Words as Eroticism

I touch myself and then I touch her, in the dark.

I have no idea what I am feeling when I reach out to her. Because if I am feeling anything, it is not her. At best, I am one of the blind men holding onto different parts of the philosophical elephant.

Without hands or lips or anything wet, this is the sexiest thing I can think of doing: Touching her only with words and letters. Not with flesh and body. And my throbbing sex. My lips.

She does not know this, when I write her: That I touch myself. And I’ve never said it out loud: that I am touching her. I can only guess and assess from what I’ve felt with my eyes closed, that I am.

In our correspondence there hasn’t been one thing that was sexy – everything about it is sexy. This is the cleanest dirtiness I have known. In all of our words, shared in-person and in letters there has not been one audible: fuck. There has been no mention of naked bodies, even though they are between us. And only now am I finding the bravery to tell her that I want to devour her. But: shhh, don’t say this too loud. Secrets can disappear.

And this is as secretively erotic as I can conjure. Do conjure. Because as long as my arms are, they are not long enough to wrap themselves around her.

I am weak and hungry with anticipation. Aching with eroticism when she courses through me.

She is danger. She is safety. For as much as I want to give: I cannot. Her heart belongs to another. In this I am letting myself go. Because I am safe. Because there is an elevated wall between us that I cannot crawl under. Will not crawl under. Here, nobody can wrench what cannot be given.

However much I may crave when I am with her or apart, my reach and touch will ever only be as long as:

The adjectives and verbs that is my only tongue and soft pads of lips and palms and fingers. The nouns that are the throbbing and fiery sex rocketing from my pores. And the punctuation that is all the orgasms we’ve never shared. Shared, together.

More Than Lust

Lust is emotion.

Lust is craving. It is a movement forward. A striving-towards.

You can crave so many emotions that will touch the spaces where the world leaves you hollow – but lust fills these multiple spaces by force.

Lust is longing. Lust is wanting.

Lust is about intensity and the fire of existence.

Lust is power, in-action. It is a river pounding toward the sea. You, coming to get me.

When I close my eyes, I see red with lust. But in this blackened bedroom, with only a blue light warming the ocean room, the sparks of technicolor imbue the hunger of our three naked bodies climbing on top of each other in primal starvation.

The only way I can see lust as a sin is for one to never strive toward conquering the objects of their aim, of their lust. Even if those objects are invisible.

+

The two girls were giggling and prodding one another about who should be the first to reveal skin. Piled onto the bed and with limbs touching for the first time and our aim was clear. The path, the river, however, was not.

This is where the reds and blues pulsed through my body to meet a purple hue. Sometimes yellow.

I told the girls, I am not shy, I have liquor in my belly. I reached down for my buckle and unlatched it. The metal was the perfunctory call and both of the girls’ eyes fell to my midsection. For a moment even our collective breath ceased.

I paused once my belt was undone, and my zipper down.

The girls’ eyes were like cameras; watching me. Intently.

When I pulled my pants below my knees and kicked them off the bed, the girls’ eyes batted – away and then back. I was already hard. Throbbing, before their thirsty gaze.

Once naked and the giggling stopped.

+

I like the creation of situations. I like the act of:

Anticipation.

Movement.

Process.

Escalation.

Boiling-over…

As we talked over drinks earlier in the night, I wasn’t certain that our night would end the way that it did.

But they called me to this place and I arrived, to indulge in the forces of nature. To engage. To facilitate the water’s ebb. No, I wasn’t going to let something like this pass me by. The message I received was: Good news. Call me now. I have a girl friend that wants us both.

+

The two girls wanted each other. But they wanted eachother in the way that they would somehow feel safer with a mediator: A boy. And as I would learn, their want, their gravitational lust wasn’t so much in their words as it was in their quiet actions. Their loud breath.  Their heavy limbs toward one another like magnets.

Once I was naked and only inches from both of their grasp, they took turns playfully disrobing. The instigator of all this was second; she took off her top and unbuckled her pants. Let them fall to the floor as we watched. She was uninhibited standing there in her black boy shorts and bra. She licked her lips deviously and with praise of the unfolding of the bodies…

The younger girl was apprehensive. Laughter and smiles hid her nerves.

But when the younger one peeled her top off, the instigator and I applauded her pert chest. Her sleek, soft, youthful body.

Slowly she pulled down her pants. Blue panties hid what I wanted to see so heavily.

+

I pulled the instigator onto the bed as the young one went into the bathroom. The rush of pulsating intoxication filled me from limb to limb. We met lips as I laid her down. Naked, my ass was in the air and I was on my haunches, ready to pounce.

Slowly, I pressed myself into her warm body. Her hard nipples. I flicked one with my hot, soft tongue.

I heard the young one come from the bathroom. In the blue darkness, she slid-up next to us, kissing the instigator on the lips.

I have never done this, the young one said beneath a nervous giggle.

The instigator pulled her closer. Said, just let it happen…

I slid down between the instigator’s revolving hips. I kissed her clean mound and then lip-bit her thighs before I circled her clit with my fevered tongue. The young one went down to her nipples, sucking and nibbling away as though this wasn’t her first time to feel this kind of hunger. Her pulsing breath resonated with this devouring.

After several long and wet seconds sucking on her and I reached up for the young ass that was writing next to the instigator’s open legs. When I reached up and into her wetness, I expected to find the blue fabric. Instead, my fingers melted into her fire. She was already slick and without much effort my fingers slipped inside of her.

Leaving the instigator’s wet cunt, I opened-up the young girl’s legs and buried my head between. She moaned and immediately rocked her hips.

Together, we were writhing in an unchoreographed dance of lust and hunger and desert thirst.

+

The young girl’s ass was in the black-and-blue air. With my head still buried between her legs, she was squirming and twisting and squealing. On the table before her were the wine glasses. The bottles.

I had one hand on the instigator’s clit and the other as my balancing rod. My cock was throbbing blue, out and in front of us all.

The instigator took me in her hand and stroked me as she breathed something inaudible. And in less than two minutes, the young, blue girl would be doubled-over, nearly all the way over the footboard, writhing in agony’s ecstasy.

+

I am hungry for music. As hungry as I am for naked bodies dancing together.

In French, Bon Iver means, “good winter”.

One of the saddest albums I have ever heard, but around every corner laced with redemption, Bon Iver was the perfect soundtrack for our languid and then alternately, feverous dance of sexuality.

The album is haunting. Sexy. It’s black and blue and, it’s organic – like the winter’s wood that needs to be chopped. Acoustic guitars and falsetto trills lead the way. The work is titled, “For Emma, Forever Ago”.

And as the melodies sank and swam in the heartache of supreme disappointment and sadness and melancholy’s bounding joy, I could only think:

For us.

For now.

For ever.

+

The instigator excused herself for the bathroom when I turned the young girl around to me. She said I am nervous and so I leaned to kiss her gently – but she took my entire mouth into hers with a hunger that electrified me. Our hot, wet mouths swam together. I could smell damp sex on her fiery breath.

My hips bucked toward her and I pulled her beneath me. Gently, I slipped inside of her with my cock as a sword.

Slowly, I slid completely inside. Then back out. She wriggled and writhed with orgasm on the mount. Even after my initial moves in and out of her, she continued to tremble in that way one does after an intense coming. As though this was the first time she had ever been touched.

Feeling her fire, I kissed her again and then went for her neck.

When the instigator came from the bathroom, she stood before us. Above us. She said, wow. She just wanted to watch. She said, hot.

Balanced atop the young girl with her ecstasy eyes and swollen lips, I pumped my cock in and out of her. All the while knowing that my ass was up and in the air and,

We were being watched. Devoured with eyes.

Eaten by lust’s fiery surge downhill into gravity’s melt.

+

I have the young girl’s legs open and my cock is working in and out of her. I am pulsing with rejuvenated energy and at the height of my sensuality and feeling.

The instigator is sitting on the young girl’s face, at her urging. I am kissing the instigator and pinning the young girl’s legs up against the instigator’s shoulders. I reach down and open the instigator’s cunt and legs. I want all of us to break into open. To burst at the seams.

I can hear the young girl moaning, half in pain, half in ecstasy. The instigator asks if she is okay. You sound like you are in pain, baby…

No, the young girl responds. I love you. I completely love you. In intoxication the instigator looks back at me with her slick eyes and opens her mouth. I reach inside with my tongue.

+

I want you so bad, the young girl begs more than speaks.

I have the instigator on her stomach and I am sliding inside and out of her backside. The young girl lays on the bed, close to the instigators face. She says, I love you.

And then,

The young girl starts crying. Not sobbing. Crying.

For a half second, I am concerned. Then, I am as turned-on as I have ever been in my entire life. At first, the instigator consoles the young girl. But then the young girl responds by saying that this is absolutely beautiful – seeing her friend getting fucked like this.

Their faces are hot with heat and proximity.

I am fucking the instigator slowly, but deep and hard – squeezing everything out of me at this point where we are meeting.

The two girls kiss. Long embrace.

And I watch the writhing and heaving of this sea of waves; of curves and lines. Everything is now blue. Our sweaty skin glistening in the blue light. Now white light.

I have never been present to see two human beings want each other so much and so ferociously – with all the fear of empty space and darkened seas between them.

+

The young girl wipes the tears from her darkened eyes just before she leans with her gyrating hips. She saddles her leg up and over the instigators ass, while I am still inside her. I pull out and slide sideways into the young, blue girl.

Once inside her, we eloquently balance our weight. I hear her say, his cock is inside of me. She moans loudly with red pleasure. I ask her in my dirtiest voice, if she likes me inside of her. She replies by fucking me back, hard. She presses all of her weight into me and the absolute intoxication of the poles in the emotions of our hours together builds and rides upward in me until, alas, I cannot control it any longer…

In wet emotion I release everything I came to this encounter with as the boy between two beautiful girls. And it is with these same unspoken emotions that we close the night under the skies of a new spring and cigarette smoke and hugs and the uncertainty of joy and the contentment of one’s hands striving toward something larger, and satiated.

Butterfly

It is morning. Not mourning.

Waking,

naked and in her high bed and I know,

this is my new beginning. This is where everything, absolutely everything, begins anew.

In her bed the soft light of this new day is the music that fills up the space between us. Somehow now, everything has become a symbol. A cymbal. Loud and full of sound.

Coming from my slow sleep, I have no clothes on and am as naked as I have ever been.

The girl is sleeping and I am watching her chest; that space between her clavicles is rising and falling and I lose myself in the idea that I am watching her heart beat. But instead of a drumbeat I see a waveform undulating in that soft place, just as our great seas do.

+

…I am learning as we go…

Days later and I come to find that this space between the clavicles, where I watch her heart breathe, does have a name. It is called the suprasternal notch and it has long been thought to be a place of understated eroticism. Unlike a girl’s legs, or chest, it takes a longer eye to reach this place where I watch her lifeforce beat.

For something so revealing, we should have a name for it. Not suprasternal notch.

A notch refers to an indentation. A space created because of an act of removal. “Notch” does not indicate that this place is the space, the window through which I am able to see so far inside. Of her.

Then,

I remember the pendant that she wears, the one that hovers over this secret place at the base of her neck, the one that is a symbol for so much. Her pendant is gold and flutters over her suprasternal notch. The pendant is a butterfly.

A gold cymbal, loud with meaning: The butterfly.

In the quiet of this morning, as the girl sleeps silently, and I think that I am watching something holy.

This is how I am learning: slowly. And only now, thousands of heavy breaths later, does it make perfect sense and alas, this perfect place has a name: Her butterfly.

+

The girl is below, looking up at me with her cosmic eyes.

I am on top of her, kissing her neck, taking bites with my lips. When I kiss her clavicles I pull away and watch the wet glimmer dry under my breath.

My fingers prod and push at her fleshy parts. Then, in this sober sun, I slide myself slowly inside her slick heat.

We both inhale strongly. As if we are just now learning how to breathe for the first time.

A wave undulates through me, reaches my head and then I push it back to her in the place where we are connected. And while only part of me is inside of her, and while – in this beginning – it may feel as though it is only my sex that has penetrated her: everything I have is inside of her now.

Moving strongly but slowly in and out of her and, I am not thinking. I am feeling: This is the only representation I have that can illustrate the one gift that I desperately want to give her: everything.

The way she presses back into me, continuing this swelling wave of force and life and breath – and I know that I am being given absolutely everything that she has.

+

Rolling playfully around and touching and kissing in the good morning she asked me if I have ever traded breath with another, through my mouth. A symbiotic kind of CPR. Her speckled eyes watched my lips as she asked. Careful she is in her words, as if, implicit in this offering is the idea that, by releasing her breath into my body – she knows that it will somehow heal me.

That it will fill the voids that I have grown like empty galaxies.

Now, I have done many things physical and emotional and even tested myself intellectually – but I have never put my mouth on another’s and offered my breath; and conversely taken hers. Only inadvertently, through a kiss, have I ever inhaled somebody else’s life wind.

What I don’t tell her is that I am desperate for her and her lifeforce. I want to touch it, know it and yes: have it heal me.

I am not afraid of being this naked. Before her and I am less than the skin that masks everything inside of me.

I am not afraid of the power outstretched between our two naked, birthing bodies.

I am not afraid of what is growing between us.

I am not afraid…

I want her with every sad and powerfully sophisticated molecule in my body. And I know that it’s right before me, because this is how she kisses me: strongly as though she means it.

+

I push myself up so that only my sex is touching hers. Once deep inside and I place my mouth on hers. With my arched back, we create a circle. Between us is a center.

Gently I breathe into her, offering her a sample of my breath, as a punctuation to this circle of love and lust and life.

…as the beginning of all that she will give to me, and I, to her.

+

…I was lost, but now I’m found…

I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to love her. From the very beginning.

The orgasm that is welling-up in me comes from that place where: If love is god, she is my goddess. But because love is not possession, she is the goddess.

For the first couple of times with our naked bodies now and I have been terrified to let my body go, to let it quake and tremble and stand in that state where a sneeze leaves you – where the demons can attack: at the height of supreme vulnerability.

But as we have stepped forward in our uneven gait, I feel her catching up to me and these developed boils of emotion. The night before, she told as much and on this morning I can feel it. I can feel her moving closer. To me. To us.

And as our bodies heave together, I can feel her beginning to move with me. And, I begin, alas, to truly dance with her. Without stepping on her toes. Without stumbling.

…finally, the words are coming-out right…

+

My breath quivers like a butterfly’s flapping wings when I am inside of her as if I want to shout everything out loud in some spoken word; in some great and lasting oration – one that will define everything for all lifetimes to come. But instead of words, just heavy breath shoots from me. Our bodies sounding together as that lexicon in which I am slowly learning our new language.

I suck on her neck, reaching for her arteries. I take whole mouthfuls of her skin between my lips in one of the most elegant and protracted fits of sensual ferocity I have ever felt. The sensation, welling and spilling over the top and out towards her, did not start in my chest, or gut – but even lower, in my thighs and calves. My toes. From my very bottom, upward. From that place where my gut meets my soul.

The heat floods me, then falls. And I know: I am going to come. To her. Because of her. For her.

Running my moist lips up and down her neck, I pull away and watch her Butterfly quivering and flying and floating through the morning light between us. Her butterfly is beating its wings at the pace of her heart and this breath and the new life and our lust and unflinching love all combined.

And then, as if it came from whole lifetimes behind me – my orgasm comes. With a slow strength it pulses from the very bottom beneath my feet, upward. From that place where my gut meets my soul. And with the power of every breath taken – from every Everest I have climbed and fallen from, part of my lifeforce flutters from me.

As an offering.

As a breath.

As a golden Butterfly loud with sound like all the other cymbals that this beautiful girl and I are alternately building and sharing and watching grow between us.

Delicate: I am in Love.

Again: As a human being, I am interested in love more than lust. But as an erotica writer I am interested in the intersection of love’s road and lust’s avenue. In this fluid life, wherein love and lust lay on the same continuum, I believe that the hottest love and the most intoxicating lust happen when the two are blended in the hottest of fires, in the whitest of light. I am unabashedly shouting it from the rooftops of our cities: I am in love.

This piece is yet another articulation of what is transpiring in this blessed moment in my life:

Our first kiss was on a wintry white street.

She is a snow girl. And on the winter slopes of boards and skis and lifts, I picture her flying downhill as a snow angel. Flying, with wings, in the same way that she appeared in my life.

After four hours of conversation and food and wine and our official first date in this gentle courtship, it was a quick kiss. It was almost as though I stole it from her, just as she has been stealing the breath from me since I professed my crush and supreme attraction. But on this breathy white night, I did not learn the landscape of her lips; and while I wanted to, I was satisfied with the simple fact that yes, indeed: we have crossed this threshold.

We work together, and for the next several days at work, I sat at my desk – unable to completely engage in any company work. Her office is close-by and my overwhelming impulse was nerve-wrackingly close to walking straight-in and taking her in my arms, into my body’s life; opening my mouth and telling her everything I so desperately needed to with my lips and my kiss.

Anything else seemed false. Stodgy. Pedestrian. Uncertain.

On that snowy street, walking away from our first kiss, full of butterflies and apprehension about my approach, what I knew was: something is happening. Something that terrifies me and makes my palms sweat. At all times: When I talk to her I stutter and stumble through my words and tremble when she is not looking.

This girl makes me nervous. Anxiety-ridden.

Quickly, I am learning that love does not make you look very cool at all.

+

Arthur Schopenhauer, one of our fathers of existentialism, had a phrase that described the sum total of everything in universe: the stars, planets, cosmic dust, oceans, people, cities, pencils, books, shoelaces and gumballs – everything. He called this “the totality of beings”.

Schopenhauer believed, in line with many existentialists, that our human mind does not have the rational ability to understand “the totality of beings”; and everything, taken in pieces or all at once.

However, he did believe that we are given glimpses of this totality of beings. Through emotion. More specificially, through non-directed or irrational emotions. Like anxiety.

I have come to further the basket of emotions that give us this taste of the totality of beings. I believe that the melancholy gives us these glimpses. So does love.

+

She – this girl, the girl – is the most beautiful girl in the world.

It is as though the universe opened its annals and granted me something that even I did not, could not, expect.

Everything about her is manicured and moreover, musical. From her words, to her laugh, to the way she holds her wine glass and looks me in the eyes when we toast.

But I, I look away, because she makes me that nervous.

She has long legs. Her lines and curves would be the envy of every sculptor if they knew her name. The curves in her neck are poetic. The way that her back curls down like a bass clef to meet her legs is intimately interlaced with song. Even the crooks of her arms are perfect.

Her eyes may be the most striking I have ever known and make me look away like a little boy.

The words that come from her mouth find their provenance in her gut, her second brain, and they are so powerful that I am certain not even she has an inkling of how big they really are.

The way that she kisses me tells me everything that I need to know: She is the intersection between my holy erotic and biggest of loves. The biggest and most erotic.

+

There is part of me that wished for a casual encounter with the girl. For a situation wherein I could display everything cool and alluring and mysterious about me; for her to see me as the kind of man that I’ve always wanted to be seen as.

But what has transpired is that I am unable to be cool around her. Completely, unable.

In front of this girl, I am just a little boy who, when he takes her hands, becomes short of breath and sweats at the heart of his palms.

If I am cool within any of this, it is only in how I kiss her: delicately. Because while my whole body wants to devour her with every primal cell in my mammalian frame, I kiss her delicately. I touch her sweetly.

Because in all of this, I think that I am saying something else.

In all of this, the strangest and most profound of interactions has transpired: I think that she is seeing me as the kind of man that I’ve always wanted to be. Not the man that I think I am. And for this I am more grateful than I could ever express.

Because, sitting in front of her, and I think that I actually could be that man. And maybe, I already am that man.

+

Anxiety can change our physiological state.

Nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath and stomach aches can accompany a sense of anxiety. External signals of anxiety can include sweating, trembling and pupillary dilation.

Love can also cause these same symptoms.

Biological models of love and lust tend to equate the grandest of the hearts emotions with hunger and thirst.

+

Our first protracted kiss came cabalistically, after work.

This was the first time I came to know the power in her kiss.

After a moment of obvious and heart-racing, heavy sexual tension and breathy air between us, we agreed that we should meet after work. And what told me most about all of this was: it was her idea.

So, we drove a couple of blocks away and met in a hotel’s parking lot. In the pink failing light of a day, she climbed into my car. It was cold outside, and when she came this close to me the air around us stalled into a jellied freeze.

As I looked down at my trembling hand, I asked her if she was nervous. She said, yes. Even her words quivered.

I said, I am too. I am nervous.

Then, slightly outside of myself and with an unabashed resilience, I leaned in to her and found her lips with mine.

In hindsight, it was one of the sexiest kisses I have ever had in my life. It was as though I had finally found the lips I have always been looking for. In the moment, however, and I was so terrified that I was almost nauseous.

We made our encounter short. And I felt fortune in this. This despite the fact that I was stuck between a place where I wanted to tear her apart with every notion of lust I have ever developed and the overwhelming sensation that I just wanted to lay, horizontally, gently, next to her and listen to her breathe and tell me the stories of her life as I run my fingers up and down her naked arm.

Since that moment, and possibly for the rest of my days: Her lips are the only lips I want.

+

Because science strives for testability, it also strives for categorization. Since Aristotle, scientists have sought to compartmentalize, in order to categorize. In order to create meaning from testable hypotheses.

Studies have shown that those who are infatuated, or in love, have neural activity that resembles a mental illness. In short, love creates some of the same neurological activity that hunger, thirst and drug addiction does.

On the same hand, anxiety affects the amygdala and the hippocampus: two emotionally charged centers of the brain.

Without any access to CAT Scans: I would posit that love affects the same centers of the brain.

And while we can locate these affectations in the human mind, we are also dealing with emotions; the component of human activity that is at once irrational and unpredictable. Almost untestable. And just maybe: the irrational dimension to existence.

+

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

+

She has written me some of the most powerful letters I have ever received. And while they are not, categorically, love letters – they are so close that they may even be larger than any love letter I have ever received.

After every letter I write her, even my small text messages, I am ridden with anxiety; and hoping, blindly, only that she gets it.

And every time she has amazed me. She has responded, more than favorably, she has responded appropriately and smartly. Beautifully. Perfectly.

In this terrifying process, of courting this girl, the girl, communication has been the one element that has saved me from perceived, certain death.

And then it happened. The words came:

Only a couple of days ago, I received the biggest news I have ever read with my eyes. In only five words, her text message said: I think I love you.

+

Soren Kierkegaard, one of the other fathers of existentialism, articulated a notion about our birth. He thought that we were born into this life, with a sense of despair.

Kierkegaard believed that we possess this notion because we also possess a false sense of self. The true self, Kierkegaard said, was found through a relationship to the Absolute or Ultimate Reality. Or, as the Christian Kierkegaard believed, through a relationship with God.

Love is God.

Or if not that, then it is as close as we secular beings may ever get to the notion of God, incarnate.

Standing outside in the cold and I am looking at my phone and the five words that she sent me: I think I love you.

I see God. I see me.

Finally.

+

For the first time, I am laying on her bed. It is morning and I, the professional sleeper, no longer want to sleep – because she, the girl, is laying next to me.

Finally, I have a sober moment to touch her. Here I am not nervous. Here, I am hyper-present and unafraid of myself in that way that waking up next to a girl whom you respect makes you unafraid.

We kiss and touch and touch until the pads of my fingers are raw with learning. Learning about her body.

And then, slowly, she moves down my torso. I am naked and open and exposed and my heart is beating so loudly that I fear she will stop her progression for fear of me having a heart attack.

And then, she takes me in her mouth.

In absolute unbelief, I close my eyes.

It is here where my blessing becomes a curse: I am so over-analytical that I can feel it in my toes. I am thinking: I am inside of her. She is taking me in her mouth. The most beautiful creature I have ever come to know has me inside her mouth.

I try and try and try to relax. But despite the fact that I have never been taken like this; and despite the fact that this may the most amazing girl to be at my midsection; and despite the fact that she may be taking me with the perfect aptitude – the one I did not even know existed – I am still thinking. And I cannot stop.

Slowly, the blood drains from me.

She looks up and says, are you okay?

Short of breath and I cannot explain anything. In our dance, she comes back up to me and I take her strongly in my arms.

Later I will do my best to explain my situation.

I tell her that this may be the grand expression of how in-love I am with her.

+

Days later and I go back to my phone. I pull-up her message to make certain it wasn’t a dream. And I read those five words over and over and over again. I think to myself that these are the words I’ve been waiting for all my life.

I make mention of the words to her. She says she is scared.

I tell her, your heart is safe with me.

My eyes are forever fixed on your heavens.

I have given you my heart and with it, every grand virtue and ideology and passion that I have ever conceived of. You are now my integrity. You are the embodiment of that and possibly, more.

And I want everybody in my world to know this much.

In the rooms I inhabit, everyone knows that I am in love. And rightfully, they know her name. From the city of New York to every street light, and from atop of every figurative building I inhabit I have called her name. And the universe, with its millions of stars, has twinkled back at me.

Falling is Like This…

“Fear is the natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
– Pema Chodron

When you gamble with your heart, you gamble with your mind. And, when you gamble with either of those factories of light, you gamble with the fabric of your entire life.

I am not threatened by the idea that our reason is slave to the passions. Not usually. Standing outside of this concept and talking about it makes all the rational sense in the world to me. Outside of this concept actually happening in my life and, I am secure.

But begin to fall for a girl and those passions will rise up in a near-revolt to their rational suppressors. And while you will march behind these deafening passions, because you have no choice in this dictatorship in which you were born into – you will feel the fear because you are unsteady; because the ground beneath you is thunderous and shaking.

Falling implies a descent. Flying implies an ascent. Sometimes both can feel effortless.

Either way: I am falling for a girl. I am flying for a girl.

It is here, in how I fly and fall and stutter, that you will find the articulation of everything I have ever learned. In everything I do in front of her, I am trying to say: This may not be graceful. I do not completely know how to fly. I am learning as I go…

These are those vignettes, the sum total of the knowledge of my heart.

+

I haven’t seen straight for weeks now on account of this glorious rapture. On account of her. And while this could be a catalyst for my mind to say that this new and profound bundle of impressions and emotions may be false, or mistaken – I do not believe this to be true. Because my heart speaks clearly.

For this, I do not need my eyes.

Because it is true that I have seen clearly. I have seen shockingly clearly, one thing and primarily one thing only: this girl. And this girl may be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

I am not scared of this. I am not scared of the temporary blindness and the sharp burning in my chest as though I am having a heart attack. Because if this is a heart attack, then this is everything that I have ever wanted.

On the same hand: I am terrified.

For weeks now I have been spinning. Everything has been musical. And while I have been occupied by life and duty and ambition, I am certain:

I am falling for a girl. The girl.

Now, these Ferris wheel days no longer have names, just a simple demarcation: those with her. Those without.

I am strong and unafraid as to whether I may be progressing into some cross-eyed state or moreover, morphing into something new altogether. Whatever this is, I tell myself, I hope that it is not temporary.

Because what I do know is that, this is different. I think: This is big.

I am strong. I am scared. I am healthy. I am completely nuts. I am completely not. I am nervous. I am present. I am not. I am in some alternate, watery world. I am me. I am this moment. I am now.

Sometimes: When I look at her, when I think of her – my eyes burn and fill with fluid. Not water. Not tears. But fluid from my heart.

I think that I am having a heart attack.

+

When I come to the bed, our first shared bed, she is already in it. She is laying on her side and as I slip in next to her, I find that she is naked.

Immediately, as I pick up the sheets and slide under them, my chest is heavy and I feel like I am holding my breath. Everything, absolutely everything feels fluid and as though I am now underwater.

I take a long dive toward her and press my naked torso into her.

This is the first time.

I touch the girl’s skin. Her shoulder. Her arm. Her spine.

Inhale. I rise to the surface and like a whale, gulp-in all the oxygenated life around me.

With my finger I trace her lines and curves.

This is the first time.

In this silent room, where I can only hear two hearts breathing in our shared forcefield, I have uninterrupted access to her. To everything.

Here there is no clothing. No tables. No center consoles or desks or duty.

I smile coyly, press myself again into her and exhale.

+

Our hearts talk to our brains.

Up until recently, science has one-sidedly concluded that the mind-heart relationship is ruled by the brain. However, research now says that the heart also has lasting and profound affects on the mind neurologically, biophysically, biochemically and energetically.

The heart produces the largest rhythmic electromagnetic field of any organ in the human body. The heart’s magnetic field is about 5,000 times greater than the brain’s. This field can be detected several feet away from our bodies. As well, the heart’s electrical field is about 60 times greater than the electrical activity generated by the brain.

These cardiac fields are modulated by emotional states and these fields affect how we cognate; how we act and react to a situation. And while we are still as uncertain about all of this as I am nervous – this might be the grand equation, the one we’ve always assumed: In our heart is love. Our heart is our Assayer and our mouthpiece for love.

Just as you should listen to your gut, you should also spend more time listening to your heart.

+

I am sitting in front of her and I want to cross my legs, but I fear that I will fall over. So, I err on the side of caution: I keep myself symmetrically balanced with two legs holding up my weight. Holding up all of this.

For a long second, I wonder if I am strong enough. If I am big enough to hold all that she has. If I am the kind of cosmic man that she deserves and wants.

Breathing this all in and I think that, in front of her I am bigger than I once was. I am stronger. I am the kind of being that I want to be, perfect in my vulnerabilities and clumsy in my virtues.

She is sparkling and I can barely breathe when I speak, so I try to keep my sentences short. My chest is warm and the wine that whets my words fires my whole body up to a near boil. And I feel something resonating that makes me feel light of head and heart and foot and breath.

In front of her I unlearn what I’ve learned. In front of her I am as mature and immature as that little boy that I once was, and now again, am.

I do not know any different, but in front of me she says she is brave. She is unabashed about her history and where she has stumbled. She says that she doesn’t just share these things with anybody. As I listen to her I am nothing but light, beaming.

In-between her songs, I think: vulnerability is like gambling.

+

“If you do not want me, starving and hysterical – then have me not at all…”

For weeks now I have been in a freefall. And in this feathery fall I am in a constant state of trying to locate the melody and moreover: the reason. The equation that says, indeed, my mathematics are adept and correct. The equation that says, indeed, your path does lead to her. All of the days prior and you have been on the right path all along.

But I do not find this in my rational mind. I feel it in my passions.

In a moment of trepidation, my mind asks about the size and volume of the chemistry between us. In this moment she says something that makes the blood fall from my face. And for a few minutes I am certain that I am, indeed, mistaken about all of this. Weeks and weeks of some of the strongest sensations I have ever had and the conclusions I have come to have been foolish at best.

I rise from my chair and excuse myself. I cannot breathe and I only see blurs and swatches of light.

Then, she asks if she can come with me.

I am uncertain if this is a metaphor or not.

+

Moments are fulcrum points, and fulcrum points are moments: the hinges on which everything rests. Turns. Develops.

In my uncertainty about what she imparted to me, I am walking outside, blurry and cold and sad. She is close. I begin to speak and she clarifies her previous words, only moments before. She says exactly what I needed to hear. Silently I curse myself for needing those words – but I know that this is where my emotions are within this. My emotions, are sharp.

Then, in my supreme nervousness, and for the strangest of reasons, I open myself and let something leak out of me that I had been slightly terrified of revealing.

We stop and stand under a lamppost on a winter’s night, bundled tight. Our breath like grand exaltations, blossoming out in front of us.

And as I am revealing more of my intimate, apprehensive self, she looks me sweetly in the eyes. Our hands are clasped together in a motionless dance.

When I finish speaking, she pulls me in and it is her lips that say everything I will ever need to know – in this falling night, or any painted night subsequent. And despite my fear – of saying too much or too little, or ruining any of this precious place that we have built together – in only a couple of hours I will tell her that:

I believe

I am in love.

With her.

+

These are big words and I know their implications, clearly:

This is the first time in a long time.

This is the first time in a near eternity.

This is the first time.

Maybe ever.

Always:

I want what is impossible.

Irreversibly and forevermore:

I will want

this impossibility and,

any other one we ever create.

+

Only a week ago and I had first learned about her lips, and the power she has in saying everything to me with just them. My hands are still nervous in hers. I am still learning her touch, her gait, her melody.

In my elementary knowledge about her, I know that I am proud of the moments we are creating. I am proud of what I hear from her. I am grateful for her bravery and I want to tell her that I will not let you fall. I will hold you up. If you stand with me, I can promise that you will never hit the ground, if I have any say in it.

I am so mad for her that I have not sat still for weeks on end and I buzz and hold my arms out into the invisible night, practicing to catch her. So I know what it feels like to catch me.

And while I will write her Ode to Love, for now I am simple: I am just going to feel my way through this and learn how it feels to love with my heart first.

+

The sun rises the next morning and I wake from one of our very brief spells of sleep. Each time I look over and see her. There. Beside me. Each time I am impressed. Flattered. Completely heart broken and happy.

In this first night together, naked and wide open and there was not much sleeping to be had.

Words were spoken. But mostly it was her eyes, looking at me the way I’ve always wanted to be seen. It was her hands and fingers, touching me in the ways that I’ve always wanted to be touched.

She laid on top of me. Playfully. Front to back. Back to front. Front to front.

Then we rolled over and I climbed between her legs. In intoxicated disbelief I slid inside her for the second time confirming that, yes: this is happening.

This is really happening.

+

As we ready to leave the warmth of our room and this provenance, she, like me, dresses. And while she searches for the pieces of her wardrobe, I know where mine are and watch her for my entire, secretive time.

I do not want to leave this bed. And her. And our nakedness.

Neither does she.

While she dresses I see something that, unbeknownst to me in that moment, will interrupt the world outside of me for many hours. Maybe even days. Possibly whole lifetimes.

She is bent at the waist, and with the half-light that is coming through the blinds I see her, the girl, in her panties. This is the first time. Her body steals the life from my mine and replaces it with something instead, something that I have never before known.

This girl in her underwear in that half-light may be the sexiest, most adorable sight I have ever seen.

+

This is true:

I have created situations.

I have simulated lust. I have simulated love.

I have pushed myself into all of those folds, those curves. Those angles.

And then everything always came unfolded because I was nowhere near what it was that I truly wanted, or thought I was going to receive.

And then I stumbled into this. Into her.

Falling, is like flight.

Falling, is like this…

+

Vulnerability feels like gambling.

And sure, walking through the world as a raw nerve is frightening.

But if you conceptualize all of the cliffs around you; and if you think about where things will go wrong; and if you dwell on disaster – all of those cliffs will close in on you like a noose.

But if you think about her arms opening; and if you can feel her perfectly wet kiss and her warm body touching yours for the first time – then you will know that the reward is too great to not step forward into her embrace on a cold wintry night and struggle to find the perfect way to hold her tight.

…and just maybe – if you are lucky: You may be granted the opportunity to, in your grasp of her, never let go…

Crush

You exist somewhere between fantasy and reality.

True: You are real and exist in the world. But, like all the planetary bodies in this universe’s solar systems that I’ve yet to see without magnification, you also exist in the bliss of imagined moments as a fictional character. Now only through the first chapter of your skin and this book, you are still an unrealized shadow in the process of morphing into something real.

Every body has a pull. A magnetism in this curved space. And when one object is larger than another – the smaller object, if it comes too close, falls under the spell of the larger body’s physical gravity.

I know, I said the word: Sandwiched in-between 1,193 other ones, I said “crush”. I had to. No longer could I bear this trembling and tickling in my chest every time I circled around you, away from my world of fantasy and in our common, shared reality.

At first, you were a dream. Something that came to me in a magical sleep as an ethereal mystery. In that dream you filled me full of wispy intoxication. And now, where I was once just an unsuspecting man, I have been transformed into a limerant who, in his wordly gait, has his head unabashedly turned toward your heavens.

The limerant, in this planetary analogy, is always the smaller of the two bodies – incessantly orbiting around the object of its affection: the crush.

When two bodies revolve around one another in space, there are two options: either the smaller of the bodies crashes into the larger body’s atmosphere or surface in a fiery mess or – the smaller body orbits the other in some elegant variation of a captured rotation, like our planet’s moon.

Like our moon, I can only hope that you hold me with a modicum of that kind of admiration.

If it’s not romantic. If it’s not cosmic. And if you can see all of this clearer than I can: I can only hope for some kind of appreciation for the bravery I have exhibited in coming so close to your luminous atmosphere.

Right now, in this crush, everything is perfect. Unrealized. Untainted. Un-torn. Perfect.

Up until this point, only a recognition has been made. From across the starry sky, I twinkled to let you know that I see you; and that I have seen you for quite some time now in my elliptical revolutions around our nourishing sun.

And then you, in response to my notice, blinked and smiled. You said, I see you too.

Then, I felt your pull. The attraction between us. And the gravity of this entire situation.

I know very well what you feel like behind my closed eyes. I know how your song sounds and feels from this cosmic distance. But when you smiled before me, in recognition of my confession, I don’t think I have ever seen anything so beautiful in all of my sunlit days.

And while every molecule inside my body wants you to capture me – for however long our galaxy exists, I also want to float around you: Perfect in my adoration and emotion. I don’t want even a false move to taint this body of work. This magnetism. This force that I cannot see and cannot explain in the darkness of the mysterious space between us.

Goodbye

“When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the grief that is in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”

– Franz Kafka

This is your letter. These are your words.

Because,

If I leave you in the morning and walk into the ocean, never to return, I want you to always hear my voice. Above the current and the pull of the moon on our watery tide – I want you to always know my voice, my words.

Because,

Sometimes we don’t say what we mean. Sometimes we don’t mean what we say.

And in some of our previous frozen mournings, when the alarm clock shrilled and I pulled my weary shell from our bed, I have always wanted you to know: My eyes were always open for you – I saw you there. Asleep and warm and far away from the duty of this new day.

But today, when you wake: I will not be there to meet you with kisses, for I will be gone.

And so,

Let these words be those kisses. Let these words sustain you for all time.

Let all this unspoken snapshot appreciation sound like a confession.

+

I miss those mornings, now so many lives ago when I was mad for you. And you were asleep with the comforter tucked between your legs. You were straddling a swollen sea of white. Puerile.

As I looped my tie and buttoned my shirt, I traced your outline and that one line with my finger – that top tip where your panties cut into your hip, framing your leg. Your curve.

Your heavy eyes opened and I curled my hand under the bend of your ass and down your thigh. Instead of words, this was my salutation. A slow smile was yours.

You clutched my hand and slid it between your warm thighs.

Standing before you, you undid what I just had accomplished in dressing: you unbuckled me. You exhaled as you reached in and pulled me out.

At this, the first touch of the new day, and we were sensitive. Gentle.

You took me into your mouth as I crawled over you, burying my head between your pulsating legs. Even clothed, I could feel the heat from your naked body. I peeled your panties to the side and cupped my mouth on everything you had.

I was late for work. But I would smile all the way through my day.

…all this only because we couldn’t get enough of the other. All this because this is how we spoke without words: This is how you told me that you wanted me more than you could even say.

…all this because we didn’t know how to say goodbye.

+

You whimpered in the middle of the night and I woke with my heart thumping.

Your plane was leaving in only a couple of hours and our hands laced together: on your tummy. My hip. Between us. Neither of us wanted to sleep and waste these last hours – but the torrents of emotions that, strung together, outlined our last couple of days wore us thin with sorrow.

And when the gray light of morning began to creep dreadfully into our silent, breathing room, I turned into you. I pressed myself into you, quietly at first. But you weren’t sleeping deeply either and you woke, pressing back into me.

Like a spoon, I cupped your entire body – holding all of you for as long as I could.

Still naked from our compression only hours before, I could feel your slick heat. Only when the blood left my head did I stop thinking and press myself hard – all the way inside you.

Half asleep and exhausted, we gyrated together. In a tired symphony, we danced one last time: closer to love than to orgasm. Closer to you than I would ever be again.

…all this because we didn’t know how to say goodbye.

+

For years I was mute and lazy with my language. I was young and hazy with understanding about these powers.

But, like you, I grew. And like a small child, I too learned how to say what I mean.

I want you to know that: If I failed you with my words, know that I gave you my entire body as my vocabulary. For years you owned everything physical about me.

And where my words were distraction and deceiving, our bodies together were not. They could not.

+

I know that everything, absolutely everything, dies – or worse: dissipates slowly.

Even in the beginning, when everything was idyllic, I knew that one day what we had would all rise to the hot and fiery heavens and never return.

Only now do I know that, in the tenebrous sadness that surrounds the death of love, the din of forever’s departure will not allow me a space to see you like this: like I now do. But it returns, those visions of you – from time-to-time, when you were: in that dress, across that ballroom, in that bed…

…taking me into your mouth in the middle of the night when I am already asleep, and you are wide awake and starving for me.

…pulling your dress up in the white wedding bathroom, before I am too drunk to get us home hotly.

…all this because: How are we supposed to really know how to say goodbye?

Voyeur Lilies

If I could articulate you – if I could draw you – then I would be an artist, drawing my desire. My want. And maybe, I could even draw a picture of my need: For you.

If I could not draw you, then I would illustrate something close: like one experience. One night and one morning.

And so, picture me as this artist – trying to remember everything, absolutely everything – for the blank canvas I have set before me:

The parts of you that were naked to me, I traced with my fingers. Your tattoo and its colors in the early morning light beckoned my lips. Unabashedly, I was indulgence. Unknowingly, I was obligation. Only hours old, my ache and my taste for you was already overwhelming.

When I pulled away from my kiss of your skin, the shape of my lips melted away on your warm body. With this sensation, your eyes opened. You looked at me sweetly. You looked at me as that kind of stranger that I no longer want to be, to you.

+

The first night I knew you, the skies were wintry. I could see my breath in blossoms.

We met over a table of candles – you and I and your girl friend…

And even when you were looking at me, I was looking at you. As a voyeur and a boy – assessing just how beautiful you are. And I did it all without giggling.

You pulled the breath from my chest…

Your eyes. Your lips.

My anticipation was my heart, beating. Making my hands tremble in little quivers. You did this: you turned me into anticipation and something holy erotic. Even as we were just ordering drinks. Laughing nervously. Learning about our backgrounds.

Your scent swarmed around our table and I was no longer drunk from the drinks.

In it all I wanted to tell you that I am just a boy that wants a girl. In all my glances toward you – this is all I wanted to say. This is all I wanted you to know.

Only later and I would discover that words were unnecessary.

All I needed was my eyes. My eyes would tell you enough.

+

When we were warm and filled with drink, you guided me to your apartment. You wanted me to photograph you and your girlfriend. Here, I was anticipation – buzzing, looking calm.

The idea of learning what was under your clothes was a sensation that is like a memory of your scent: robust and voluptuous. Bigger than me.

Once back in your apartment and you made drinks and lit candles. You made me feel welcome and then you ran the bath water. Your girlfriend and I talked as you moved about the apartment, making sure that your clothes were not falling down.

As if I couldn’t be tempted with something that was forthcoming.

As if you know all too well about temptation and anticipation.

Then you stepped into the white bathroom. You left the door open. Your pants were unzipped – your belt was flailing outward. You were adorable in your shyness and bravery.

I already had my camera out and was snapping away. I knew, even then, that I wanted to memorize every little thing about you.

You were guarding yourself with playful hands as the water flowed behind you.

You said, no – wait…

And then you revealed yourself to me.

Naked and in the bathroom light you were. And the blood coursed through me at paralyzing speed, smashing my breath. Still, I kept depressing the shutter on the camera.

Here, my want was musical – like all the curves and lines on your body. The words you spoke, I will never remember. But forevermore, I will know how overwhelming my hunger is for you.

When you stepped into the tub, you dipped your head – your breasts perfect and your body naked before me. And when you resurfaced, your mascara was smeared like a peacock’s eyelash.

+

I said that I wouldn’t overstep your boundaries. Probably, I was lying.

When it was still dark my chivalry said that I would not push anything. This despite the fact that I had my finger on the shutter of erotic anticipation all night long. When it was still dark, I was laying next to you and you shot your hand into mine. You squeezed it like you meant it.

And when the sun began to rise, I was naked in your bed. I was stealing quick rifles of touch from your arm. You would not let me drive home in the cold, drunk. Forevermore, I will thank you for this

As you slept, I was again the voyeur: taking small, sleepy glances at you.

And I was marveling.

But we were not alone. And this seemed to only heighten this anticipation of all my want and nearly – need. Your girlfriend was asleep next to you when we were drifting to and from our own sleep.

I asked you what your favorite flower was and you said that it was Stargazer Lilies.

I asked you if you knew what lilies meant…

I said that lilies have meaning like everything else. I said they mean, “I dare you to love me”.

Your eyes grinned at me and made me feel as though I had said it out loud, “I dare you to…

And as I fell back to sleep I gave you a big white bouquet.

+

Standing before you, with my camera in-hand – and you, slick with water and completely exposed to me made me feel as though I was naked too.

From where I stood I felt perfect in my safety. And I think you felt it too.

When you dried yourself off, you walked into the bedroom and bent over in front of me.

Click. Your slick ass and arched back burned into my eyes.

Your girlfriend was trying-on panties and tops, barely covering her tiny body. I snapped and shot her with my rifle eye – but always I kept one eye free and waiting on you.

You laid on the bed and lathered baby oil all over your body. I saw your hand slip down and into your panties to oil your clean-shaven cunt.

Click. Click.

+

You asked me in the morning, if I wanted to go out to the couch. I obliged your request and got up from your bed, naked and swollen. Throbbing.

And your eyes were on me. On my cock.

You looked up at me, sweetly.

In your sheer top you sat next to me on the couch, a blanket wrapped around your bottom half. You pawed your toes into my thigh as we sat opposing one another. The winter day outside was gray and I couldn’t take my eyes off of you.

We queried one another. We talked about the past. About broken hearts and darkened heads. Intermittently we would stop with recognition in the other’s words.

I am not so different from you. And you are relatively the same as me.

You read from a book and we looked at photographs together: You came close. You put your head into my chest and leaned back. I inhaled like a pillow that was able to hold everything you had to give.

+

As you danced and moved in your array of outfits: panties and high-heels and see-through tops:

I did not want you. I wanted the anticipation. The uncertainty.

The tease.

I want you for later. For tomorrow’s days.

And as you moved around me in eloquent pirouettes of fiery, wet sex – I snapped away. I captured your lines and your sex. Your hands and fingers curled down and under your wetness; as the pads of your fingers played with your nipples and hooked into your mouth – over your teeth and on your tongue in the exact desperate way that I wanted to lure you in…

Click. Click.

On this night and for several seconds at a time – I was invisible and only a voyeur. I was welcomed in my perversions. And while I was fully clothed – overdressed – I was also naked. Accepted.

Your entire body flirted with me.

When I left the next morning you wrapped your arms around me exactly in the way that I wrapped mine around you. For a long second, we did not let go. And you looked me intently in the eyes and, as I rounded the corner, you said, “I want to see you again, too.”

+

The next day, long after I was gone, you said that, last night, I told you that I would marry you.

I’m not certain, but your words were joking. Humorous. Giggling.

I, astonished, rifled through my memory. I recalled the idea, in my head – as perfect. But I was certain, as I said: I didn’t think I said that out loud.

You laughed. Probably giggled, from across the city, in an exclamation that said you were only joking. Kidding. You weren’t serious.

I closed my eyes and remembered that I did not speak these words out loud to you. Still, you heard them.

…with my hands outstretched, a bouquet of lilies are within my reach…

Animal

If I am not an animal, then I do not know what I am. If my sexuality is not choreographed violence, then I do not know what it is.

What is this thing, this sexuality? It is something I cannot see. But it is a part of me, physically. It is my cock, my body, my hands, my lips. It is my skin and the explosion of sensation when I am touching you. Needing you. Thinking of you. It is ethereal; and comes and goes.

Out in the sun, I cover my sexuality with tailored fabric. During the day I mask the scent of myself and my sex – just as you do: behind walls and houses and clothes and money and duty.

But under it all, we are animals. Nude and salivating, dripping wet from our pores.

I am like you. And you are like me. The energy.

And so, blame me not if I picture you, dear stranger, without those clothes as you stroll past me during the day. At work. Bent over the kitchen sink. Passing through revolving doors…

Do not mistake me: I see your curves. I have memorized the asses and hips and legs of millions. I have hatched them all in charcoal. Outlines in my memory. Secretly I take them with me in my predatory exodus.

When it is quiet and I am alone, I redraw those shapes. I redraw you.

And even from where I am, miles and lifetimes away from you – I can pick-up on your scent.

I want you to know that I take you home with me every night. And the animal in me devours you without your asking. Without knowledge. The animal in all of us doesn’t want to ask. The animal in all of us doesn’t want knowledge.

+

If I do not want you with a controlled ferocity, in hysterics, then I do not want you at all.

If you will not die if you can not have me, wholly – then have me not at all.

This is where violence lives. This is where we are torrents of hot emotion, boiling-over, inescapable and starving naked.

But there is a dance within all this. The tango of terror. The salsa of seduction.

Even animals can dance. Do dance.

+

If the day is calm and full of routine and we are passing bodies in public places, touch me. Test me. Sample the current’s flow.

And then lick your finger to tell me as much.

I want you to, I need you to: Run through the forests of these glass buildings with me, like the animals we are: blind and savage and acting only on impulse. Uninhibited.

I want to feel your naked leg brushing up against my hand as we sit at the restaurant. I want to hear your breath above all else – drown out the sound the world around us. I want to be reminded, without words, that you decided to wear a skirt. I want you to drop the cage from my sex and remind me that, as you were dressing this morning you peeked around the corner of the bathroom with a deliciously devilish grin on your face. I want to feel your leg stroke my hand and I want to know – aching, desperately, hungrily know – what you are wearing underneath your skirt because you did not tell me.

I want you as my temptation. Unending, delirious temptation.

I want to never feel as though I am done. I want to crawl the streets, prowling for your heat, starving and unable to quench my thirst.

And in our day of routine, I want to roll the pads of my fingers up and over your thigh, under the restaurant table. And as the waiter is taking our order, I want you to open your legs and invite me to slide inside.

But do not mistake me: my fingers can tease. They are controlled in their appetite. They come slow. Up and toward your heat. I am soft in my pounce. But still, even before I am there, I can feel it – I want to feel it – I need to feel it: your heat.

I want the breath to go from my limp body in anticipation.

And when I slide up your thighs, I want you to open wider. I want you grin mischievously at the couple sitting across from us as though they can, if they want to, see under the table; see my hand reaching for your cunt. In ecstasy.

Because today you did not wear anything under your tiny little summer skirt.

+

From atop racks of clothes I want to see you wave me in. And I want to crawl towards you, slow enough not to cause a scene and show my fangs to the innocent, pleasing people around us.

But as soon as it is clear, I want to climb around the corner and meet you in the opened dressing stall in this busy store.

Teasingly, I want you to peel your shirt over your head revealing your pert nipples. Then, drop your skirt and begin trying on the outfits you used as excuses. You are not going to buy any of these garments and we know as much.

I want to quietly unzip myself and reveal my hard cock to you as a surprise when you turn around. And as you rub your chest, pinching your nipples in your hand’s trim down your side – you see me in the mirror. I am stroking myself.

I want you to fall to your knees, without choice and out of hunger – to take my swollen sex in your mouth. Tease me with your tongue and your eyes. Lick me and feed me with your hands cupped under my balls.

All the while we both know that anyone can see you kneeling before me – from under stall.

Once slow and seductive, I want your pace on my cock to quicken until you are taking all of me inside your hot, wet mouth on each stroke.

Then I want you stand, drop the clothes that hide your sex and straddle me. As though you have no choice.

I want desperately to see your perfect circle of ass in the mirror rocking back and forth, gyrating, taking all of me inside you with ferocity and grace. In dance.

I want to reach up and cup your mouth to silence your whispers of intoxication. And I want you look into me without deliberation and practice. Savage and satiated as though this was the panacea. The only cure for everything beyond us in this little space of the world.

I want your hot breath to rifle in quickening shots onto my palm as you begin to quiver. As your head falls back and one last long orgasm of breath shoots from you and into the world beyond us.

And all of this, without words. Because sometimes, animals only make guttural sounds.

+

You are all of the terrifying, beautiful vistas that I cannot fuck.

You are all of the seas that I cannot crawl into. Through.

I want you completely nude, with your legs splayed in acrobatics up and in the air as I am pounding down onto you – coming as close as I can to you. Without crawling through you.

Always: You are the emotional wall that I batter my ram against in some effort to understand this world better. Because here and now, in the face of you – I know nothing. I am nothing beyond this. Here and now. I am an animal. And our naked bodies, glistening with sweat and strain and tortured ecstasy slap together as the sound of all my fiery worlds colliding.

Your heaving chest as the Alps. Your cunt as the wettest, fertile valley. And your legs as the roads that lead me to your hungry, wet hole in this earth.

Anything less than this is unacceptable.

I am animal. And so are you.

Emily

Life is grayscale. And in the fluid continuum that is our existence love and lust lay on the same spectrum. As a writer, I am interested in this alchemical relationship. This is an excerpt from my forthcoming novel, “A Biography of Fear”.

And if eroticism is that anticipation which comes before an encounter; if eroticism is about the ascent upward into our sexuality – then this piece embodies that notion.

I don’t sleep. I don’t have dreams. I have conversations. The same ones. Over and over. Like I am rolling around in a sound Laundromat.

And so I lay in wait. Under my sheets. Hoping for a cliff. A wall. A stop sign. An end.

Then, slowly, the light outside turns from street-night-light black to gray, then to a washed-out amalgam of pink and blue: the early mourning hue. From up here, on the second floor of this safe mansion, the city churns-on below us. In just a few short minutes the day will open and the bustling and the congestion and the ambition will surround us. Stand on our chest and suffocate us.

I can already feel the lead in my belly balloon into a sailor’s knot in my throat.

And all I can do is stare at the ceiling in my frozen pose, to watch the light morph and flicker.

This is today. Yesterday. The next day. Every day.

This is the sound of my heart breaking in the morning.

Ever since Valentine’s Day I have been sleeping on Emily’s couch.

Three weeks down the road and I am beginning to find comfort in the itchy, ratty fabric that is stretched over it. Emily apologizes. Says she would never have picked this ugly couch. It was already in the room, when she moved in. She drapes a comforter over it. She says that it pulls-out, into a full bed. I say, yes, maybe tomorrow.

For the previous week, Emily and I have been drinking. And while, even just two months ago, I didn’t enjoy the alcohol buzz, I am now beginning to gain a taste for the acidic burn down my throat. And, I don’t mind the sensation of when it all comes back up again.

In this space where the polarities are finding common ground, I figure:

Vomiting isn’t so bad. It’s almost like crying: When I feel it coming, I go find anything that looks like a toilet, or a place to hide.

Separate or together, they both feel the same; they come from the same place – that place where the fearful, heavy, falling heat lives, behind my sternum. They both launch up and out my face. Out my lips, my nose, my eyes. Watery and with mucus. And when I’m done, typically – I feel better.

After a night of this: Acquiring a taste, vomiting and drinking, and sobbing and sniffling – I slip into a tired pose on Emily’s couch. I lean into the pillow that she fluffed for me that morning. I open the sheets that she so carefully tucked-in at some point in the day when I was working…

Leaning back into it all and I watch Emily move around the room in graceful sweeps. She hums songs and looks over to me every now and then. I look away. I try to give her privacy when I sense it is needed. She slips into the bathroom, to change.

I close my eyes and open my ears.

I hear water running. A toilet flushing.

I don’t know what I am supposed to feel. Warmth. Love. A friend. Fortune. Loss. Sadness. Her. SHE: The girl I lost. I don’t know. I don’t know. I can barely feel anything. As though my fingerprints were cut off at the tip and now I no longer have a signature to seal a kiss on the envelopes of my emotion.

Emily paws by me and turns down the lights.

“Tired?” She sighs in my direction.

My heavy head falls forward and my eyes begin to leak. Tiny molecules of salt sadness trickle down my face.

I feel Emily’s finger sweep against my cheeks – to gather a couple of the raindrops, up and away.

She turns out the last of the lights, walks across the big room and I hear her crawl in-between her crisp white sheets, way over there. It sounds like she is walking through a forest of newly fallen snow. Rhythmically.

Crunching. Compressing.

The room is silent, except when Emily rolls over. It sounds like she is swiping her arms outward; and making snow angels. She says my name.

I am entranced by the sounds of this winterscape. I have yet to lay completely down, as if a pillow or blanket or anything will taint the swollen sound of Emily in her bed. I want to hear it all. Warm and cold and inside and outside – I am everything, all at once.

“You know…” I can hear her voice tremor. Trill.

My silence stands for, yes. With a question mark.

“You can have whatever you want… Here…”

From across this big room, I can feel her words in the darkness. They are pointed. Right. At me.

I let some undirected words whistle over my tongue. But they were unformulated melodies, and luckily – inaudible.

“You don’t have to sleep all the way over there…” Emily coos again.

She wants me to kiss her.

I can feel it.

But I cannot say this much.

I do, however, purse my frown into a round welcome for Emily’s red desire. With this look on my face – and from afar, it looks as though I am ready for this, kiss. This even though I am unable to open my mouth and speak the words very clearly: Thank you. But I cannot kiss you. I miss HER lips. The girl that is gone – I miss HER lips.

The girl that I lost. The girl I can never have back. I miss HER lips.

If you want me, I am forever on loan. Know this, I want to say. If there ever was an element of possession in love – I am still HERS. If there ever was an element of possession in love – I am not HERS. And SHE is not mine.

Still,

Anything less than HER lips are unacceptable. Unforgivable.

This is why, I tell Emily – on those nights, when your hands are saying more than I will hold you and protect you in your walk up the streets of sadness – this is why I say to you, in earnest and in pain, that the blood does not – will not – coarse down to my midsection. No, I say, I cannot – will not – kiss you.

“But, you don’t have to stay all the way over there…” Emily urges me on from across the slick, darkened room. “You can have whatever you want…”

A couple heavy breaths into my deliberation and I pick myself up, heavy and slow as though I am carrying the entire couch with me. I step towards Emily and her white snow of sheets.

The sound of my steps are usurped only by the sound of her crunching in her winter bed. I can hear her sliding over, oversized snowshoes and all.

She is making space for me.

My chest is shivering when I sit on the edge of Emily’s bed. As though I am sitting at the edge of the forest. Looking in. Through the dense maze of trees where I cannot see the other side. I am nervous and am weakly unsure whether or not I have enough to heat to walk through. But,

I do. Want to lose myself. In Emily’s white forest.

I know that this is where I am supposed to be confident, calm and crawl into her warm body. This is where I am supposed to further my tale as a man who loves women. But I am distracted.

I am me.

I am not.

I am there.

I am not there.

I am lying.

I am around the corner.

I am not.

I am me. In the forest. In the forest.

I inch further onto the bed. Closer to Emily. I hear the snow crunch and she slides centimeters closer to me. It feels like days are passing over the tops of the trees in our forest. And my deliberation goes on forever: sun up and sun down.

Should I kiss her, or not?

And then, for the first time, I lean in…

In the morning, I wake to the sound of birds outside the windows. The sun. Emily warm, on my hip.

Spring is on its way.

Nostrum

The ocean is a flat landscape. To the horizon and it simply rolls over the edge, never to return. The sea and its millions of desolate acres reflect this barren sugar sand beach and today, where not even the gulls acknowledge our presence.

The girl stands in front of me as a beacon and a cliff. Like a solitary warning light she keeps me from walking out into the great blue beyond. Like the pelicans above, she waves her arms in the blue sky.

Land, sea and sky.

And the scent of fire.

+

The girl shares her lips with me. Innocently. Delicate with intensity.

She doesn’t want to scare me and I can feel this. Amplified as I am – as that current of electricity that she has ignited between us, and I can feel everything: Her breath. Her voice. Her skin. And her voracious appetite for the entire world – not portions and places, but all of it. Every word and utterance and story and color and composition collected. Every love earned and all those yet unrequited.

She says so much in the exact time it takes the rest of the world to say precisely nothing.

Like the gulls in the pink sky above us, her arms waving in flight are the perfect representation of her form and figure. She is the metaphor that is like a punchline simile at the end of the allegory of my cave.

+

My love. My craving and my mind have been swirling in near-torment as though I am in a tempest. For weeks now my disconnection with the world around me has been mounting. For weeks now I have been standing at the edge of the world, beyond the horizon – my arms outstretched.

And in a plane of existence where reason is slave to the passions, I fear that I have no more recourse in my learning, other than to feel. But I am overloaded. Infected with sensations. Unable to process them any longer.

Instead, I am standing on the edge of my world, waiting for the winds to rise and pick me up. Carry me wherever.

+

The sugar sand below our feet crunches like carpet and on this empty white beach, the sun is falling towards the horizon. Once orange, it is now pink.

A bottle of wine between us, our hands are laced together. The girl and I. Our time is limited and we talk feverously, but we walk slowly. Our abbreviated histories are dense and we simply hatch marks in our timelines to iterate the relative sense of our being.

There is so much to say. Too much to say.

The small waves roll up and onto our naked ankles playfully. In a couple of hours we will only walk a few hundred feet down this shoreline dream. But we reflect miles and years and lifetimes of learning between us.

Before I find the seashell that I will take back home with me, I look down and see the hair on my arm stand up as though the winds have returned.

Looking into her eyes and everything about her is calm. The wind is not in her hair.

It is somewhere in her words.

Maybe beyond her words.

+

Since my arrival at the edge of my world the scent of fire has been in the air. At night. During the day. In the city. On the beach.

She says that it may just be woodsmoke. It is Florida and it is cool here now. Winter is coming.

Still, I think something is on fire.

But we never see flames in the sky.

Just feel them between her and I.

+

More than kissing me, on her bed she offers me her lips. Like words I listen to them. Taste them. Try to memorize every incantation and tonal hue.

For the first time in ages, I am nervous.

Her walls are purple. Her bed, red.

We have been waiting weeks and months and maybe my entire lifetime for this moment. While I am feeling her for the first time, and just beginning to come to her understanding, she pulls me on top of her.

Quickly, I am postured above her. Gentle. I am trying not to crush her with the weight of my world.

+

On her bed, she offers me her body as the promise that we had both agreed upon in our moments of pronounced rapture and desire and greed and want.

I am stark raving hungry for her but spread out above her as though I have just sat at the table of the most formal of meals. In my head I feel the fiery color of white tablecloths and silver and crystal.

Quietly I place the napkin in my lap. Gently, I begin to satiate my appetite. With some champagne class of candlelight and black ties I quell my appetite with small bites. Flavor not quantity.

+

I peel her shirt upward as I lean into her, letting her feel all of my heavy breath. All of my heavy want.

I am delicate in my voraciousness. I am soft in my hardness.

I work my way down her neck, to her collarbone.

She tilts her head to the side and draws a line. She says, here…

Everafter, I will remember this line and its location because when I touch it or taste it, she whimpers. Like a map her entire body is.

+

On her gothic bed she is wearing black. When she picked me up from the airport, she was wearing black as though this was a new beginning, not a new end.

She is wearing patterned stockings. Black heels. A black skirt. A white blouse under her leather jacket.

And when I peel her skirt upward, I find that she is wearing black panties. And a black garter belt.

When my hands find this fabric, I lose my breath.

But she takes my mouth into hers and fills me full of life.

+

Ferociously, our hands are finding whatever we can, to hold onto – on the other’s body.

Immediately I open her legs and her skirt.

I want her panties off. Now I am beyond starving. More than a delight or something to want, she is something that I need.

With my lips I kneed at her belly, her hips and her thighs with my rounded lips. And while I want to tease, to play and to savor it all, for the first time I can smell her and my desire climaxes with my tongue meeting her swollen lips.

Already, she is wet and a song rockets from her mouth in one pronounced, longing-filled exhale.

I slide my tongue inside her and with her citrus juices, my mouth explodes in color and sharp sensation. My hands fly up and down her torso, looking for her nipples, her neckline, her form and figure and soul and mind.

Gently, but rapidly, I lap at her. Suck on her.

At every turn, she guides me with the ease of a noticeable breeze.

+

She has my cock in her hand and is sliding it up and down her slick cunt. My mouth is on hers. Together we are breathing.

And then, she puts me inside of her.

For the first time in a near-forever, I begin the process of not fucking a girl. In this, I am unable to name our act. I am only aware of the fact that this insertion of me into her may be the only analogy that we need for anything and everything between us and outside of her darkened bedroom full of light.

And while we are beyond orgasms in this moment – we are not. So, we take deliberate care in securing a tremble for her. Aftereall, her orgasm has been a long time coming. So has ours.

Together, in our synchronized pace, we tremble and quake in unison.

+

Her stories are not collections of passing time. Every one of her tales means something. Emphasizes something else. Is part of the puzzle. Transmutes something disfigured. Aligns something already nearly perfect.

She numbs me to everything outside of us. She sharpens me to everything I have ever held onto, inside of me.

She says so much, so quickly that I do not remember any of it with a rational mind.

Instead, I am only an articulation of this moment – standing before her with my arms outstretched. Slowly, then suddenly, I am aloft –

She has swollen my sails.

She is the wind and the fire and the metaphor of every book I have ever read.

+

In the end she may be the most perfectly bizarre and beautiful creature I have ever known.

She accidentally killed a cat once.

She is a painter of monstrous proportions. She is a professor. She has been everywhere I have not – around the world and back. She wears black. She is talkative and I do not blame her because of everything that there is to say. She is kind. She is petite. She is gentle. She is the most delicate creature I have ever known. She gets bloody noses after smoking cigarettes. She makes me buckle my seatbelt and knows exactly where she is taking us.

She cuts up old books to make collages that will, very soon, be the basis for her paintings. Without regret, she litters her dining room table with these half pages and pieces and torn-out pages. She tapes notable pages on her dining room wall.

She wears her grandmother’s teeth around her neck.

She sees auras.

She is wildly articulate.

She makes-up words.

She always drives almost on the shoulder of the road, but not quite.

She is intense.

She is unafraid. Or, if she is afraid I do not know about it because her vibrancy buzzes louder than the fear does.

She may be the most amazing girl I have ever known.

+

I can only speak to her in letters. In confessions.

I speak to her in written words on antique stationary – whether it is in ink or in verbal intonations. And within that, all I have are snapshots. Moments. Because in the end, this is all we have:

Words. A plane. Florida. Fire in the sky. A sugar sand beach. Laughter. Love. Wine. Blue cheese. Green earth. Orange sky. Periwinkle cars.

Fire in the sky.

+

She lives in the migratory path of the monarch butterfly.

Through the trees they weave and flutter and roam. In the wind they are nearly indistinguishable from the falling leaves trickling to the forest floor.

And while the butterflies are moving deliberately toward a destination with their swollen sails, they – like I – also resemble an object falling more than flying toward their future.

And somehow a girl is involved in all of this, for all of us.

Mine just may be standing at the edge of my rounded world of a backdoor in Florida.

The Wounded

I love The Wounded.

I sleep with The Wounded. I fuck The Wounded. I live and breathe and play with The Wounded.

I too, am The Wounded.

I care for The Wounded and The Wounded care for me. If I find you broken down, I will sit beside you and crawl with you to the nearest shelter. For a while, I may even drape my warm body over yours, to be that shelter.

I love and hate The Wounded.

I understand The Wounded.

And I don’t.

+

When I find her, she is slumped over the bathtub. Silent now, she has been, for half of a record and another glass of wine.

When I open the creaky door, her pants are below her ass. She has taken off her shirt and is wearing only a broken bra.

Her right arm is draped over the tub. Her left hand is limp, down at her side.

The yellowing light overhead is decay. The floor is dirty. She is wounded. Bleeding. Wounded.

A razor is in her left hand. Her right hand is empty. The blood drips off the side of her arm and into the tub. Not into her palm.

+

From under her armpits, I pick her up.

My elevation is symbolic.

Rolling her into the tub would be treating her like an animal. A dead, weathered carcass tumbled into a grave site, at best.

But she is not dead.

She does not want to die tonight. Tomorrow is a very different day.

I prop her up against the wall and turn on the shower. She is half awake, half dead. Half intoxicated. Bleeding down her arm, filling her up pants now with red drops of water.

With one strong arm, I hold her up. With the other, I peel her remaining clothes off.

Adjusting the water like a thermostat, I make it hot. Scalding. Almost boiling.

I leave her pants in the tub. Her socks, on her pigeon-toed feet.

My clothes are still on. Soaked from the inside out.

I unbutton my shirt and roll my sleeves up.

+

Pushing her further into the corner, and with the steam rising, I kiss her.

Her eyes open enough to let me know that she still has a pulse.

With her good arm, she touches me at the waist. Her finger somehow sloppily looping into my pants. Like a hook. Like a hope.

I kiss her again. This time, stronger.

The bathroom is filling-up with a heavy steam and by the time I move down her torso, for her swollen, pregnant tits, we can barely see, face-to-face.

She yelps when I clamp down on her nipple with my teeth.

+

When I stand back up, I pin her deeper in the corner.

Her bloody arm is limp and down at her side. I run the pads of my fingers over her series of cuts and draw a line up to her mouth. I do this once, then twice and then the third time I press hard into her cuts and bring my bloodied hand up to her mouth, encircling her aching lips.

I run my fingers inside her mouth, over the back of her teeth. Over her tongue.

Ethereal and vacant, her eyes close in ecstasy. In pain.

+

I open my shirt and press her bloodied appendage into my torso. Into my heart. And that place where fear resides and bubbles to a boil – just below my sternum. In my gut.

As her blood runs down me, she is opening my pants. Unbuckling me.

And I still have one hand on her sternum, pressing her even deeper into this corner she has created. Cried out for.

Wringing out her arm over my soiled body, I am telling her – without words – to let it out. Because if that fear lives anywhere, in its incessant circulation through you, it has to be in your blood. In your inheritance.

Bleeding all over me and I am as terrified as she is.

+

I reach between her legs as she goes limp. As she lets go of my cock.

She moans. I slide fingers inside of her and she expels breath as though it is the last from her lungs. As though her moan was a death knell afterall. But instead of collapsing in this sauna of temperature and emotion and everything necessary, her body writhes awake.

I take her still-bloodied arm up to my face and press it to my lips – feeling the myriad of cuts. The many incisions. The bloodletting.

She has not slit her wrists. She has only made parallel cuts on her forearm. In the same place she always does.

The relief is temporary, at best.

Three inches further down and she would be hoping for permanence.

Someday soon, she will.

+

Squeezing her red arm, I spin her around. With resolve. Without elegance.

Twisting her arm and pinning it to her back, I pull her ass toward me and with my free hand, I slide my cock inside of her.

Squeezing and twisting her arm, I began pumping into her. The blood running down and around her back and her torso.

I have her head pinned into the corner. The steam is rising up around us like a hot envelope.

Wrenching her arm even more and she does not yelp.

I pound at her backside even harder, my cock filling her completely.

Her porcelain skin is now colored in the hue that she imbued. I wring out her arm again and dizzy from the heat, I pull out. I pick her limp body up and spin her back around.

Her eyes are closed. Her torso is runny like spray paint. Her hair is red and dripping down her face.

With her hand, I run her fingers through her hair and down her face. To her swollen lips and into her mouth.

Revived, her eyes come to the misty light of this room. Of this life.

+

The bathtub is red like the water falling from our bodies.

I can see the razor under my foot and instead of stepping to the side, I press my foot harder, down and onto it.

Now I cannot tell who is bleeding, or why, or how.

Constriction

There is delight is expansion. And restriction.

With my hands wrapped around her neck and pushing her deeper into the bed, she is writhing in ecstasy.

Our naked bodies are a symbol of this freedom.

My hands, are clean.

On top of her, I look down to see my cock as a sword, battering her. Bringing her closer to something I can’t otherwise give her.

In the pale light streaming in from the hallway, I can see her look is inquisitive. I have never done this before.

My hands are wrapped around her neck.

+

I am not an angry man, nor a mean man. I am, however, an emotional man.

My hands around her neck are a symbol of how I want this to work. I don’t want control. I want this situation to find its focus.

And this situation, is us. In this life.

Not yesterday and not tomorrow.

Now.

I want to wring it out of her – everything that she is. Could be. Was. To bring her closer to now.

Pivoting more of my weight on her throat, I am hoping that when I release – and when that great gasp for air comes it will shoot everything up and out of her.

As though it was only suppressed. Hung-up in the back of the throat.

+

I want more than delight. I want more than ecstasy.

I want our days to weave together neatly with our nights.

I want to love and fuck at the same time.

+

One of my hands wraps all the way around her throat, cupping her breathing channel perfectly. With my other hand I pinch and prod at her nipples.

I slide down her stomach. Circle her clit.

If I had something to restrain her arms with, I would.

But the emotions and longing to live is enough, for now.

Slowly releasing my grip from her throat and I pull out of her, spraying my juices all over her stomach.

I clean myself from her and nothing else is said.

Apeiros

From far away, it’s like a mirage. Through the refracting molecules of the atmosphere it looks like I have her under a colored spell.

With her glassy eyes and intoxicated breath, it could look like I splayed her legs myself and opened her wet doors to ecstasy with my own invisible fingers.

But I’m not a magician. Nor am I that egomaniacal to believe that I have that kind of power, on reserve. When she asked me what my fantasies are, I replied simply by saying that my fantasy is to fulfill her fantasies.

It’s her fantasies that have her under a spell. Not me.

+

Under the pink sky of a fallen day, and under the black spell of the coming night we are in a neon club. We are at the end of a day and a long string of fantasies.

She has been under my instruction all day long, beginning with my initial request that she wear a short skirt. With no panties. And when I arrived to pick her up in my car, she was grinning as she pranced to towards me.

Today was about playing with this idea of fantasies. Hers. And resultantly, mine. Of taking them into your hand and rolling them around until their scent dissolves into sexuality.

She has told me on numerous occasions that she loves to show-off her cunt. The first time I heard this, my breathy reply stated that she was like me: an exhibitionist. To which she responded by saying, no you don’t understand. I really like to have my cunt seen.

It was then when I knew that this girl and I could truly create something magical. Because of the limitless possibilities of the universe. Because of alchemy and the dark voids in between.

+

I am not a magician.

I am a writer. In that,

I am a human.

I am striving. Being. Leaning. Falling. Looking. Blinking.

Trying.

And so when she, the girl, was looking for a place and a space to fulfill some of her fantasies, I showed her the tear in the void and how to crawl through.

And then she became terrified with joy.

Obsessed with moderation.

+

She is sitting on a stool across the bar area from me. Her skin mirrors the revolving lights around her. To me, she is like beacon: a disco ball. The straw from her drink is sliding sultry in and out of her mouth.

Already, she is intoxicated.

Even before we arrived, she said she was wet.

She is sitting on the stool, with her legs partially open. From where I am sitting I can see her cunt when the light is just right.

I am looking around, trying to find any wandering eyes.

At first there are none, then some…

+

Earlier, we were walking up and down the promenade. Her skirt riding high, up on her ass. Even after hours of watching her parade about, her perfect curve, where her leg meets her ass, will leave you breathless. The look on her face while she is explicitly naked under that skirt will leave you paralyzed with hope and possibility.

For hours now she hasn’t said much.

All the words have already been spoken between us. Some of the possibilities, played out in our hot conversations when I know she is touching her self on the other side of the phone.

In this everything is beyond talking. Everything here is about action.

And she is the naughtiest actor I have ever seen.

+

Inside the busy clothing shops along the promenade and I was reaching up and under her skirt for her wet cunt. She would lean into the clothes rack and pretend to be intently looking for something.

This when she was just looking for somebody to notice us.

Then, when we forgot about the scurrying feet and credit card holders and baby makers, we were spotted: She was leaning far into a rack of clothes. Her ass perky and jutted outward as I had a whole hand full of her cunt, rubbing her bald slit. She was lost in her ecstasy, listening to the sounds of others. Feeling the sex dripping down her leg.

Panting, she opened her eyes and then closed her mouth because there she was: a girl, stopped dead in her shopping spree, staring straight at us both. The girl’s lower lip fell away. She blinked. And then she took a deep breath. Her chest heaved up. Then down.

We smiled. Because, what else are you supposed to do?

And then she sighed as I plunged my two fingers to the hilt. Pulling out, I scraped my soft pads on her g-spot. Her legs quivered.

The girl walked away.

But before she rounded the last corner on the horizon, she looked back – skeptical if she should turn that corner and close this wing of possibility. But then she did. And that possibility dissipated.

+

In the bar – hours later and under the guise of darkness, there is a couple sitting, opposing her. She is sultry with her straw sliding in and out of her mouth. She is an actor. She is hot for this fantasy. She is teasing them with her legs slowly opening. Slowly closing.

Even though I can’t see it: she is breathy. She is nervous. Her eyes are glassy.

The couple is talking. Looking. In-between her thighs.

She is looking at them. Looking away.

Teasing them. Teasing me.

I leave my seat and, through the sea of heads and shoulders and glasses clinking, I approach her.

+

A couple nights prior and I was invited to her apartment for the first time, for story time. She likes to be read to. She knew I was a writer and asked me to bring some writings. So I brought some of my erotic tales to share.

The night prior and she learned that I wrote erotica.

She said that she wanted me to tuck her into bed with a story. I didn’t limit our experience by saying that she would get a sexy story. Or a dark story. Or a love story.

She laid on her pillow and I, at the foot of her bed. Both of us leaned back, our legs brushing one another’s.

After the first paragraph and I found her eyes with mine. She liked what she was hearing. She was surprised. Pleased. I could see it in her mouth agape. Her eyes, wide.

Halfway into my first story and I could hear her breathing. Every couple of sentences and I would find her eyes. Then her hands. They were wandering down her torso, playing at her waistband.

When I finished my first story she told me, coyly, that she wanted to show me her cunt. She said couldn’t even remember the last time she masturbated in front of a boy. She said read another story. And don’t watch me too much.

I want to show you my cunt, I heard her whisper as I leaned back and flipped to a new story.

Reading my words of intoxication, and I feel as though my pants are unbuttoned – my cock on display. In this my exhibitionism is like hers: frenetic with energy.

+

To this point, in the darkened club, when I walked up to the girl and put my hand on her thigh – gently sliding up to where her skirt met her leg – we hadn’t had sex. We hadn’t tasted one another. She hadn’t even seen, nor felt, my cock.

Earlier, in that store, where we were made by the alluring younger girl – when my fingers were sliding in and out of her wet sex – I even held my midsection back. So that she couldn’t feel my cock.

She said that she liked guessing. She liked making up stories. Possibilities.

Because once you know your possibilities, the universe immediately closes its wings on your story. But when you are unknowing, agnostic and standing in the face of your questions and possibilities – the results are limitless. Perfect. Untainted.

+

I can see that the guy across from us has his hand on his girl’s thigh. They are both looking coyly at us. Unsure about what they are faced with. We, like them, are unsure as to what faces us.

I kiss the girl. She twirls her tongue inside mine.

She licks my lips. Slides a finger up and in-between our mouths.

Then she pulls away and while she is looking into my eyes, she closes one void of possibility: With her free hand, she walks down my torso, down my thigh – then back up. She playfully finds my cock with her fingers and outlines my bulge with a nail. Then she grips my whole length with a savage intensity.

She whispers in my ear and then looks at the couple.

+

On the ride home, she sighs and lights a cigarette and explains, with breathy incantations, how she has never known such arousal.

And when we reach a red light she says,

…and I love your cock…

Behind us there are no cars following. We are not following tail lights either. We are not going home with the other couple. Nor anybody else we have or have not teased on this night.

For where she closed one wing of possibility by fingering my cock and feeling it for the first time – she kept the other wing open and abreast of the limitless universe of possibilities that could be. Would be. Should be.

In this we have been reverent to that magical kind of anticipation which we call: eroticism. In this we did not engage with the other couple. Maybe out of nerves, but I hope that it is out of this anticipation. This escalation. This movement upward into the higher possibilities.

That night we lay on her bed, opposing each other. She is still wearing the skirt, her legs are open. Slowly, as though she is savoring her food, she is tickling her clit. She is breathing heavy.

As I read her a new story, she tells me that she wants me to take out my cock. She wants to see it. But she doesn’t want to touch it. She wants to see how I stroke it.

Halfway through my story and she is coming. Our slow escalation is taking shape and I know my orgasm is coming too. In time. For now however, her legs are twitching and her midsection quivering. And like a good lover I pause, but do not cease my pace. No, I do not stop reading entirely. As my eyes bounce from the page to her electric body, my wet words slowly stroke her inside places that ache with fantasy and the limitless possibilities of this universe between us.

And the ceiling above us opens a little more…

Camera Obscura

A photograph is a drawing of light, perfectly voluptuous in its perversities.

Through my camera lens, amid the cicadas buzzing in this summer night, I am composing a representation of she. A woman. A girl. Everybody. I am snapping away at her undressing. Because she asked me to. Because I wanted to.

She is sex dressed in skin. In clothing. In panties and lace and strings and curves and lines. She is everything before her, she is a mirror for what comes after. She is archetypal.

On this night we will take hundreds of photos, but only a handful will capture the moments that matter. Only a few will capture everything that she is and isn’t.

In the beginning she is rigid. Scared. Alluring in her uncertainty.

But the light in this room is melting everything…

+

She has invited me inside and I am delicate with my reception. I respond with compliments. Deep breaths. Gratitude.

I tell her that she looks beautiful. I tell her that I love what she wore and I don’t want to cloud it with lingerie or anything that is not her walking out the door on any night.

This is her apartment. I am shooting her in her world. In her bedroom light. Where she lives, dresses, showers and calls her lovers in the cool dark night of her bed sheets.

Secretly she is an exhibitionist and loves showing off her windswept 20 year old body. Secretly she knows that death is forever, still a lifetime away from her. Explicitly she knows that this body is not forever. That the weather will come.

This is why I am standing with all the blood swirling through my body in torrents and waves to my midsection, to my head and then down to my hands holding this camera.

She is not without flaws. She is perfect. And young.

And ready.

She is standing before me with her pants splayed open, the top of her panties peeking out. She is running her nervous hands up and down her stomach, around her bellybutton. Waiting to depress it. Waiting to exhale.

I ask her if she is an exhibitionist. She replies indignantly, no. She draws me the picture of a man in a raincoat. And I dissent. I tell her that she is an exhibitionist. At home, walking into a store. The way you dress and flirt with the world with your body – you want to be watched. You like being watched.

Coyly she laughs and then says, yes. I do. I suppose that’s why you are here.

Five minutes later and she is hot with fetish. She has slipped off her shirt, over her head. Her exhibitionism must be written on her skin. Simultaneously it all becomes exposed: her want and need and desire wrapped within her dripping sex.

Even from behind the camera and I can feel it.

Her sex, hot and wet and warm.

Dripping.

+

I am a voyeur and an exhibitionist.

A camera is like my clothing, my wall between these worlds.

Behind the camera there is a safety.

Behind the camera there is beautiful danger.

+

I am simulacra. I am standing behind my camera like a pervert who is not perverse.

I am watching her bending over, sliding her jeans down and over her shimmering ass. She slides a finger inside her panties at her hips. She snaps it back onto her skin. She looks back at me. At the camera.

She is becoming sassy. She is growing older right before me. She is expanding into her sex.

She rolls over and I have stopped giving her direction. Now that nerves have worn off, she knows what she wants out of this. She knows who she is within this.

With my gasps of air she knows that she is gorgeous. She knows that I am flush with fetish.

She is on her back and running her hands up and down her thighs.

No longer is she looking into my camera. Instead, she is looking at me. My chest. My body. My cock. Her eyes are fluttering up and down, trying not be caught. As if I can’t see anything behind the camera. As if, from here, I am invisible.

Her tongue is pressed against her top teeth like a knife that wants to cut through this heavy air.

+

I am moving around her snapping away as she is stirring, squirming, sliding.

She says, I feel underdressed. You are overdressed.

You should…

I am snapping away at the edge of the bed. Close to her. Her nipples are hard and I am focusing-in on the curves and the shadow below her tit, her armpit. Her lines in her muscles. I pull my eye away from the camera and look down at her.

She is staring at my midsection.

I am hard and I know she can see my throbbing cock through my pants.

She looks up at me, biting her lip and running both of her hands over her chest, concluding with a twirl of her fingers around her nipples.

I have an idea and tell her that I want to see her unbuckle me. Take me out.

Slowly, seductively and confidently she slides even closer to the edge of the bed. Without word she reaches up for my pants.

I begin snapping away. I say, slower…

I shoot her hands and nails and the bulge in her forearm as she is taking me out.

I shoot her face and the naughty smirk like liquid from her lips.

She unzips me and then my cock flies up and out. I am throbbing. Pulsing. Buzzing.

Her mouth is agape.

I snap away…

+

As I take off my shirt and step out of my pants, she is watching me. Just like I, the simulacra, have been watching her like a camera. Like a lens. Like a solar flare.

I am standing close to the bed and as she slips off her panties, I am snapping away. My cock hard and curved in a path of light, right towards her.

I shoot her bald mound, its curves and the shadows that define it. From the light that is afforded I can see that she is already wet. Glistening.

As she is staring at my cock, she says, I think I love being watched. And,

I like watching you.

Bucking her hips in the air, I move around her, to her head – so I can shoot down her torso to capture her fidgety fingers sliding down to her wetness, playfully.

I am leaning in for the shot when I suddenly feel my cock become enveloped with a hot wetness.

I say nothing and only continue shooting. Exhaling loudly and with force. This is me obliging not only her, but this entire situation. To that end, I can hear her music vibrating over and around my aching cock.

I pull the camera away from my face and look down and into her glimmering eyes. She is staring straight up at me, teasingly. Hungrily.

+

My legs are becoming weak and so I prop myself on the bed as she continues to alternately take me in her mouth and pull me out to stroke me and examine my body. Then my other leg begins to fall into an intoxicated paralysis and so I climb all the way above her.

With my camera in-hand I leave my cock where it is and then crawl outward with the rest of my body – down and towards her wetness where one of her hands is full of her cunt. Fingering. Flicking. Circling her clit. Sliding in and out of herself.

Once propped on my elbow, I snap away. At her circling hand, a blur now. Her thighs. Her curled toes. My cock in her mouth. Her erect nipples. Her tight tummy.

I shoot her and I shoot me.

And then I lean in and take her clit into my mouth. I suck and flick it with my tongue. Her mouth is wide open, my cock on her lips. She is moaning.

Her toes are wave cycles of intoxication. They tense. Curl. Release.

A moment. A snapshot.

+

I’ve seen the shadowy things appearing and then withering into the sidewalks, since my youth. Ever death obsessed for all of my life, I have troubled myself endlessly over questions of fame and fortune. Nearly 30 years down my road and I came to the conclusion that: with fame or fortune, either way I can’t take them with me when I leave.

As this life lives like my dream state where there is no holdover, from one life to the next – I have come to the conclusion that what I desire is beautiful moments. Whether they last three seconds, three minutes or three years – the purpose is not in the duration. The purpose is in the striving.

Because when you can conceptualize that notion to the point where you are floating on top of it, a strange thing begins to happen: The beautiful moments begin to happen. All around. For seconds and moments.

Small slivers of time that reverberate at the frequency of illumination. So pungent are my collected moments of beauty and patience and time that they have burned themselves upon the silver plate of my mind for all my days.

Like a drawing of light.

Like a photograph.

Of Revolutions

This is an ode.

And she is worthy of every utterance:

She talks to me with her whole body. Her hands are like eyes, washing over every corner of my being. Inspecting me. Talking to me. Without words, her mouth listens to me breathe. She crawls up me with her tongue and feels me with the palms of her lips and we laugh in a language I haven’t ever heard before, but am mysteriously able to speak.

She is my kind of girl: She wears dresses and has feminine hands. She is shaved clean. Blonde with streaks. Tan. Smells like mangoes and melons and her hair frames the mascara that encircles her Monet eyes.

But more than exhibiting the perfect display of femininity, she is my sexual match.

+

She is unafraid of her body. And she makes me unafraid of mine.

In this, she is the most wonderfully complicated sexual being I have ever known. But in this she is not intimidation. She is not superior. In this, she is whole. And vibrant. For this, I kiss her strongly and take her into my arms as many times as I can.

We spend entire evenings that spill into the half light of the morning, dancing.

And while I would never profess to being a good dancer, never before have I danced so gracefully. Never before have I been able to exhibit my full body of sexual aptitude in the face of a reverent eye. And what’s more, we do all of this underwater. Giving and taking and reciprocating and moving with one another as though we born to do this and nothing more. Nothing less.

Sometimes when I’m inside of her, trying to prolong our tango, I think of Fred Astaire. And I think of how we must look together, dancing on this pier of enchantment. In the sepia days of our ancestry. With the whole experience of humanity behind us as our lesson – for right now. This moment. This second.

We sit on her couch and talk. She is funny and smiles wide with her big eyes. She likes reggae in a way that I have never known and I am only now beginning to understand this music. When she bites her lips during the choruses of sound, I smile back thinking that my new comprehension is probably on account of the way she spreads her legs and lets the candle light wash over her thighs. Illuminating her wet, white-hot sex.

+

I wasn’t looking for her and she wasn’t looking for me. But now it’s beginning to feel like we found each other in this grand labyrinth. It just may be that, for a reason the universe found us, in our human walk down and around the blind corners of Halloween frights and misty hazes of middle of nowhere corn mazes.

When we first met I was wondering about love at first sight. Or really, mostly lust. The way that sex drips from her is instantaneously intoxicating. And trying to remember our conversations that first night we met in the bar, is murky at best. What I do remember is going to the bathroom and then returning, to find that she and her purse – were gone.

I had ordered two drinks before going to the bathroom and picked them up from the bar after I discovered that she was gone. The bartender looked at me as though she knew – as though she was apologizing with her eyes. As though she was saying, better luck next time little boy. Still, I took the drinks and went to where I was sitting with her and downed most of my drink. Because I didn’t know what else to do. I looked out the windows to try and spot a car speeding away into the night.

The whole while, I could only think of the way she was looking at me. I wondered if she looks at everyone that way. And I wondered why I didn’t have anything that she wanted. I was buzzing with rejection and trying not to take it personally, then…

Then I turned around and there she was. She hadn’t left. I hadn’t scared her off. She was in the bathroom.

I turned around and there she was. There she is.

+

I am a predator for her sex.

We cannot keep our hands off each other. And when I leave her in the morning I can only think about the next time I can have more.

We fuck, have sex, kiss and cuddle and can not stop swimming through this sexual of sea of ecstasy. Even when I am inside of her I stop, so I can go down and suck on her wetness. Even when I am inside of her she stops, so she can take my cock into her mouth and moan and drive me absolutely fucking mad.

We are foreplay and sex and post coitus all rolled into one fiery ball for hours upon night hours.

We are in the kitchen and her perfect body is radiating with the previous couple of hours of being devoured. She is naked and so am I: Unafraid and without torture in our nudity. I pin her against the counter and kiss her on her slippery, watery lips before I slide down to taste and suck on every lobe and curve and nipple and line. Down on my knees I slip my tongue inside her hot folds and begin, more than lapping at her, devouring her.

She is food. She is sustenance. She is vitamins and minerals and health and my daily meal. And when I cannot have her, I go hungry. Prowling in a world where everything else is insufficient.

With my whole mouth wrapped around her cunt, her hips begin bucking. She leans back into the counter and wraps her legs around me. The backs of her knees on my shoulders. I am sucking and licking and tickling and fucking her with every wet molecule in my body. And still, I only want more.

Sitting on my face, with her hips writhing and then we begin our ascent upward. I reach under and lifting her from the ass, I stand up – my face buried deep inside her. My tongue fucking the space that my cock had been previously.

Then, she picks herself completely up and off the counter and begins dancing. Her hips circling my soft, wet landing strip of a mouth. Her entire being undulating to and from my face fucking her. Devouring her.

In this I take her whole. And I tell her, with my whole body, that she has never been wanted more in her whole life.

And when we are done, I forget where I am in this world of bills and lights and cars and train wrecks. I am somehow, miraculously, cut-off from the world beyond her and I. My head is not light. My whole body is. My knees are weak, my body spent and I am staring out the window wondering what is happening.

I turn around and there she is.

Smiling.

Deviously.

And then she leads me back into the dark bedroom of slick polyester sheets wrinkled with our unending sex.

+

Her eyes roll back into her head when I am fucking her. This is when I know that this is not about love, or even lust. This is about primal incantations that we are all blessed with – and this is the place of ecstasy that she is unafraid of going toward; and being immersed within. When I see the whites of her eyes I know that I am fucking the most gorgeous and sexual being that I ever have.

She makes me want to go further.

And despite my ache for her, my cock can only go for so long.

It is here where I first felt her supreme brilliance. She is aware. She is kind and she tells me with her whole body that I am wanted more than I ever could be. She kisses me with not only her hands and mouth and eyes – but with her whole body. With her thighs and ass and ankles and all the small bits in-between.

She traces the outline of my flaccid cock. She tickles my thighs. She breathes heavily into my ear with a wind of flutes and song. This is the music of an interlude. And then when I see her hips bucking again in her unquenchable thirst, I look into her artful eyes and see everything I need to. And the blood returns to my body in the places that have opened-up only to her.

And then, in our elegant dance, we somehow flop around and I am sucking on her still wet cunt and she has my soft cock in her mouth, now hard. She is biting my thighs and tickling my balls and absolutely devouring my cock. And I have her entire cunt either in my mouth or all over my face and I do not know how to crawl through her. But I am probing for a hole large enough to fit both of our beings into.

And the whole while I am trying to find new breathing holes because I am paralyzed with this intensity and I can only conclude that there must be some way to find air in and through my ears.

+

After a nearly complete night of live music and drinks, we go to the sultry Sugar House after midnight and drink chocolate liqour from strawberries and then we sit on a couch with her girlfriend with the perfect tits. My Italian girl is wearing a skirt and her girlfriend begins sucking on her mouth and reaching into her dress for her even more perfect tits.

In five short minutes we will become an illuminated display of sexuality. And everybody will stop what they are doing to come. And watch us.

My Italian girl spreads her legs and her tits are pulled from her shirt. Her eyes are rolling back in her head in the same wave that her body is undulating within. She has her friend’s tits out and is sucking on her as I open her legs even more – to dive in for my first anxiously-awaited taste.

All night long we have been teasing and touching and kissing and fingering her under the table. And she has reached-out and into the night to stroke my cock and I cannot think clearly anymore…

And now, under the red lights and on that red couch, we are an illuminated display of sexuality. I peek up from between her writhing legs and cunt and body and see men and women. Desirous. Hungry.

And I have a plateful right in front of me.

+

When we are smoking on the couch and taking a break, having water and catching our breath – we are also crawling over one another. Teasing one another with our eyes and fingers, tracing the wavy lines that candle light spills on our bodies.

We are almost giggling because for 4 hours now we have been crawling over one another. It was the same as last night. And it is the same as tomorrow night. But we do not giggle. It is something more than that. Something that says this may be bigger than we thought. This may be bigger than you, or even I.

I am a predator for her sex. And she is, for mine.

I cannot stop tasting her sex. Before or after or during or on Tuesday – I am trying to find that sacred space where I can crawl through her.

In the meantime I will just settle for fucking her and listening to her and watching her eyes roll back while I fall into some reverse kind of love that, like her music, I am only now beginning to comprehend.

Lesbia

You restore your self to me again but do not ask how many of your kisses are more than enough. And for the short revolution where the sun hides from us, we taste one another. Sampling lips and breath with tongues and fingers. This despite our swearing silently that we should not be sitting before this feast: Eating. Craving. Wanting.

Danger. Danger. You whisper as I slide inside of you.

I do not want you to be my mistress. I do not want you to be fleeting like everything else we will touch in our lives. I implore you: Do not let this be like your father, and die on us.

(Lesbia was the lover of the great Greek poet Catallus. Many of the his erotic poems were dedicated to her. More than his lover, she was the poet’s unrequited love.)

You always talk bad to me, when your visions of our nights run in reverse. This when you are dark silence when I hold you inside of my arms as a display of my love and want. Never has a woman been loved more than you are, right now. But never have I seen a woman more conflicted about being loved. Up and down and all around, like I know I can – if the breathing widens our constricted, snaking space.

But under that fleeting cloak of night we are somehow safe. And together. Your words are soft; and melting with an erotic timbre that only your mouth knows. I put my ear close, so as to not miss any of your subtle colors. Then, when you bit your lip, I leap into you, cupping my mouth with yours – to capture even more of your candied letter charges.

I could not crave anything more than I am in desirous rapture of you now. You, wet and nipples hard – are the only flinching thing in my quest to satiate something more dynamic than petty lust. For this, there is no liquid gold apart from your prized, damp mouth and the dripping sex between your legs.

I dread the coming of the sun. The coming of the day. When the intoxication will slip away. And your sounds will become dry songs.

(Unrequited love is a love that is not reciprocated by the person which is desired.)

We have said that we will simply lay in this, your same bed. We say, nothing more. We swear that we will not engage. Entangle. And then when I arrive into your drunken room, you are naked. The sheet only hiding one breast. Your curves are for my darkest temptation.

Now, you know this – but I will belabor its searing sword points because I have no one else to share this with: Our words are lightning. Negative electric currents. Both of our lips tingle with high voltages.

You know that positive lightning is a rare form of this kind of strike. And when you close your eyes – tell me that you do not see what I do: Blue white explosive lightning strikes.

(Lesbia is eroticism. She is sadness. She is euphoria. She is bitter disappointment.)

Our hands and fingers find the other’s body. You, slipping under my shirt and tracing lines down and around my waistband.

We tangle in a dance of heavy breathing. Mouths close and on the neck and ears.

Our falling into one another breaks my tongue. In this moment’s darkness, where we are closing our eyes because we cannot see, opens up our other senses. And that sixth sense: our heart. For this, I do not clutter the moment with words. My body is the only language strong enough to entice you into understanding.

You undress me as though you have no choice. As though this was going to happen, from the past it has come with revenge. Button by button I open up to you, as if I were the one hiding. As if I were the one who could not.

And then the dance begins – with both of us flirting with the fire, basking in the game of this seduction. Aiming for the center and slow. But only for a while. Only until you open your legs and I dive for your neck.

(A notable form of unrequited love is self-inflicted masochistic infatuation.)

Desire like this causes bruises that are slow to heal.

I am symptomatic. I am reeling and I do feel shame in wanting something that does not – moreover, cannot – have me as I have her. In my gut. In my head. And in my heart.

In your bed, I am persuasion and this is not I.

If you forget me, I have lost everything I have ever gained.

What I do not want to happen is my crazy heart. And yours.

…to only lay with you and this thrill one more time…

Now

I am all alone when I reach under the sheets for myself. In this hushed chasm of night, she is not with me. She has never been this close.

And while she has never known about my quiet time, when the blood has settled in its pendulum swing to my midsection, it has been implied. She has been made more than aware of my desire for her. I have told her that, like a nocturnal predator, I will devour her if I catch her scent. I have said it all in so many words.

Some of them have been these:

I met you in your kitchen. You were the host of a great and drunken party. There was a fire in the half light of the backyard that mirrored the fire I felt when we met.

You made no real communication with your eyes. But we shook hands anyway. That was the only time we touched.

Still I feel you all the way over here. Miles and miles away, and a lifetime beyond. I am pressing my entire body into this bed, filling up this entire room with the heat of everything I would do to you. Say to you.

I picture you, always, in your kitchen with that dress, low-cut on the top and your golden skin rich and deep all the way down between your chest. Your tiny fingers I think about tracing the curves in my lips. Your petite frame pressed into mine. Your ballet legs wrapped around me. Face to face, I am paralyzed by the idea of you watching me. As your metric eyes measure the pleasure of this heat.

I remember seeing you walk upstairs, that first night we met. For awhile you disappeared in your own house.

We didn’t know each other. And I had never been in your house – but I cannot let go of this idea of trailing you up those stairs. Because you are giving me a tour. With nobody looking, I run two fingers up your leg, peeling back your dress to get a glimpse of how everything works.

Once we round the corner to upper floor, where nobody can see us, you lace your fingers childishly in mine – tugging me onward. The adrenaline blacks-out the sounds from down below.

Teasingly you say, this is the bathroom. This is the linen closet…

It’s not so much that I want to fall in love with you as it is that I want to drown myself in this secret intoxication. I want to devour all of you more than care for you. I want you to be my clandestine plaything. My lover.

As you open the door to a bedroom, I press my fingers into your neck. In a near massage, I have your attention and I hear you exhale. The wispy breathe creates a small, pulsing tornado of silence in the hair dangling in front of your face. Before you step forward into the next room you cross the threshold by turning and offering me your lips.

But we don’t have time for a slow reveal.

I am hungry for you and you know this. You are hungry for me and your husband is downstairs and we both know this.

You pirouette around to land with your whole body pressing into mine. Our mouths leaping into the others, whetting at the taste of our converging appetites.

I reach around, sliding my hands under your ass – at once learning your feel, kneeding you and peeling your tiny panties to the side so I can allow greater access to your core temperature. Your center heat.

As you climb up and into me, my fingers find your holes and tease them.

You are already wet and so I drop down and throw my hands up and into your inner thighs, pinning you against the door jamb. You are gasping for air as I bury my tongue inside your folds, circling your clit with powerful strokes.

Just to satiate my appetite.

I want this: that first taste.

I don’t want complications afterwards. I just want this; here and now. I just want that first taste and not the last stand or the future’s uncertainty.

I want this savagely. And you, bent over, with your panties to the side and my hands flying up and down your torso; pinching and kneeding and grasping at everything that is not mine and will never be mine.

With your ass pressed into me, I picture myself sliding into you as you whimper. You are clinging to the doorway as if we have opened up into a room that never before existed in this house. Your house.

Everything around us is growing. The light. The space. This newfound place.

As I begin to pump into you, your whimper blossoms into a cry and so my hand flies up to meet your mouth with a cup of silence. I grip your lips and feel you press back into me. My fingers run inside, behind your teeth, over your tongue. And you clamp down, taking all of my cock inside you.

Still halfway in the hall, so that we can see any shadows coming up the stairs – I am pulsing with your intoxicating juices suctioning me closely into you.

Pulling all the way out, I slip back inside you and begin fucking you. Not loving you. Not caring for you, but rather – fucking you with every primal impulse I have carried with me since the Dark Ages and antiquity. And you fuck me back, not wanting more. Not wanting anything less. Not even my name for an introduction to your husband after this is done.

Reaching around for your engorged clit and swollen lips, I run my fingers around the entire situation that is now my slick cock and your soaked cunt pulsing and accepting the fury of our savage meeting.

We don’t have much time and so you pull me out and drop to your knees, taking my cock into your hand. In a fitted rage you begin pumping my cock, alternately staring into my eyes and waiting for me to erupt. Your free hand slides around my wet balls, underneath and then up to my nipples.

Not five seconds later and I feel the swirling heat of all this surging through me. From the top of my head it comes, rushing into my gut and then with my quiet vocalization you take my cock in your mouth where I explode and you graciously take all of my juices, swallowing me nearly whole.

In this fantasy, I do not remember getting myself back together, or what is said just before we walk back down the stairs. But laying in my solitary bed miles and lifetimes away from this imagined possibility, with my juices sprayed on my stomach, I think about how my thirst is still unquenched. And how I want to swallow you whole, tasting every naughty molecule of your sex as you did mine. In that hallway of fantasy.

And as I drift off to sleep, I fall back to the reality of this quiet room. And the darkened night. And I think about how solitary and alone I was walking into your door for that first time. And in the same kind of reverse, I think about how I walked out of it: Alone and with the sound of your summer night’s party swirling up and into the night like a great din.

Fire Escape

I heard them on the fire escape whispering just before I began to smell their freshly-lit cigarettes. Still falling toward a blackened dream I heard one of the girls say, “I want your fingers inside me.”

That’s when I rose and parted my blinds.

Up on my bed, not five feet from them and I saw two girls standing on the metal platform outside my bedroom window. Dream sirens they were, tempting me to leave my sweaty, summer sex-drenched sleep.

“I want you to pay me some special attention…” The first girl cooed as she stepped into the other, running her finger around the other’s engorged lips.

She ran her finger down the passive girl’s sternum, tracing a circle around her nipple; and lightly pinching it through the fabric.

As though their heat pulled all of the moisture from within me, my mouth went suddenly dry. My light head fell from my top, down to posture in front of my bottom – deep inside me. The butterflies began to encircle my entire being.

I was nervous for them. For her. But also, for me.

In this moment of intimate city living, I didn’t want to be seen. But I desperately wanted to be known.

Secretly I was begging the passive girl to oblige the desirous girl’s request.

“You know… I’ve never even kissed another girl…”

Then, they met, with a slow ferocity – at the lips. As though they were in a vacuum, their suction as the adhesive that joined them together in a union so dense that, even right in front of me, it was able to hide its power from me.

The two girls slid from their lips and embraced. The desirous one’s hand running down the other’s side, cupping her ass and then sliding under. I saw the other girl buck her hips once the fingers reached her soft entry point.

“I want your fingers inside me,” the desirous one said again.

I heard them whisper, then: they disappeared in the door from where they came.

In this confident moment, I was unafraid of any cosmic power. I did not fear the destructive elements. I did not fear the darkness of death. And I did not feel that I was unable or unwilling to comprehend even the gravest of sensations. Here, I was not vulnerable. Here, I was nervous. I was trembling as though every erotic molecule in this intoxicated city was aligned towards me.

I reached down and began to slowly stroke my cock. My fingers running underneath to that soft place. I pressed on it, and in conjunction with the slow, tight grip on the shaft of my cock, I exhaled from my mouth with the great reverent release of the tension that was standing before me. Out and into the world, I sent it.

As a hope.

Because I wanted more.

For it was as I surmised, that the desirous girl lived across the courtyard, one floor below. And as though my heat was a conductor, the lights in her bedroom came on.

Through her open blinds I could see the two girls. One sat nervously on the edge of the bed while the other unabashedly straddled her. Slowly their heads began swirling in dance as their open mouths magnetized; learning one another further.

Holding at the top my ascent, I teased my orgasm. Baited it to wait. Dared it to stay as I tickled my head and massaged the underside.

Then the girl on top pushed the other girl back onto the bed; onto her back. Playfully she leapt on her, pawing at her willing body. Then she reached up and pinned the passive girl’s arm behind her head. Wildly she kissed her, pinning her entire body down with her feral hands which flew up and down the girl’s intimidated torso. Then, pulling her weight back – the girl slowly slipped her down the passive girl’s pants.

With their faces close, she began to finger the girl. A few seconds later and the girl’s hips began to buck. Gyrate. Raise from the bed in approval.

From the cracked window, I could hear the breathing intensify.

Teasing each other with open mouths, the passive girl began to gain momentum. Then, with a calculated violence she pushed the desirous one back into a pinned, half-sitting position against the wall. Pouncing, she fastened the girl to the wall with her strong legs and then grabbed the desirous girl’s thigh, kneading it up and down.

Words were exchanged.

And then she slid her hand up the girl’s shorts. The desirous girl’s head fell to the side in consent. Mechanically the now-active girl’s arm began moving like a gear set in motion – back and forth. Back and forth. She leaned into it as though she were attacking the desirous girl in her softest and hungriest place. As though she deserved it like erotic punishment. But primarily it was as though she were giving them both what they finally wanted.

I continued to roll the head of my cock around in the palm of hand. My other hand balanced the blind open.

After a whirlwind of time spun past, the girl pulled her arm and hands and fingers from the other girl. She tickled her leg in her withdrawal. Then the desirous, pinned girl grabbed the other’s hand and seductively took her fingers up to her face and into her mouth.

After a reorganization of the bodies, the two girls laid on the bed, cuddling.

With the experience still raw, I rolled over onto my back as the wind began to stir the acacia trees outside. And to the music of leaves quaking, I slowly, teasingly drained the entire moment from my body, from the inside, out.

Secret

I asked her to tell me a secret.

After having courted and dated once before to a small resolve, we started talking again – over a year later. Hundreds of thousands of words into our reunion and she told me something that she never had spoken aloud before: that she wanted to be tied-up and used for pleasure. She said that, for years, she had been aching for someone to completely take control of her: mentally and physically. Sexually. Just once.

She was a high-paid executive. She lived on a hill in a ridiculous house with marble in the foyer. She said that, like her drawer full of toys, everything in her house was carefully chosen. Selected. Commissioned.

She said that she was tired of making decisions.

She said nobody knows, not even you. She said that she hides it all: her thigh-highs, her piercings and the constant aching between her legs while she is staring at millions of dollars in meetings all day long.

Previously having moved in the direction of love-won and the alchemical heart, our relationship forever changed with the utterance of her secret desires.

After another week, she and I had built a pact on trust and lust. Everything robust and erotic we carefully diagrammed-out. Tides of blood swirled around our midsections when we spoke. After awhile, this was the only thing we talked about. She told me everything. How and when and where and what it looked like when she closed her eyes and reached for her throbbing cunt at night.

+

She said that the front door would be unlocked. She said that she didn’t want to know when I would arrive. She wanted a surprise.

Impress me, she whispered.

Invisibly, I opened the door. It, nor my feet, made a sound in the glassy foyer. I went up the grand staircase with stealth precision. I saw a bedroom light on and entered. She was not there, nor in the closet or bathroom. I opened the top drawer of the credenza where she hid everything naughty. Dirty. In the drawer below I took with me a strap-on and some handcuffs.

Walking down and into the great room, I spotted her in the kitchen. She was cooking. Pots and pans on the stove were steaming. The sink was running and her back was to me.

I slipped-off my shoes and moved-up behind her like a predator.

Intoxicated by the culinary delights and everything chopped around me, I grabbed her dangling arm. She howled. I reached around and clutched her other hand as it flailed around and pinned it behind her startled, shaking body.

Both of us exhaled, breathing each other in, in this quiet moment before the abusive torrent. With one hand I clutched both of her arms, handcuffed them and pinned her neck to the counter.

Flipping up her skirt, I shoved my face into all of her. Wet she already was. Newly, suddenly wet. She gasped as I lapped and sucked at her, furiously inserting my fingers into all of her holes. With a fistful of hair, I pressed her, hard, into the wall.

I squeezed and slapped at her ass until her pitch was melodic with pain and pleasure. With her ass tortured red, I reached around for her throat. I pushed her further into the wall and, without word, I punched my cock into her cunt with a relentless savagery. Immediately I began pounding at her, gripping her throat even tighter.

I pulled and tore at her shirt with my other hand, twisting and slapping her erect tit. My fingers occasionally flying up to fuck her begging mouth.

I then reached back for the strap-on, stepped into it and put my cock through the hole below the dildo. As she told me to, I slapped her face and said don’t look.

Then I slid both of my cocks into her. I spit on her ass but the dry dildo made her yelp as I began to pound away. I put my whole hand in her mouth, yanking down on her jaw.

After several minutes of hammering away, I threw her to the ground. Once on top of her and straddling her head, I squeezed her ears between my legs, gripped her throat tightly and let a hot jet of come shoot out all over her clothes.

Just as we diagrammed.

I didn’t uncuff her, nor did I say goodbye, ever again.