sadistic contempt.

I am hissing with this hunger.

When we were on the couch, you thought I was giving you pleasure. You thought I was fingering your cunt. You though I was tickling your clit. But I was doing little more than stealing as much as I could and measuring your lifeforce through your cunt with my fist and my fury.

As we crawl onto your bed, I am thinking about pounding you through the bed. I am thinking about fucking your legs back until they snap.

My fury is so blind and invisible I can not even speak its first syllable.

Then, we kiss…

And somehow that black veil raises its hell from my eyes. It is then that I realize I came only to be touched. That, this is all I needed: to be touched. That, this is all I have wanted: to be touched.

In my fury, I have forgotten about the simplicity of a hand on my chest, measuring my heart’s loping gait. Or fingers laced in mine and engorged lips on my bicep.

+

There is something perverse about confessions.

I have had to confess many things in my life. As a deviant youth, I was afforded lifetimes of experience because of my libraries of transgressions and subsequent confessions. Even as an adult, I’ve hosted symposiums full of simple confessions alike.

There always was, as there is to this day – a peculiar rush that floods my body, when the time comes to confess. To be even more honest, I have learned that as I am speaking my confession, I am typically only eyeing the threshold instead of hearing what I am actually confessing – that threshold which immediately changes upon the utterance of the confession. This threshold is that delicate place where the blood leaves the body. This is where the music dies. This is the beginning of the sense of complete loss. Profound dread. This line where everything changes, this is what I crave in confession.

This threshold, this change, this confession is the perfect act of violence.

Red death.

Black birth.

+

We are drunk and spring is supposed to be arriving any day. The sound of your laugh in the complete silence above the rustling of sheets and clothing being peeled off our aging bodies, is sweet – as though it is somehow transformed. Titillated by the hands of something unnamable…

We talk about Latin lovers. Minutes later and we are touching, prodding at our now naked bodies and I remember what my Latin lover showed me. And I want to share it with you. But, I stop in half-motion and lay back into the bed. For there are some things which need their secrecy and shade to grow.

Maybe this is only an excuse – for the truth is that I don’t want to share anything with you. This is not about giving everything to you. This is about stealing a little for my self.

Certainly, you have your ideas about who I am and who came into your bed at all. This when you don’t see the invisible thresholds of the most selfish man in the universe and everything that I have lost, been raped of, and left behind out of stupid ignorance.

+

Once we begin touching – really touching, the black storm drains from the strangest of places: from behind my knees, the crook of my elbow. And quickly, my fury dissipates as we crawl into one another, naked and locked in some perfect human puzzle.

It is then that I realize that sometimes this is all I really need: to be touched. Skin-on-skin.

I do not whimper, but a tear streams from my eye and rolls off the far side, away from you.

+

When you wrap your body around me and take me all the way inside, I am stunned at the sensations that flood my body. It’s as though I have jumped into the shocking frigidity of some great, unnamable ocean. Your touch is wholly new and I can feel you in every vacant space between my fingers.

For a moment I think about the bliss that has invaded me so violently. We push and pull at our symphony of want and restraint and boundaries and everything stolen from our lives as you writhe and gyrate while I am sucking your juices from you. Like a thief, I am pulling life from you. Juice, from you.

Your legs squeeze my ears, blinding me. Alas, the magic trick is complete. You don’t know me and I know nothing about you except for this tattoo which circles your stomach and that empty place where you were once able to give birth.

+

In the morning you tell me to come inside you.

Where love is the most selfish emotion that we own, I can think of nothing more violent. I can think of no greater gesture, to come inside you – as if my come is my scream and the sound of our bodies pounding furiously together is all the applause we will ever receive. So, I fuck you longer. Harder.

I watch your stomach rise and fall, the muscles flexing and flinching, polished as though you were bred for this. As though you were bread for my hunger. Meat for my table. Lessons for my life. Sustenance for my growth. A knife for my death and a grave for my rotting.

+

More than likely, I hate you. I despise everything about you. If not now, soon. I will – hate you – soon. In the morning, you make lamb sausage and scrambled eggs and coffee and we eat this at your dining room table. But it is snowing outside and I begin to seethe again.

But you cannot see this. This darkness. Where I am burnt. Nobody has seen this. For I have confessed much, in front of courts and classrooms of eyes and ears – but not one person has ever come to this conclusion. Not one person has ever even slipped with mention of this feeling that drives the pounding of this meat, the devouring of this nasty emotion. I have walked for years to stand here, for this confession:

In that same way that a narcissist possesses a dark side of inadequacy beneath – I too hate so much around me in that same way that makes me punch every mirror I pass.

I have pointed and fingered and fucked full of blame those that wear their anger on their beard like a unfinished meal – all when:

In the slushy remains of winter, where spring and green should be – there is only sloppy snow. A cold day. And my confession that I am the angriest man I know.

The Most Selfish Man in the Universe

There once was a man who cried and wept and yelped and decreed: All I do, I do for you. This man, naked under his crimson robe, was incessant in his pleas. He said things like: I want only the best for you. Anything less is unacceptable.

The man bellowed things like:

I cannot live without you. With you, I am stronger.

When not howling and heaving, the man uttered phrases like:

It pains me when you are away. I miss you when you are not around. I do not know what to do with myself even when you are near.

The man sometimes sobbed in song. He would say:

When you hurt, I ache in pain. When you fall, I tumble from the cliffs of Dover.

Where this man initially reveled in the joy of a beginning and a the provenance of relationship and the triumph of the human spirit, he now only sat with his arms crossed, crying and mumbling about his lack of breath. His dearth of life. The futility in living at all. This man, sucked every good molecule from every living being around him.

This man went by the name of the first human plague, the first fit of evolution into this advanced mammalian state. This man, went by the name of the most selfish of all emotions. This man’s name was worst possible combination of any four letters.

This man’s name was Love.

What is Love.

I am not much different from you. I, like you, say things like: All I want is love. Love is the most prized virtue in this world.

But it has come to my attention that I may be asking for something that doesn’t even exist. Really, I spend so many nights talking about it, but: Do I have any real, concrete idea as to what I am really saying, for those that are trying to hear me? Up on my soapbox, do I have any real idea what love is?

In all my nighttime, seemingly productive dialogues, it is demarcation alone which is probably the solvent by which we c/should sink all of our wonderment into, to retain a clear, undiluted answer. To begin a real dialogue about love’s presence in our lives, we must explore love’s corollaries. Love’s veins: eros, amor, agape, phileo. Especially when the question is this abstract. Especially when the question is: What is love?

I am away from my intoxicated nights of conversation. Now I am standing in front of the mirror and I ask this question once again: What is love?

When I boil it down, in my patchwork world, love is a polysemic word which represents the amalgamation of all the real, or apparent, forms of love: eros, amor, agape, phileo. To clarify in this mirror of words: Under most red lights, when I am talking about love at all, I am referring to romantic love, or amor.

I believe that we all fundamentally understand these faces of love: Eros is erotic love. Agape is unconditional love. Phileo is brotherly love. But it is amor, or romantic love, which baffles all of us and causes these strange language circles of conversation which reach no real, concrete end – either out and in the world, or in our hearts.

Amor, this most mysterious brand of love, is sharp. It is a blade, which cuts. A fire, which burns. A slippery cell that squirms and wriggles and oftentimes feels foreign to our human grasp. More often than not, romantic love is violently difficult to hold onto, once grasped at all. Truly, romantic love is the ultimate gamble. For at every turn, the possibility of falling from one of love’s cliffs is a real, and mostly, probable expectation.

In the end, it may be simply because of this gamble – why I have always been so fascinated with romantic love.

Love is like a ghost. It can haunt you. It often appears in the strangest of places, without explanation – only to recede into the dust of night without notice. Love can strike fear into you. It can scream at you. It can amplify your infirmities. And in all honesty: it does. Afterall, the most prized virtue in the universe should have this kind of roaring power to: strike fear, scream, amplify every vulnerability you own.

But like a ghost, love too is mostly misunderstood. Like a ghost, most of us have seen the apparition. Felt it. Welcomed it into our lives. Been haunted by it.

Still, sitting in this chair, talking over cocktails with those eager lips around me and I begin to emerge at the idea that: I am being uncritical in all of this. I am not even sure that like most ghosts I’ve ever known: I’m not sure if love, romantic love, exists.

Pause. Breathe. Exhale.

In reality, what we call romantic love may be nothing more than ardor: That fiery, fleeting initial burst of fire and disfigurement. In the end, this may be the ultimate goal. Or at least, it always has been for me.

In trying to refocus my needs and desires and patterns within my previous relationships – I have noticed that when this initial fire does recede, my interest wanes. For after this fleeting burst of energy – the real questions come to the fore. Or, if not the questions, the stark, real answers.

It is here, where I believe the other forms of love begin to waddle-in and meld with amor, or romantic love. Especially initially, there is a sense of phileo, or brotherly love. Ultimately, the goal is to reach agape, or unconditional love.

Where my final, profound discontents within my romantic relationships may have found their ultimate doom is the earliest of stages within my relationships, within this face of erotic love: eros. For I believe that, like so many others, we often confuse amor with eros, or erotic love.

In the end, that fleeting fire of ardor may be predicated on a heavy lot of eros as opposed to romantic love. In the beginning, eros is the reality, amor is the goal. In total: Amor is the actualization of all the basic forms of love.

Certainly, like the ghosts of the night, wrapping your hands completely around amor is a tricky one. For most of the time, you cannot see its limbs, its veins. Phileo, eros, agape. In all, the amalgamation of love may not, nay – does not – always exist. To have all parts working and in-line as a unified whole is obviously difficult. To sustain this machine’s motion for any length of time – nearly impossible.

Simply writing about the work of fulfilled romantic love brings me back to my beginning – back to where I always begin in my relationships: to the ardor, the struggle of the explosive beginnings. I am brought back to that place where my love affairs have constantly found their swift demise.

Having, at long last, defined love I am still left wondering: can only unfulfilled love truly be romantic?

We say that we “love” many things: I love the color blue. I love my car. My house. In the same linguistic manner, we say so much is romantic. In the contemporary lexicon something seen as romantic is something which is unrealistic, ideal, impractical. Romance is about the glorification, especially when it comes to love. In the end, I am of the belief that our idea of romance is also about tragedy (see my article, “Romance as Tragedy” in the Denver syntax).

Our idea of romance may be about the fire of love. The blade of love. The ultimate gamble. The quick gamble. The most painful and destructive gamble.

Even agape love is a gamble and full of pain bodies and bloody blades. If even the most asexual form of love is that dangerous then I will propose that even romance itself is quite romantic. Romance may just be the most sharpest of blades, the hottest of fires. For it is about a moment, a forest fire, ablaze in a small forest. Quickly it dies. And, whether short or extended in time, we all know what fires leave behind: devastated endings and destroyed beginnings.

A charcoal forest, once vibrant with life; with love stories living and even composing the whole forest all together – that is romantic. It is, alas, love that is unfulfilled. It is love, with its corollary veins and arms dangling from its own cliffs, striving and seeking its complicated, whole self. And yes, struggle is also quite romantic – for it exemplifies virtues that otherwise aren’t in daily life.

Like anything else, the conception of love is a fluid one. In our grayscale, liquid world so much is once present, then recedes. Eros comes, agape leaves. They exist at the same place for a small moment, when one washes away – only to return moments later.

If this is natural love, romantic love, then it is a truism: love is the building block of our human world. It is where everything, organic and composed – both begins and ends: in a blackened forest after the fire has died. Love is the weeks and months and years of life that begins and grows in that forest. Love is also that fire itself.

And so it is: love exists. However it exists in a grayscale world full of complications and misunderstandings. But, dear reader, more than that, I am left feeling stronger for having struggled with this question at all and my final conclusion breathes: Love is the most prized virtue in the universe.

The Alliteration of Love and Lust

For two years now, she has been my erotic ideal.

She, alone, has symbolized the aim of my erotic intent. The intended high-fashion of my pen. The slow grooming of every sophistication around the hearts of love and lust that I have ever won for my self.

She was untouchable. She was not something I was supposed to have, or even kiss. She was merely something I was supposed to want and ache painfully, silently – invisibly for.

But now, we are laying in the still of shattering night, on her bed. My fingers are drawing lines of conviction on her back, up and down her tiny spine. I am kneading her thighs. Her calves.

I am touching her skin. Proof that the disappearing girl has reappeared from the darkest of night. Proof that my heart of eroticism is beating, alive.

Truth is: She was here all along, only mythically beyond my grasp. And now, I am touching her skin.

Every now and then my noise machine goes silent and I can hear her breathing. I stop my trace upon her body only to stand in the wind – to force the memory of anything else back into me, including breath.

+

“A man’s sexual choice is the sum of his fundamental convictions… The man who is proudly certain of his own value will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest… because only the possession of a heroine will give him a sense of achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. He does not seek to gain his value, but to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body.”

– Ayn Rand

+

I first saw her standing on a stage. Two years ago.

And while I sometimes think I remembered everything about that first night – truth is, I remember very little. Just the monuments:

I remember the heat spiraling from her. The heat that intoxicated me and made me actually question whether or not the stage lights were on, or if she was radiating all that light from her tiny body alone.

I remember her bubble gum voice coming through the speakers. And I remember the terror that climbed over me at the thought of saying a word, any word, to her. But for some reason, I felt compelled. If only on the premise of: If you see something beautiful, act. Now. Beauty is fleeting. And sometimes, a dream at best.

I remember one other vision that I would take with me for so many weeks and months and years after that: she was wearing thigh-high stockings. Cut-off jeans. Over her shoulder was slung a sea foam green guitar, but it could have been any color – for I saw very little apart from her being.

I have never owned a true celebrity crush. But I have crushed on many things that were larger than me. Still, this was the first time I had ever stood in front of something and been so paralyzed by my beating eroticism and heart at the same time. For the last two years I have wondered if this is my celebrity crush – that painful kind of infatuation that cries you to sleep at the end of endlessly long days.

I don’t remember much about her initially, apart from seeing her one more time, performing. Desperately I wanted to say something, but knew no words. After her set, I was standing outside and then, magically, there she came – strolling past. Quickly, I mumbled something complimentary – that their set was good. I enjoyed it. Without ruining even one gait, she merely smiled at me, uttered some form of gratitude and walked into the night.

With continents of experiences between us, I watched her walk down that sidewalk and disappear from my life.

Then, without even a hello and, she was gone. Forever, gone.

+

Have you ever wanted something so bad, then received it?

I ask you, what do you do next?

If you are me, you are not the picture of Don Juan. And certainly, you are not Casanova the misunderstood savant of everything about the human heart. You are not the picture of everything romantic, that you had wished for your living self.

Instead, you are stumbling over your words, and her body. You are laying next to her for the first time ever wondering if it is the last time, wanting all of her at the same time – but uncertain as to where to even begin. You are greedy because moments are fleeting and this may never happen again…

Instead of ideal, you are wanting to put her perfect lips in-between your teeth and gnaw on them. Not for pleasure anymore. But rather, for sustenance. For food. For life. For every person who has never had this opportunity and for all the failures that are soon to come.

+

Unknowingly, she has been the breathing representation of that intersection where love meets lust. Beneath these lights she has walked for so long now, earless to my strong sentiments and invisible conversations.

For the last two years now, she has lived only in an impossible, dreamed place: within hundreds of thousands of written words. She has lived in a place where hundreds of thousands of people have read these words, this place where her monument was carved as a picture in words. Here, I promise you, it has endured. And while no particular ode was written for her, nearly every ode I have breathed into these pages, was rifled in her mythic direction. Like a flare in the darkest night, imploring her to blink once.

We are two years later now, and the strangest of things has occurred: I know where her front door is and I know the streets where she has been roaming for this eternity, on foot and by car. These streets, these doors, now have names. Lights of their own. Intersections of their own delight.

This when, for all of this time, just her first name sent a wave of heat through my torso. This when now, this is bigger than a crush – this my life we are talking about.

+

Her body is holy.

And if her body is a representation of some thing, one academically-touted thing, it is of something holy. For a love, that is holy. For a promise, that is holy. For a hope, that is holy. For a life, that is well-lived with integrity and dignity and the bounding joy of love – the body of everything filled with intoxicating lust. And holiness.

Hers is the kind of body that you trace for her pleasure, but secretly for yourself – to learn its sacred curves and secret language, because of the virtues: of gratitude and grace and pleasure and want and everything bigger than you. If not that, then simply because you are unsure if you will ever even be close to something this perfect. This heartbreaking. Ever again.

To this end, my whole life exclaims that I have laid in her bed!

And when I eventually, clumsily crawl deeper between her hipbones and under her panties – the thought again comes to me: I am about to feel her heat. I am about to feel the wet, physical center of my erotic ideal. Then, I slide further down after the breath leaves my lungs and the memory of anything that ever lived before me…

+

It has only been a couple of weeks now. Nineteen days, to be exact. Since I saw her name again. Certainly, when I first saw her name again, I leapt and wrote. I had to. You can’t blame me.

However, to my surprise, she greeted me warmly, and then – everything in my world began to spin as our words picked-up in length and frequency and profundity and before I could even count a beat in my heart, we were talking. Really, talking. Finally, I was really talking with somebody. And more than that, we were talking about the profundities of life and love and want and lust and living vibrantly and what that means at all…

And the wild fires of my life began to meld into one glassy exhale. Because she suddenly began to feel familiar. As though we were speaking about the same things, with the same voice, in the same musical cadence. And my eroticism began to find new light, new breath. New ambition. New possibility.

…in love…

+

Beauty is not Barbie sitting on the shelf next to Ken.

Beauty is about how a girl holds her glass. How she moves across the room. Says what she says, means what she means. How she synthesizes ideas, creates new formulas for perception.

Beauty has never been about something stagnant and learned in a classroom. Instead, beauty is about movement.

Eroticism lives at that intersection where love and lust meet.

Eroticism is the fieriest of flames. The bluest of light. In this intersection where love and lust live, this place that I call eroticism, the beautiful moments have a possibility of life. Under this fluid streetlight, the profundities of existence happen. Some are sexual, some are not.

Eroticism is not about sexuality. Not explicitly. Eroticism is about every titillating thing that happens before a sexual encounter.

You can lust after an idea. An event. A possibility. A girl. A thigh. A moment, on a girl and in the world: in an ideology in a book, on a beach, hovering over a cliff.

Eroticism is about the want you have when you encounter an idea more-holy and bigger than you. Eroticism is this sensation of, “aha!” Eroticism is about the anticipation of want. The anticipation of need. The anticipation of every thing you have ever wanted, or what you could become.

Just the same, you can love everything under the umbrella of life. And really, you should find those things which move your entire soul to the sharp cliffs of this earth.

I say to my self: put yourself in this space. Strive for this fire. This heat. This birthplace of true, complicated passion. Anything less is really unacceptable.

And then, I look up and there she suddenly, miraculously, is…

+

For all of this naked time where she was but a wavy line in my timeline, she has represented the height of my eroticism. And now, she represents that pointed possibility of breathing unimaginable life into this intersection of love and lust, this birthplace of passion. In all, she is the paralyzing flame of my red wine lips, wanting. Needing. Almost having… if the alchemy has been stirred in your favor.

I have spoken it aloud to strangers and friends alike: She is the sexiest girl in this Queen City.

But then, the strangest of sequences begins to unfold: In a correspondence of thousands of words it comes to pass that: she is not only the sexiest girl I have ever seen, she is brilliant. She is the best kind of intellectual: she is unsuspecting in her presentation. And what I begin to see in her is intellectual integrity, the one rounded element that has eluded me in all my intellectual relationships. It is this that I have lusted after for so long, since my childhood bones began to break in shards more apparent to my heart than anything else.

How this began: She writes. I write back. She writes. And I begin to fall, steadily, quickly, unwavering, into a massive military complex that, at first I don’t want to identify as such – but then relent, with ease and call it: love. And then, in only a couple of days – I am sitting before her words and the heat in my body is swirling, pulsing.

And it comes to pass that she is, indeed, more than any other I have known: She is the Michelangelo of my erotic ideal.

She is eroticism.

+

And so, for the first time ever, we are sitting next to one another. (Certainly, she did not remember me from two years before, mumbling on that sidewalk after her gig).

I am thinking to myself: This is my celebrity crush. This is the one girl that I have ever pointed at and said: I want her (my intiution is not sharp enough to explicate a thesis, because I only feel this). This is the first girl that I have seemingly haphazardly pointed at and said: I want her and nothing else.

Finally, remarkably – she is sitting in front of me. And I know: This is my one chance. This is my moment.

She is smiling at me as I shiver before her. I do not remember what comes from my mouth, except for the fact that every phrase is shaky and I hope with all my frail timbers that something will magically impress her, about me. When she is not looking, I breathe and pull myself together and put my invisible hands together in hope that my prayers will even make sense at all.

Then, she tells me to sit closer.

Again, I try breathing (because really, I am not suave, I am only me).

Then, magically, I am touching her.

Her hands crawl into my lap and I am the painting of gratitude. And alas, obese love. I am the picture that I want of me to be hanging in my legacy’s image: I am every deadly sin wrapped into one. I am, alas, the embodiment of everything bigger than me: I am Beethoven’s symphonies molten lava into Mozart and a perverted Dali moustache grin painted on Rothko’s dying face.

With every small touch on her tiny body, I tingle. Her fingerprints leave small explosions on my leg.

Her hand slides closer to my heat. At first, to test. Then, she leans in and the intersection where love and lust cross in the dead of night expands and soon, a small, nameless universe is born.

And then, as though we want to share a secret, she comes closer and: I know it is going to happen. It has to happen. This is my one chance. This is my moment. If it is to never happen again, it is happening this once…

I don’t so much kiss her as she kisses me. Averting any confusion, we kiss each other back. Again, and again…

+

Still, days later and I have been shaking, intermittently, from that first encounter. Shivering. I think about this reality, and the large facts that say: You kissed her and she kissed you. And where this could only happen once, my primary reason exhalts and I tingle in delight. For this may only be the beginning.

For where I once knew my eroticism by only one name and one small intersection of love and lust, I am now forever changed. I now know my supreme delight by two names, an alliteration, her names alone – the unspoken singular being: love.

Beyond anything of physical pleasure, it is a new born child and stamped in fact: I am in love with this girl. Mad, deep, life-altering love that begats new symphonies. New plays. New paintings. New paths in the wooded hills of my songs.

For my erotic ideal is even more complicated than I once imagined. And I am still learning, teetering on a brink of possible disaster that I may have never really known. Still, with all possible struggle and beauty alike, I am standing in the wind, head-on – believing that I may have never wanted anything more.

And so again, I ask:

Have you ever wanted something so bad that you could not shake it from your waking life for years? Then, in a burst of unexpected light, it came walking into your life with open arms, possibly even wanting you?

I ask you, what do you do next?

Doors

I was born to do this: To walk past the vertigo in my life and surface on the other side of the silvery swirls of barely walking.

And in only a few short moments you will crawl from my bed, find your clothes and disappear, back into the murky memories of expectation and red wine want.

+

If you look through the peephole of life’s labyrinth of doors, you will see the darkened, naked room on the other side. In all challenge there is phototropic metaphor, seeking light.

And so it is, here I am again standing at yet another door, knowing that somewhere in the dark room, there you are.

Monster. Lover. Stranger. The eternal disappearance and reemergence of me.

There is part pulling at me, to walk through. So I do.

But you are not there, the room is still a void and there is time before the door shuts behind me, sealing me inside. Time to escape.

Instead, I sit to wait. To contemplate how much I do not want to fuck you. Because I do not know what this means anymore.

+

When we get to your car, after drinks, I unzip my pants in front of the symphonies of sound coming from your dashboard. You look down, then up. Take me inside your cup of hands. And we both drink it in.

You begin sliding up and down on me, the fattened lips of snow kissing your windshield, sliding past our sense of infinity.

And then, in only a few short moments you will crawl from my bed and walk back out the doors of my life.

+

The purple purses of our winding walk are slung over our shoulder, but when you arrive, there is nothing in your hands. Nothing behind your back.

You have swum in these darkened seas and expanded them with your light.

My empty cups of hand are open before you. I want to receive this gift. I want to learn about the mysteries and glow with their pride. Blush with my perseverance.

+

I have done this before. I was born to do this.

To stand before you as I have done with so many others. Those figurative, those sentient and responsive, and also those vacant eyes of the undead.

I have walked into the homes of strangers and stripped myself of all shields of fabric. I have stood at the feet of so many beds and the outstretched arms of lovers. Momentary friends and foes alike. The doors always behind me, always closing their tired eyes as though they have seen this so many times before.

But the sound of the lock clicking shut this time has sworn to be my perfunctory call. My windy push forward.

+

I do not want to fuck you and I will not.

On the drive to my bed the nerves are calm. This when the ultimate end to our night was to always involve a bed, like so many of my nights before and after this. But I am calm, driving forward toward it all.

In all challenge is a sea of metaphor aching for life.

I open the door, you walk through, and then I follow.

With chivalry’s hands, I slowly begin to unpeel you. And in only a couple of sophisticated moments your clothing is strewn around my bed. Then, we lock: Face to face. Body to body. Life to life.

+

You have told the world around you about your heat. About your sex and your need for impassioned dominance and submission and the leathery ropes of letting go. As a result you now walk unafraid with vulnerability strangled dead in your wake.

I have told the world around me about my desire. My heat. My passion and my blindness alike. Still, I am perpetually beneath my Golden Gate Bridge, having leapt from it and survived. Swimming, I am, waiting for rescue near the rocks. Wanting only to save myself and curse the rest.

+

We are not far apart when you take my sex inside your aching mouth. You tell me that it has been forever. A long leap since the last time. You crawl up and over my rocks and moan in delight of the ancient waters dripping from your chin.

And where there was once the internal pressure of diving so deep, I have surfaced to lay naked beneath you. In resuscitation, beneath your breath.

And for a couple of hours we swim around one another in symphonic elegance. I, unafraid of the doors that open but never close before and behind me. The ease of the lighter waters and easier currents take me into your sail and we ride on in a symbiotic intimacy that has been known for ages.

My death is in this rebirth. Of this kind of naked intimacy. Of no expectation, but supreme gain. You are laying on my chest and we are simply talking. Sharing. Listening to music and tracing the lines of our bodies. For a few short hours I am comforted in your hands not shaking, your voice not quivering and the surprise of all this…

I will not forget this and I will not settle for a swim. I will only aim for the currents down those streams of all my life’s doors where I feel serendipity and whim. Only aching for this antithesis: The lifestyle of living for the strong swim.

Challenge me with ribbons and I will walk through these glass doors.

I was born to do this.

Rome is Burning

I can only talk about sex in first person because anything else feels uncertain. False. As though it has been forged by bad checks and hockey tongues of inconsequence.

With my sexuality as a mirror for the all the other arms of my being, I have learned much. I have learned where I fall, how I fall and mostly, how to either not get back up, or rise alive and dead at the same time.

One thing I have learned is that I resonate in this particular place where my body and mind and sexuality is a grand floor plan for an unnamable building of disgust. This is what I see with my eyes closed: My skyscraper of debauchery and living as a slum of everything filthy and fearful.

As a writer and a being, I live on the outskirts of my downtown. I live in the ditches and on the riverbanks where the sloths and invisible people do. Each morning I break bread with the homeless and the heartbroken, the beaten-down and those that simply prefer laying down to standing up.

Maybe, just maybe, I am the first person of my own disgust. Maybe I live in the broken-down places in the city I erected. Maybe I live in and out of the ditches I have dug, dirty with my naked limbs. Alone and unasked from the unsympathetic universe.

Very few have crawled more than a few paces with me. Very few people have even stood to rise next to me after a night of ashes.

Perpetually I am: On my haunches and staring up at the bleary oblivion above.

+

If you want to talk about perversion, true perversion, join this unformulated and clandestine group and be beaten to death by your own life. Otherwise, pay nothing to stand in your own closet unadorned.

Stand to rise. Alive and dead in the same breath.

Whatever you do: act. Stop your mouth long enough to rise, alive.

Writhe, alive.

+

I have one such face that is this kind of action that I crave. Her name is bigger than a city. Hers, is the name of an entire civilization that crashed into the ash of history.

She, this island of civilization, is my perfect perversion.

She is every fetish that I enjoy.

She is disappointment rolled into its antithesis. She is the opposite of so many of my discontents: She says very little, but acts loudly. Robustly. Quietly, violent.

She is smooth skin. A swimmer’s curves. Watery, crying nipples and a Picasso ass.

+

We are laying in my bed in the dusty sunlight of an early morning. We are strung-out on lifetimes of sadness and throats strangled. There is a shower and water nearby, but instead of that, we are looking at porn.

The sheets are pulled up our torsos, making little mountains of hands on our own skin. We pull and prod at our unsleeping sex at the impetus of the filth and images before us. Inside us.

I crawl down to her bottom and her toes and I lace my naked legs in hers. I watch her eyes bounce and ache in delight of the filthy naked bodies on the screen before her.

I can feel her hand twitch and dance on her sex while I stroke mine. Ass to ass. Thighs to thighs.

The diseased beauty in her eyes makes me throb with supreme delight and I drool in loss of myself.

+

I know nothing about her. I barely know where she is from, or what she does for work. Still, we’ve known each other for some time now.

Apart from her apple bottom, I am heartfelt lustful for her on account of the fact that, simply, she tells me very little but acts out loud.

The first night I met her, she said little. She sat in the middle of a heated argument and said small, silent things. Then,

I was leaving her at her car when I asked her to ride into the night with me. Her eyes flickered. I asked her if she had preferences. Standing closely, she said very little, only: I like to be told what to do.

+

We broke bread together once and she asked me if I were addicted to sex. I nodded and somehow formulated the idea that I go into sexual comas. Spontaneously I was the teacher and the student, speaking to myself, and her:

While I spoke, she did not watch my eyes. I said that I go into these comas from time to time. I said that I black out. Lose my vision. Think only the filthiest of thoughts. Lose my self. Swim only in the darkest of my sexual seas.

I said, out loud, that I will do things in these comas that I never would, otherwise.

She did not respond to this fresh, fruitful thought. This precendence that would carry me for days afterward, into new levels of understanding.

+

She does not accept that place where words come from me, my mouth, to be so close to her sex. More than that, as we are flicking our sex in front of one another – I think that she will become violent if I come too close.

When my cock slides in her mouth it does so, to the hilt.

She gags. And gags.

And more than feeling perfect, I can only picture teary eyes.

And violence.

+

I’ve grown tired of the vertiginous words that swim all around me. Words of promise and provocation. Words without legs.

But there are these small, fleeting moments:

We are naked in my bed. We are not talking about anything. There are no empty promises. Just boundaries of filth and lifetimes behind.

She is the kind of music I always want to play. Something about looking into that kind of darkness brings the breath back into my body. Somehow, her echo is the one I have always heard in my own sexuality. She is beautifully black. She is the disease I fear I have already fallen into.

My sexuality is my own death and life. Singularly, breath giving and breath violating.

Demimonde

We should all live more provocatively if only we had a secret life.

Still, while most of us do live more than one life, it’s not the one, or two, that we should have selected if we could have at all. The kind of secret life I speak of is a demimonde: a half world, a mistress world where you can live the kinds of lives that you have ever dreamed of.

Like you, I too have a confession:

These extravagant worlds I have passed invisibly in and out of for most of my adult life. My thirst for secret codes, sensitive communication marked only by a symbol on a dirty car window or two rings of the phone coupled with shrewdness, lust for heartfelt adventure and the ability to make quick judgments have served as the grace in my gait to and from these worlds. Neatly and quietly I have married my waking life and these half lives, these mistress lives that I am only now leaking into the living light.

+

My demimonde is not one, nor two.

My demimonde may be a theme in a champagne play of crimson curtains, but I know not this concision. What I do know is that the through line of my mistress lives are the boiling of the blood; the letting go of everything you think I am. I swim behind mixed pseudonyms and defensible positions of power and location, but my charms are always the same. For I am no actor. I never have been.

I am the space you create away from your other masks. I am wispy, pillowy; the place you land in-between your breath of obligation. And work. And duty.

You are the switch that turns me on and lets-loose every literary alias that we could have ever been all this time. You do not know where I live, and I never want to know your façade. I do not want to know your simple chores, nor you – mine. Never will we wake in the same bed. We do not pass one another in public, with our husbands and girlfriends meeting unknowing eyes in the middle of our median lives.

Sometimes I am your secret.

Sometimes you are mine.

+

On the nineteenth floor she is waiting for me in the striped chair. When the elevator doors open she uncrosses and crosses her legs. I can see her stockings and her garter and the sly grin in her mascara makeup.

Our greetings and salutations are not composed of words. For I think that if they were, we might find ourselves in love or flirting with some other four letter words as simple as: Soon. Can’t. Wait.

Instead, we keep it simple. We stay with lust. And a much bigger word: Escape.

The restaurant is not open but the door before us is. As we pass through the empty restaurant we can hear the musical movement of dishes and pots and pans and the scents of preparation. The bases and the heat of cuisine wafts in and around us, concealing us from the noonday outside.

She drops my hand from the lace of hers and walks up to the window. Sighing, she looks down and out and over the afternoon city. She says conquer me.

She says, seduce me. With a word. Or four.

Standing behind her, I whisper into her ear and speak in eloquent tongues – my story of devouring her. I kiss the ridge on the neck. Her hands grip onto my hips and I press harder into her. The diamond on her ring sparkles and disperses light all over our corner of this hotel. I reach around and up and into her skirt. Over the stockings and garter and… she is bald and heaving and naked underneath in the invisible places that she will take back into her office in only a couple of minutes.

I can hear somebody behind us, setting a table in a white coat. I am certain he spots us, for a short moment there is no sound. Then, sound again. Next to us, our table is set. The champagne glasses sit unused. I hear someone moving behind me and I press harder underneath her clit, finally sliding inside her.

Here, our permission is only in the simple repetition of our quiet, weekly lunchtime presence, where this restaurant is closed, but the door is always open.

She turns around and I cup her question mark of a backside. I move up and down the pleat in her taught skirt. She tells me to kiss her hard. She says that her husband knows. And she thinks he likes knowing about our secret.

She tells me to kiss her hard again. With the back of her hand she brushes my cheek and I know it is over.

She takes the first elevator down. She waits as the doors are closing and utters four letter words: This is the… Last. Time. Good…

Bye.

+

I am Speed Dial Number 9.

When she takes her men into bed, she keeps her phone near. She holds down her whimper just as she holds down the number 9 on her keypad. She rings me in and in circles of light opens her bed and her sex to me miles and lives away.

On her unattended phone I can hear the rustling of sheets. The soft meeting of the headboard and the wall. Thrusts counting her breath. I can hear her whimpering. She is begging. She is beckoning, silently as if there is somebody in the other room: Fuck me. Please, fuck me.

Voice mail can only go for so long and I only have a partial recording of one of her phone calls. I think about this recording for we cannot continue forever and I want my tee shirt from the experience for my dying days.

+

She is her own demimonde, the high priestess of her life, and others. She is mistress to many and the world calls her a whore. Her name is Angela and every time I remember this because, within her is an Angel.

We met years ago and I do not believe that Angela is her real name. She is a prostitute and I think that she may be the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. And while she has imparted the stories of her life, she has not told me with any convincing, her real name. Angela, afterall, is inappropriate for what she is.

She wears a Bindi, that Hindu red dot between the eyes. Even in the winter she wears very little clothing when she answers the door. She is tan and her body is as perfect as you could imagine from a sculpture. I think that she likes to tease me, always with her body and the cut lines of her panties underneath her transparent robes and shawls.

She never leaves me alone in any room for too long even though she confides that I am her only real friend. She tells me that her family no longer knows where she lives. All they remember is that the world calls her a whore.

I kissed her once, deeply and madly on the lips as though we both we needed it. But the smoke and the drink got the best of us and we only both began laughing.

I have been to many of her homes over the years. She moves frequently and I wonder silently who moves all of her furniture so much of the time. I worry when I do not hear from her for months on end. Sometimes strange phone numbers show-up on my phone and I am left only with messages. Quick updates.

Then, last year, the calls stopped.

I do not know if Angela is alive or dead, or if she ever was. For there was always something half-living and half-dead about her brilliance. I, however, have not changed my phone number. There is a secret part of me that hopes she will find me, find this story and read her name in these words; and call me; carry me up and away to an invisible city where nobody knows our name and we sit in the champagne sunlight of the futuristic world we have only ever known in the movies.

+

I often think of painters at the opening of their new exhibitions. I wonder if their internal trepidation in the opening is on account of the fact that their secret is being made public. I often think that the great ones were exhibitionists at heart. Exhibitionists of the heart.

For while these three girls began with a matter obscured by lust and the mad derisions of a hungry being, they all ended as the best phone calls do: with love and a smile. Memories of a life well lived and a heart beating in concert with breath.

…these are the most erotic things: reminiscences that bring you back to the anxiety of want and of being alive.

Half alive in a mistress world.

The Church

There is something that speaks to the sold, unseen darkness in me. It tells me that I want filth. Complete filth.

This voice never lies. But something in its timbre tells me that I am being mislead.

This voice tells me that it does not matter how you get to heightened sensation. To divine pleasure. To car crash red and blacked-out ambulance light rides. This voice tells me that, whatever extreme they term it – bondage, masochism or pain – you will simply call it inspired divinity.

This cave wind of an alto voice is the same one which tells me that I love you. But, tucked away in its whispery breath is the truth that you should know: I love you best when I am leaving.

+

We are floating atop a black and white checkered floor. Barely standing, the brick walls have blackened cubbies. From the middle of the room it appears as though there are holes in the walls all around us. Holes for the reprobates and perverts alike. For where there is not dungeon light red on the brick walls, there are caves of darkness.

We are standing in one such cave, one such hole. We are so far away from the center of this strobe light floor. The light sweeps this underground like a broom. This demi monde, this underworld where the leather chains pace in celebratory circles and beckon the darkened night above us.

From here, in the basement of this church, the music whirls and pounds. It is the sound of industrial alley ways and black and, moments of my eighties youth.

The girl, the accomplice, and I are standing with our legs staggered. My sex on her leg and her sex on my leg. In the filthy light her face is white, her lips – crimson. I lean in…

From here, the voyeurism intersects with the exhibitionism and it is perfect.

+

The antithesis, the ivory girl with the platinum hair, is sleeping next to me. I am in her bed for the first time in a near eternity. A giggle in me almost surfaces while I watch her perfect shoulder slowly heaving in concert with her sleeping breath.

But I know, if I leave this bed before she does – in the least I said everything that a car crash can’t. After her orgasm, in the middle of the drunken watch wind down, I whispered to her with my hoarse, coarse voice: I am madly in love with you.

I do not know this love from my rational mind, nor from much more than a couple of baskets of experience. But I know this love. When I leave her, I taste it on the tip of my first cigarette and I see it in the highway lanes swerving endlessly back to my gray, morning bed.

+

Underneath the church, in blackened Sunday night church, the caged animals are pacing and spinning with intent. The husky thump of music is pushing us all into an uncultivated, erotic frenzy where leather and vinyl aren’t enough to quench our eye’s thirst, nor our sex’s hunger. But it is all there, down under.

At the instance of a song, she, my accomplice in this filthy feat, leaves my heated side to twirl and heave in the middle of the dance floor. Minutes later she returns and whispers into my ear: You like to see me dance with other people, don’t you?

I nod and she returns to that center so far away from my bloody heart.

I watch her tease and nod and reach for the sex outside of herself. And for this I am proud. I valorize those that push beyond themselves. Beyond their comfort, for some inspired divinity.

In the red darkness, I instruct my church girl to reach into my pants after she shoots more alcohol down her throat. And she does: She squeezes my cock. Then, hurriedly, we leave. For more filth awaits us.

+

I am not opposed to pushing our limits. I am not opposed to pushing our language to a place where the heightened intent is manifested by our very lips and our throaty obbligato.

She calls me daddy. She says, please. She whimpers and moans, urging me forward. Beyond thinking this dirty, I think it brave. In her timbre, I hear honesty. I hear something authentic; hers. Ours. Mine.

At her house there is a flogger.

I do not know this until the dirty morning light convinces me so, but the floor is filthy, strewn with pieces of her life. Books, clothes, boxes; and unkempt life. She lays down and with her perfect moonlit tits in the air, I begin playfully teasing her nipples with the leather fingers of the flogger.

Then, I whip her hard and intently. Devilishly. Deliciously. At first, she does not even flinch.

+

Before you: There is the girl and there is everything else.

There are matters of the heart and there is everything else.

In and out of all the rooms I have inhabited, I am searching for my center.

I do not know if love lives in that circle, or outside of it. I do not know if my love is enough for one. And I do not know if another’s love is enough for me.

I do not know my center. But laying next to her in the gray wakening of a snowy morning and I know that I feel a center rising, a little to my left. A little ways from the center that I had always pictured in my concentration.

Beyond her, outside of her – the platinum girl with the musical shoulder – there is the filth of trying to just make it through a day. The filth of an industrial world and commerce and making ends meet and bills piling up on a dusty table.

In everything is an element of just trying to find your center.

+

Smack me awake with your skin. Push me to arise into the life I always wanted.

Touch me as though you mean it.

Feel me, kneed me, as though you want me.

If you do not know the words, I am a forgiving ape. For the words escape my passions too, with mean and uncompromising frequency.

If you do not know the words, then tell me with everything else you have.

+

Leave me in limbo, leave me in a grave.

Leave me. Or love me. Leave me not in a place where so many live their lives: in the middle and uncertain.

Love me or leave me. If it is the former, then may it be forever. If it is the latter, then leave me altogether and your taste I never wish to know again.

Like my entire white body, you are burned before this stake.

Lust as Rust

Lust is a rust that can protect the heart from falling in love.

The sun is reflecting off the mirror buildings and I have pulled up to a light. I catch summertime legs in my side window. Walking down the sidewalk is a sun-tanned girl in a flower skirt. I can see her calves working and pulsing with each step.

Her whole make-up: her shoulders, her hair, her gait – all send a writhing but silent pulse down my torso.

When the light turns green, I keep my eyes on the girl and for the first time, I see her face: delicate and beautiful. Cute. Maybe adorable.

Immediately, I turn back to my initial, primitive sensation. Of mad lust. Of thinking about the men that inhabit the valley between her thighs. I think about her sounds. Her coos. Her purr.

With my heart twisted in a knot from weeks behind me, it dawns on me: my only sense of appreciation of the girl was as an object of sexual fantasy. Delicious delight.

But I do not curse myself.

I state a hypothetical and ask myself: What if her words made me squirm with delight like her body does? Then she would become complication-realized. To keep a window between us and her on the street is safe.

Lust is easy. Or at least, it can be. In lust, I can take her with me without her knowledge, without her consent, to pick at and play with, later that night in my darkened bed.

Alone and under my own red badge of courage, years away from love.

+

I have a bondage girl. She is red with lust and love and more than that: she is my symbol for everything in-between. She is the stage and the fight, the spotlight and the red cape that I charge into, head-down – horns forward.

Without even touching me: my bondage girl has tied my wrists to posts on the bed of intrigue. The mattress is stuffed plump with oversized words. The pillows have been fluffed with our breath. And the nakedness I feel in this dimly-lit room is her eyelashes fluttering like the chemical electricity in my body.

We built this bed together. And now she has affixed me to it, willingly, with the ropes of circumstance.

I am blindfolded by my thoughts and when I close my eyes, I feel her wind slap my face. Tease my torso. Tickle my thighs.

And in my confusion – in this unknowing of what exactly she is and where exactly in my body she resides  – I try to only focus on this supreme eroticism.

This anticipation.

I want the erotic as a virtue but I am gnawing through my lips, ready to scream.

+

I am not great.

I am not the girl walking down the street with the legs and ass. I do not make cars stop.

And I will have you know, with my lips sewn shut in a mid-scream: this is not why I dress myself with the invisible adornments of everything inside of me – on the outside. My emotions on my garments.

I am not edible to the common girl.

Like so many around me, I do not prey on simple emotions and, in the span of twenty minutes, have a girl bamboozled. Bedazzled.

I notice girls. But as a fractured whole.

I notice the moments about girls: the curve of an ass, fingers gripping a glass, calves extended upward in heels, a hip over the top of jeans, the round of a mound under a windy summer dress.

I notice the moments: a gesticulation, an articulation, a moment of vulnerability and an eye gone glossy at the mention of a loved one.

We are all fractured parts assembled as drifting molecules pulled together by the magnets of cognition.

And so when I catch a girl with that look in her eye, when her whole body is tipped in my direction and looking at me – I know several things:

I feel it. And,

This look, that look right there – it took time. It required an assembly of pieces. An amount of cognitive dexterity.

It is this look that tells me: she sees the invisible things. The things that others cannot, do not.  Will not see in and on me. Or around us, in this aquarium sea.

+

My bondage girl has red hair. But, like most everything else about her, it’s not obvious. The red is a mysterious red. Reckless and streaked. In some way, it is quiet unless you look closer.

But if you close your eyes, she is loud. You can feel her sitting next to you as though the wind curls around her body as though the wind even knows that it’s too delicate to ever dare push over. You can feel this wind, being diverted and bent and meeting only again once on your face.

This girl has worked me into a firestorm without even touching me.

It’s her words. Her moments.

It’s how she crosses her legs when we’re talking. How she pulled her dress up her naked thigh as I was staring her in the eyes.

Certainly, there’s one facet that could be the catalyst for this swell of emotions: that’s she unavailable. More than that: She’s married.

But impossibly, the only catalyst that this provides to be is the one that helps me keep my hands in my lap. My hot, heaving lap.

+

There is an art to flirting in the same way that there is an art to patience.

To flirt well, one must also be patient and see the invisible things in others.

To flirt well, there must be a two-way road and the alchemical drugs must begin to swell.

The night before I was to see my red girl for our cabalistic night, she asked me what she should wear. And I answered as I always do: a dress.

Her hesitation said: Red. Danger.

Mine obliged and let it drift it away just before she said: red or black?

I said that black will disguise what’s underneath better. Wear black. I can’t know. I want to know. I don’t want to know. I can’t know what you’re wearing underneath because somehow,

this kind of lust will bring me closer to love.

That night, when she arrived in a black dress, with heels pushing her entire body up toward the heavens – I greeted her with a hug. I pressed my lips quietly on her naked shoulder.

And then the winds kicked up where it was once dead with silence.

+

Her whole body begins to lean into me as our words begin flying from our lips and kissing each other’s ears. There is so much to say, but little time to say it all.

For my bondage girl is straddling those poles of love and lust and alas, her life will pull her away from me in a short, stop light time.

My red girl, my bondage girl is loosening her self up. Sometimes her hair falls to her chest, as a lock for my eyes. And as she is leaning into me and I am leaning into her with only words but millions of miles away from touch, she fidgets with the hem of her dress.

She slides her dress up her thigh. Then down. And I know that I don’t need to see this with my eyes, I can feel it like a breeze, with my whole body. In this she is teasing me silently. She is saying: You want to know what is under this dress, don’t you?

You want to know the invisible things, don’t you?

+

Sometimes rust is red and sometimes it means decay. Other times it means something different. Something bigger. A commentary on time.

Whichever way the pendulum is swinging in my heart, this red rust keeps my love from lust. And my lust, alas, away from love.

Hours into our secret night and my bondage girl rises under the red lights of the patio. I press my lips quietly into her red shoulder again, and she disappears into the night. The knots of circumstance are cinched tighter around my wrists.

And the rust on my heartstrings begins to melt. I can taste its acidic leak in my belly…

Then, minutes later, I receive a note that says: there wasn’t anything under the dress at all.

And I think of the dirtiest word I can, then let it flip from my lips in a moment of silence: flirt.

+

She is a singer. Smoky in breath and dark and chalky in sexual timbre.

I have stayed away. I have obliged the ropes of this situation. I have embraced this rust between my love and lust. And I have refrained from seeing her sing. I have heard it and have barely bore this weight alone.

But she sent an invite. Said she would sing a torch song. For me.

A torch song. On fire.

Days later I saw her on the stage for the first time: in a red dress, under the spotlight.

Her dress quaked between her legs, as though her vocal wind was trilling all the way down, between her knees. Her calves ripped with heels and stretched her whole being beyond the club’s ceiling.

Stuck in-between expectation and hypotheses, I was paralyzed by her voice. By her presence. She and her wind dwarfed the whole place, my self and every word I could utter. I imagined her taste and licked it on my lips.

In a moment where song proves that words are sometimes taller than buildings, she sang it three times with the eloquence of a torch’s fiery intent. Looking at my silhouette, she sang:

“Don’t go to strangers, darling, come to me.”

+

There is a part of my childhood reverie, still-existent, that tells me:

I believe that if I could untie myself from these ropes of circumstance and grab her, pull her closer and unleash my body’s dictionary on her witness – I could have her while still wanting her.

…as if my lust could bring me love…

Still, my adult fear whispers that there is fortune in these ropes. There is a treasure within this bondage and it is more than just the circumstance,

…because I know that if these ropes are loosened I may just grab her, pull her near; and not let her go…

+

I am red with love and lust. I cannot escape it. I do not want to escape it.

Since I was a child, this is my fate – like yours: To find love and lust and relish in it.

Soak your self in it.

From the ancestral lips I have heard it whistle toward me: Love is the greatest virtue in the world.

Do not fool your self into thinking otherwise.

I want to spend my days with those that see the invisible things, like my red, bondage girl who straddles so many of the invisible, unspoken worlds that we all inhabit – but only allude to with lazy language.

And if I spend my days soaked with the heat in-between the poles of these red fires, then I am grateful for my run. For my days were lived vibrantly and predicated on the greatest.

The biggest.

The beginning and the end.

Everything red.

Perverse

You didn’t know that you were supposed to be my last hurrah. Neither did she, the girl that was supposed to be my new beginning. My future.

I kept it quiet. Just like I did during that last night, that last hurrah, with you. Like the most cherished of all my sensations it was: a dark, perverse secret. All through our night, until the sun rose – and I was always running beyond you. But you didn’t know that. You thought I was stationary. But I was running: Beyond that night. Beyond the hungover, dirty morning. Toward another. Toward her.

For come the day after and I was leaving my solitary days to fall in love.

This was supposed to be my last dirty hurrah. Something I needed, to stop that surge of venom.

Now, I am huddled over this desk, over this bottle months later. A week’s worth of cigarette butts in the ashtray and I still feel like I am coming down off this din, this protracted bender. Even to this day, I have no certainty of why, or even how long, she was in my heart. The weariness has subsided, the courage is regaining force, but the nausea is still everywhere.

In these smokey times, I like to drift away. Think about better times. Better nights. Like our night. That last night. That swan song…

+

Our evening began with the still gray twilight. It seemed that, the closer night came, the hotter the flirting became.

You were sitting across from me when, under the table you kicked up your legs onto my knees. Your legs were wide and your calves were sawing into my thighs. While I was speaking, I was visualizing the delights: your short black dress, spread open. People passing by. Seeing. Watching. Feeling. Unabashed sexuality. Heaving lust.

I stopped speaking.  You grinned.

The server left the bill. You ground your ankles deeper into my legs. We both grinned at her and left.

When we got in the car, you kicked off your shoes and put your manicured toes on the dash. At first you let me see what you were wearing underneath, below. Then you rubbed yourself through your velvet panties.  You looked at me, intoxicated. The lust glistened on your lips. Then you licked them and I reached down for your slow bucking mound.

+

Love is the most prized virtue in the world.

I see it all around me. In so many exclamations. Points of profundity.

Everybody talks about it.  But few actually do it.

And when I meet somebody that runs from love: I want to jog alongside them. For these few, the word refuses to whistle from their lips, as though it is venom. A curse. Or worse: a lie.

For there is a correlation that is suffocating us like a noose: love equals happiness.

+

I don’t remember our first kiss. Afterall, we never said anything about love.

I do remember the summer patio, buzzing with noise and glasses and people making sounds below the melody of the music.

Again, you lifted your feet up and onto my thighs. This time, with your sharp heels knifing and grinding into me at the swivel of your hips.  As nighttime was settling-in, you reached down and slid your finger under your panties, peeling it halfway over.

You were watching me, watch you. Licking your lips.

Liquor brave on that lively patio, swirling with secrets and darkened dirtiness, I leaned toward the apex of your splayed legs. I fell to my knees and slithered my tongue in circles around your clit. Then as my exclamation point, I slid up and down your entire slit, darting once in and out of you.

I sat erect, back up and in my seat. Slyly I wiped my chin and looked around.

On this patio full of life and the mention of love and buzzing blinders: We were not spotted.

+

Agape. Eros. Philia. Xenia. Storge. Pragma. Mania. Ludus.

These are some of the types of love. Styles of love. And these are not all.

In a grayscale world, love is fluid. Love is a current. White-caps. A torrent.

And when a dam is broken and a fluid flood ensues: Some drown. Some die. Some wave their arms frantically, for help.  Others, run.

+

We were leaving for the next destination, a birthday party – and I had no idea why I was taking you. My friends would never see you again.  I said that I wouldn’t even introduce you. I wanted you to be invisible so they wouldn’t ever question me.

Then, as we got into the car, again, you opened your legs and flipped your dress up. It was now dark.

You reached over and pulled me into you. People were passing by. Sidewalk smiles and feet shuffling. Stopping. Then walking on again.

I was heated and breathing from my ears. You crawled into the back seat and pulled me onto you. I flipped around and you ground your cunt on my raw, throbbing cock.

You whispered, again, that – last night, you watched yourself cum in the mirror as you thought of my cock, fucking you.  And you loved it. But you do not love me.

Adroitly, you had me unzipped and my cock was up and hard and you were stroking it. I did not help in any of this. I was pinned in position. Holding you. Holding me. Holding secrets in this darkened car on the side of the road.

Desperately, you began bouncing on me. Riding me. Gyrating on me. And then I was inside you. Fucking you. Opening you as wide as I could.

I reached around and filled up every hot opening. With my fingers, my cock, my tongue, my neck.

I wanted to flip you over, onto your back. But I saw lights behind me. I pivoted around.

Behind us, a cop with his lights on.

Above me, you with your hot cunt grinding on my fears, were looking into the cop’s car. For who knows how long…

+

I don’t run. I don’t jog.

I thought it was more appropriate to swim.  Now I go out to the empty pool on haunted afternoons and below the weeping willows, tear from one end to the other. Like something is chasing me.

Like love.

Like the ghostly silhouette of a girl.  My secret girl. My disappointment girl.

Because it is true: I didn’t achieve the love that I was leaving you for. I went stupidly for it, and I didn’t even see the flood – from the side. For I had my eyes fixed on the light, as she told me to do. Then, again, I was blindsided by somebody I trusted.

+

After the voyeur cop, we drove away for the party. We found a parking spot by the sex store. The adult arcade. The last one in town.

I said, let’s go. You said you wanted to know. So… go.

There was a girl in one of the arcades, lying on her back, reading under the red light. We shut the door and slipped her the money. In this dirty din, the lights came-on and I pinned you up against the window.

Suddenly your mouth became dirty. You said, fuck your self. Rub that hot cunt.

I looked over your shoulder as I pounded at your ass in this sticky cave of sin.

+

I do not blame. Her. You. Them.

Life is death. Love is a torrent. Dams are abuse. Violence tears us apart. Then, floods kill.

Something that is the most prized virtue in the world, is also something that has teeth.

Love is an angel disguised as a demon. The devil himself.

And ardor’s heat is nothing more than vapors from hell.

+

We were surrounded by lesbians, dykes, bisexual and uncertain girls alike. Friends and new foes sat by us on the club’s couch.  And while, in all the Forum letters of my youth, this was the basis for a paralyzing tale – this was not the case.

Lesbians tend toward supreme dislike with me; and near-hate, when a girl is sitting atop of me, grinding her still-wet cunt-in-panties on my still-hard cock-in-pants. The deejay spun his records and few apart from the lesbians seemed to notice.

I pulled-out a nipple and sucked. Hard. Bit. Gently.

I looked up and our hostess, my friend, was standing above us. She said, cool it. My mother is here.

You sat next to me and made conversation with the girls. My hand crawled beneath your ass and I slipped fingers into your hot hole. Invisibly, I fucked you while you traded business cards.

+

It was a blur, but we drove to the other end of town, where your car was; to the bar we began our night at. You said you needed the bathroom and went inside. I stayed out.

You reappeared with shots, which you shot. When we got to your car, you pulled-out two cold beers from your purse.

We sat in your car, listened to music and I tried to forget tomorrow and the girl that I was going to love. Just for a couple more minutes more, I swam in the sea of sex and forgetfulness; my drug.

But we didn’t sit quietly for the proposed short time. No, a couple more minutes turned into an hour in your backseat, sucking on your juices and thrusting my cock into your drunken mouth at perverse angles.

+

I drove back to your house, because you couldn’t. We appeared at the front door, with beers in-hand. Your babysitter answered. She interrogated. Gave me the evil eye. Was disappointed. Then, left.

We went into your bedroom. You pulled out some smoke, opened some wine. Took off your clothes and slid my cock inside you.

I didn’t kiss you. I was as far from love as I could be.

I fucked you hard in that soft bed. I pounded down and onto you. I smacked your tit. You smacked me in the face.  I rolled off you and two minutes later and,

Your five-year old daughter walked into the room and crawled into bed with us. Startled, you leapt out. I was naked, and hid it like a secret. I asked her about her ice cream. Then, she fell asleep and I slithered out of the bed. Dirty and ashamed. Cold and hungry.

The sun was rising when we finally tired of fucking; and pinning your legs up behind your head in your living room. We fell asleep on your sticky couch with no blankets. I was shivering, cold.

I slipped out of your house at dawn without a word. You could have cared less.

And this is just the way I wanted it.

I want perversity in all my exits.

Stop Go Light

“Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy.”

– Giacamo Casanova

+

At the thought of her I am wet. Hard. Punched drunk by my own venom, surging.

At the thought of her I am pulsing. My bloody heart and the valley between my legs writhes alive as though spring has come and fall has receded into its darkened winter.

At the thought of her I am barrel-chested, expansive with possibility and my future is like the universe, still exploding from that single point; ballooning outward.

Forever. Outward.

+

We are 

not supposed to be together.

We are

probability and uncertainty and the undying promise that tomorrow may never come.  Tomorrow, the phone may not ring.  Tomorrow, the universe may contract and never expand again.

Tonight, however, and the moon is full.  There is still more time until winter’s coat chills this land.

+

Flying through the night, wedged between two broken racing stripes, we are gliding down the highway.  She has my shirt unbuttoned, untucked and my belt buckle is becoming untangled as we speak.

She is over the console and reaching into my pants as though she has a fever.  She is biting at my neck.

Her teeth are like her breath. Like her juices when I am between her legs: like citrus cacti. Sharp and big.

She numbs my tongue.  She wets my black and blue neck.

+

When I leave her, at her car in the morning; at her house in the dead of night:

I can’t think of big things. All I can feel are small things, like:

I can’t breathe a complete breath.

I feel like the Antarctic seas. Clean and clear. Washed over.

When I leave her,

It is as though simply standing before the question is good enough.  As though she is the question and our time, the wind.

All I can feel are the small things. Walking away from her and I know only simple truisms:

I miss her.

I want her.

I need her.

On my boomerang return back to her at the beginning of the week and all I know are the big things like:

I miss her.

I want her.

I need her.

+

Last week it was over. This week it is hanging over my head.

She is asleep and I am watching her tiny torso heaving. She is making sounds of breath and lips and mouth.  She is exhausted and lopes her leg over mine.  I lose myself in the air after midnight, the touch of her naked skin on mine and, for many minutes, I listen to the cars passing her house. Her bed.

This is the first time that I have laid with her, in her house. In her bed. In the night.

A couple of times and I even fall asleep in this strange white room.

She says she loves me.  She says she loves another.  There is a picture of him across the room and I wonder how he loves her. If he really loves her at all. If my love is that love, the kind of love, that she loves.

The card I gave her two weeks ago is on her desk. It says: Leap and the net will appear.

Then I come-to and remember that her leg is loped over mine.  My leg is now tingling because all the blood is in my heart, but because I do not know if I will ever be this close again, I only blink, look over her moonlit body and breathe deeply as though I am sleeping and this is a dream that I will always remember.

+

I don’t see intoxication enough. Not in those around me.

I don’t see paralysis enough. Not in those I share words with.

I don’t see complete disasters, out and in the open.  Not truly. Not completely.

I often wonder if we have surrounded ourselves with the comfortable ones. The fearful ones. The delicate ones.

This is life afterall. Delicate and pungent. Short and squat, like a lateral vessel sloshing its liquid time back and forth.

To become a complete person one must endure disasters. Messes. Paralysis. Intoxication. And they must shiver awake a little more, each time they are called upon by these disasters. Messes. Moments of pure terror.

+

She is sitting before me. A jean skirt, tiny and riding up on her thighs.

The tattoo on her hip is peeking out.

She crosses her legs. Uncrosses them. Puts her foot up and on my thigh.

I can see the dark triangle between her legs. But it is her head and her heart that are magnets for my eyes.

Cars in the night wash light around her head like a halo.  She smiles at me and I am stricken.  We are sitting with others and so I don’t say:

Somewhere between all this sex and love is power.

And in every small thing I do and say with her throughout the night, I will make certain that she feels this power, at least once.  Thing is: the power may not be anywhere outside of her and maybe she has known it her whole life.

+

A couple of weeks ago, when I thought her heart was smiling only at me:

She was lying next to me and I kissed her spine as morning peered in through the windows. I told her that she is the most beautiful girl in the world. She will tell me, hours later, that she thought I was talking in my sleep.

We haven’t slept much together in all the beds we inhabit.  Typically, we go from ravaging to comatose. However, I have heard her childish breathing turn to an eloquent snore.  And I know that we have slept, invisible hours upon others because I have heard our alarms shrilling because responsibility is always standing before us.  Calling our names as that tail end of our time together.

Always, always, we rise early early early in the morning. She is always off to something, or someone and breakfast is just not something we do.

+

Right now I am thinking of all the ways that I want to devour her.

Right now I am thinking of how I will not take our next moment for granted.  How I don’t know how to, because she is quick. Here. Then, gone.

Right now I know that this is all I have: these thoughts of her…

+

The last time I tasted her, weeks and lifetimes ago now:

She was sitting on my face while I stroked my self in front of her.  I was lapping at her citrus juices. I nibbled, sucked and tasted all that I could. In that sober morning moment, I took every sensation with me and stuffed it into my memory’s pocket for future use.

When I exploded all over my stomach, she slowly crawled off me and sighed.

I grinned, knowing that this is how we begin our days together.

+

It is said that if you don’t have any disasters to endure, you may need to create some. To be complete. To become whole.

I am nervous and naked, crawling from her bed because it’s too hot to sleep. Because I can’t sleep. Because I just want to watch her, even though I know that she needs this rest. This sleep.

She is exhausted, like my heart.

I put on my pants and shirt. I slip on my shoes. I am stricken. The sadness wells in my sternum and I am too nervous to tell her that I love her with all of my heart.  Instead I kiss her on the shoulder.  Musically she says, call me later please…

I lock her door, open my car door and drive into the night, alone and under the pale of all love’s stoplights.

The Saddest Poem of All, Tonight

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

From “I can write”
by Pablo Neruda

+

I did not meet her standing on the ground. No, instead we met over a thousand feet up, far above the city lights. Standing, and we were looking down.

As the clown in my circus of will and ambition, I have fought the fight of attrition.

I am not a poet, nor sorcerer by trade, but I have believed in love as apathy’s raid.

+

If you want to see the saddest boy tonight, pull your mirror and see me, sitting across from thee.

If you have never seen love unfulfilled, stare across this table as though your trembling made you able.

I am not a poet, nor sorcerer by trade – but if you wish toward the sea’s winds to see the sun fade – from this life I am born. From this life, I am torn.

+

I am Wednesday.

I am heartbroken.

I am me, unable to dress. Unable to eat.

The simplest of duties, stricken by fate in the circus of this life.

+

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

From “I can write”
By Pablo Neruda

+

Thank you for giving me this. This is much and more and the score of my days.

For when I have been empty, broken and struck by the light of eve, you crawled from beneath me to leave.

+

I want simple. And settle down. I want the sun to rise and fall over our heads. I want no pomp or pretense, instead I crave your intense,

Potential that only I can see.

Power that soars over me.

The drive and pistons burning free.

I am nothing more than thee.

(and I want nothing more for me)

+

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else’s. She will be someone else’s. As she once belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.

From “I can write”
by Pablo Neruda

When Light Goes Black

I devoured you with a scream.

When I was done you said: Nothing is as sacred as it was before.

Shouting towards my center, I replied: I never knew that I would want you. Not like this.

But since the light, I ask: would you come, crawl closer? I think that I need to make a confession.

I do not crave you madly because I cannot have you. I do not want something I cannot have. The black places inside me are full of voids and cannot contain something any darker than the light that streamed into our hotel room that morning.

This light has led me to that space when, days later, I pulled out my phone to see this: You have done something to me. I am looking at things differently.

+

There was a leopard print robe in the hotel closet when we arrived. With the water pounding in the background, filling-up the whirlpool, you slipped out of your dress and dropped your panties. You wrapped the robe around your tiny body.

You poured something in the water and it foamed up to the top.

I crawled-in naked and was not deterred by the thoughts I was not having: You are not mine. You cannot be mine. But,

I am going to have you. Right now.

…I think…

In the water and I watched you in the mirror on the wall. You flipped your cat coat off your shoulders and crawled in the water next to me. I’m not sure what touched what first, if it was a thigh or an inerrant finger or drunken hand – because as soon as your skin was involved with mine, I blacked-out from the rush of intoxication.

For the next several minutes I have only taken with me the visions of the leopard robe on the floor and my mouth opening-up to devour all of you.

…and then our lips met. Hungrily. Met. Like they were long(ingly), lost (lust).

+

I am not bragging about this. I don’t brag about something I cannot have.

I whine. Then, I exalt.

You said: Damn you for making my sex life seem so mediocre. Then you said it again: Damnit. You said this because everything powerful is about two-way roads. Broad avenues. Highways where the traffic comes and goes.

Like you. To the mountains and sometimes over them. Away for the weekend. To your boyfriend. And then back.

+

I could not find the hole into your soul. So I pulled you on top of me as though the small addition of your weight would help me breathe again.

We sloshed the water up and over the edge…

Then we followed the waters rush and slid up and over the elevated tub. I watched you first. Your naked body before me, for the first time. Glistening. Wet.

I had been waiting for this moment, for a child’s winter. I had not been waiting for your kiss. No, I never thought it would come. Instead, I had been waiting, craving for your naked body, before me.

+

Since second one when I saw you, something inside my torso wrenched sideways. And when we talked, you looked at me like I have never been seen before.

…if everybody in your world gets this same treatment, then we are a band of enlightened beings…

But I do not get your steady ear. You come and go. We talk when we can.

With everything understood and oddly perfect – I still want only more. Like when you are holding the perfect dozen, but want the baker’s dozen – so you can carry twelve in one hand and one in the other. Because you want more even when you can’t carry anything else.

With you, I will take perfect in one hand and nothing in the other.

And I will keep grasping at everything in front of me…

+

It must have been late when we left the water. It must have been understood that there was more to say with our bodies because I don’t remember the walk to the bed. I only remember the process afterward, of trying to completely learn your body before the sun rose.

Your mouth was hungry like mine. You bit at me and I, carefully bit at you. Kissed you. Took your tongue and lips inside mine and sucked. Tasted. Ate.

Then you put me, hard, inside of you and I inflated and exhaled in a strong bellow. Seeing me inside of you was more than an act. It was the metaphor. The thesis. The scream.

I pinned your legs up and you did not look me in the eye.

I was right there with you, looking down at your closed eyes. I was there, in that cultivated moment, unabashedly loving your body and finding my ultimate intoxication embedded somewhere between your amazing body and touch and cunt and ass and legs; and the simply-complicated fact that you were here with me at all – when you could have been anywhere in the universe tonight.

+

Desperate for more of you, I went for your heat after I heard you sigh – saying: Go on. Please…

With a controlled rage, I buried as much of myself into you, sliding my tongue in and out of your soft spots. My fingers, flying in and out of you. You writhed in dirty delight.

A long while later, after I was satisfied with my exploration and learning of everything between your legs, I came back up to you. You grabbed my face and pulled me into your mouth.

Your legs were wild and splayed out and kicking in the air. You gripped me by the neck and then I, by yours. As I began fucking you; pounding down onto your hot, wet mound, I squeezed harder. Your tiny neck in my hands was strong and called for more. And as I began to leverage down and onto you with all of my weight, I was squeezing and thrashing your neck, your head into the pillows – slamming you up and down in a violent, choreographed fit of eroticism realized and desire exploding.

…in reciprocation, you squeezed my neck even harder. And for a second you even opened your eyes and looked up at me, in agony’s ecstasy…

+

Several hours later, I opened my eyes and to the sunlight streaming-in. I was terrified that you did not know what happened. I was terrified that it was a dream. Somehow, a mistake.

Then you moved when I moved. The sheet fell from parts of your body revealing your hip. Your tattoos. Your skin. My cock, still hard, brushed up against you.

I heard you sigh sweetly and so I came closer.

I knew our time was coming to an end, so I reached under the sheets, for what I had dreamt so heartily of, between your legs. You were already hot and wet, waiting for something like me.

I opened your ass and legs and buried my head between your fertile valley and began lapping at you. Your moan was a melody that bucked your hips into me and my tongue slid hotly inside of you.

With your stomach on the bed and I behind you, I reached under and gripped you by the hips – pulling you as close as I could to me. Even if that meant not breathing.

Because you know as well as I do: everything, absolutely everything, is a metaphor if not a fable.

For the next hour, I licked and sucked and touched and opened you up as wide as I could so that I could see and reach as far as I could inside of you. Because this may be the last time ever…

+

I’m not going to say I would cry. I’m not going to say that I haven’t stopped thinking about you. But we all know that in any linguistic negation it’s opposite – a positive affirmation – is always present. Without the positive there is no negative. Without the dark there is no light.

You said: Thank you for enhancing my senses. To that end, I want you to know that I have lived my subsequent days without you constantly paying homage to your sentiment. Alas, I am brighter. Sharper. Sadder. Empowered. Human.

And: I’m not going to say you make it easy for a boy to fall for you. So I have written it instead.

Yes

The word “yes” turns me on.

For many years, just saying the word “erotic” was, well… erotic.

But I have come to find that a good “yes” is always what I need. To the converse, the word “no” will drain the blood from my hot parts.

A close fourth or fifth in this line of words that turns me on is: adventure.

+

It was still sunny outside. But she said “yes” anyway. The whole while long driving towards her and I assumed that she would call and back-out. But she didn’t.

When I arrived she was dressed for a play. An opera. Her lipstick, still wet.

When she got in the car, she said that she thought she was overdressed. Because, where were we going, again? Yes… so, you’re really going to pop my sex club cherry, right?

The windows were down, the world around was hollering and spring was on its fruitful way. I nodded, smiled and said yes to her, all over the clear blue water I am going to pop your cherry.

She said that she didn’t think her clothes would be staying on very long.

Spring was coming. And soon, so would I. I said yes, your clothes won’t be on for very long at all.

+

The sex club was empty. And for this, I was grateful. Afterall, the girl was in my care and I didn’t want anything obtuse. More than that, I wasn’t interested in playing with anything other than the girl with tattoos all over her body and pierced-absolutely-everything.

When we climbed into the hot tub, we sat side-by-side. Under the rippling water we checked-out each other’s wavy bodies.

Our thighs touched. I reached down and began stroking at my cock, feeling her eyes bouncing down and then straight ahead, shyly. It this moment that is delicate, the wave of nerves before the storm – the only time in any relationship where you are completely uncertain as what to expect – because you have never touched before.

This is the longing to know. This is the moment of unknowing.

Thing is, I think that we were going to skip the whole sweet first kiss thing…

I inhaled the fumes of water and lust and then… I reached-out and touched her thigh. I looked into her pivoting eye. And then her manicured hand dipped under the water for her pierced clit.

+

I rolled out in front of her, my cock waving in the water between us. She took a hold and we stared into the other’s eyes, intoxicated and drenched with the anticipation of sensation. Of sex. Of supreme lust made manifest. Of the adventure party leaving base camp.

Slowly I crawled up toward her chest, her face.

She slid me in and out of her mouth. Slowly at first she took me, as though she were trying to decide whether she liked the taste of my dish. I reached down and twirled her nipple piercings in my fingers.

Then she took me entirely inside of her with an animalistic fervor. She attacked me as though it had been so long since the last time and all the weeks and months of thinking about it were too much…

And then the words began, in form of questions:

You like that cock?

Yes…

You like being a dirty little girl, don’t you?

Yes…

Her eyes lit up and over the tip of my cock she said that she wanted more words. More questions. Because yes, she wanted to feel as dirty as she could in this blue, blue water. And only words could topple her sexual being, over…

I pushed her up onto the edge of the tub and buried my face cautiously between her legs for my first taste.

Yes. Yes. She moaned.

+

The hot water was the beginning of our affirmation. With an open stretch of blue, cold water in front of us, we left the boil of the tub for a space where we could move; glide together. In the pool.

We had gone on one date prior. We talked about our lives and shared our very personal histories. When we left our glasses of wine, no food was eaten. I did not know about her appetite. I did not know what she could handle, or more than that, what she wanted to handle.

But with her legs wrapped around me in that pool, I learned that she had a feverous appetite. An unending thirst. A passion for sexuality. We talked about it in words and thrusts into one another. We talked about it with our eyes. And for awhile we floated around the pool, touching cock, touching cunt.

She asked me how I wanted her. As I began to slide inside of her I said that I wanted to pop her cherry all over this clear, blue pool. And as our heat slid together, she sighed and said that she didn’t think I would actually pop her sex club cherry.

+

We pirouetted through the shallow ends of the pool, the water sloshing up and onto our naked chins. Unabashedly, we moved from side to side, where I pinned her against the wall and pushed her legs up and over my shoulders.

With everything I had, I laid into her. Our breath beating like hearts. Our breath punctuated by large and small exclamations: yes. Yes.

In our dance away from the wall, I stayed inside her the whole time. I reached down and twirled her clit piercing between my slick fingers. Effortlessly, we supported each other’s weight and more than bouncing with the waves of the water, we created those soft, rolling waves throughout the pool and more than that, through our entire bodies.

Gripping her, I slid my fingers down to massage her ass. She sighed, yes. I love that. I opened her even wider…

As I slid in and out of her I told her that it would be hot if there was another cock in front of her. You would like that, you naughty girl, wouldn’t you? She sighed, yes. Or, if we pushed you up against the edge of the pool to an open pair of legs. You want to suck on another girl’s wet cunt, wouldn’t you? She sighed longingly, yes…

And as I opened her up underneath, she said that she went through a phase where she only wanted it in the ass. To that we both sighed and sang with the water lapping up and onto us both.

+

I laid her on the bed. That’s when people began trickling into the wet pool area.

Taking her nipple piercings into my mouth I slid inside of her and pinned her legs up to my ears. She said that was her favorite. I reached down, cupping my cock and her wet cunt, then slid down to her ass. She said, yes, and that too…

One couple came onto the bed and she and I twirled around our common center, shifting positions and sensations. The man next to us went down on his girl. We watched us in the mirror. We watched them in the mirror.

With her legs up and over my shoulders I laid into her. Without the resistance of the water I pounded down and onto her, with our bodies now dry save for she. She was now dripping…

Then I asked her how she wanted me to cum. She said, yes, I like that. Anywhere. On my tits. On my ass. Anywhere. But mostly, on my face.

Then, after two hours of standing near my summit of climax, I pulled out of her and crawled up her torso. In a few short strokes I exploded with weeks of suppression. When I concluded my tremble, she looked up at me, grinned and said that she believed that was an award-winning orgasm. Yes, she said, that was amazing…

+

Once back out and into the day, away from our sensory overloaded play time and we both lit a cigarette. And in less than fifteen minutes I had dropped her off at home, and our adventure was over.

As I drove away from her, I was still charged with another orgasm. I was ready for more. But I knew that the importance was not in the duration of our adventure. The purpose and importance was in the fact that it happened at all.

For this and more, I love yes. I love adventures.

Enchanted

She said, “me encantas”. Translated, this means, “you enchant me”.

I’m not sure what turns me on more: love or lust.

I love lust. But I also lust love.

And when a girl that says I enchant her, the heat that rises from my core is a whirling dervish of the most intoxicating emotions: love and lust.  Couple that with who this girl is, and the fact that she sings like a haunted angel on stage; and for many hours now I have paralyzed myself by immersion. Of swimming in the thoughts of her: her black dresses, her dark eyes, her piercing words, her sense of song, seduction and the way that she flirts with me.

+

There is an art to flirting.

While I am not the most adept in this art, I am a connoisseur of this aptitude. I know the vehicles for flirting: touch and sight being the two most dominant. However it is words that tickle and torture my soul.

“Me encantas” is like water in that it swirls over into the realm of seduction.

Because when I picture the girl saying the words, “me encantas”, I picture her in Peru, overlooking the sea. She is, afterall, one of the ten things I know about Peru. About the great poet, Pablo Neruda.

+

In the same vein of the question of: is life a dream? I do not know if I am an idea or a person.

So when this dark soulstress tells me, “te quiero”, I am not sure if it’s me that she wants – or the idea of the power behind her words. Behind my words. Behind who I am and who she is – behind her piano, or not.

I am not sure if she is flirting with me, or seducing me.  In one, you do not reach a linguistic end.  You do not become, “flirted”.  But you do become “seduced”.

On my empty pillow at the end of the night, for a near eternity now and I have been unendingly enchanted by this dark girl. Since we first met under the stars on a dark night.  She has twisted my hunger for love as much as she touched my thirst to be lustful for her.

Maybe the mystery is the inquiry.  Maybe it’s end of all of this.  Maybe it’s the unknown. Like her black dresses that sail behind her. Or the way that her hair hides her blackened eyes. Or the way her breathy words haunt me as though I want her more than I can understand.

If even confused: Consider me seduced. Enchanted. Wanted.

Blessed.