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?

+

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.

+

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.

+

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.

+

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…

+

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?

+

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?

+

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.

+

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.

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.

+

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.

+

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 unnamable, 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.

+

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.

+

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 Jonathan. 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.

+

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 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?

+

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.

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 is spiritual, others – prophetic. Perhaps, this is the most perfect kind of violence. The kind of violence you find Joy in.

+

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…

+

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.

+

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)

+

This is me: Out loud. On my knees.

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

+

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…

+

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 –

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.

+

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…

+

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.

+

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.