"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
She wrapped me in her quilted smile,
then torched the salty fabric of us, tear stained and aching.
She knees cruel in the balls.
And I love her that way just the same.
She hangs me up to dry,
then cuts me down for air.
The breathing windows of us,
pulsating walls setting chairs rocking, us inside,
lulled in four-arm sleep.
I took a lover once; he sewed me to his spine,
Neither round his girth, nor over his shoulder
Could I see the world he traveled far from me.
His sacred numbers blessed our holy hands,
One cradling his mane, the other locking mine.
Back then…
Lovers and landlords favored rent over poetry,
I, never the sort to drift far, the lair’s lure strong,
Offering dusty shadows beamed in dirty panes,
True love writ on a paw or whisker, soft-shuffled,
Whence the divan bearing swans sunk infinitely.
Image source:
My velvet summer leaf, I beg you cup my cheeks with layered sheaths,
And obey you, please me so to please you so.
Your waxy shield melts to my hands.
One caress and the sun is yours for the air making.
Sleep inside my pores, arresting palms shaking trees.
Noose a summer’s dream inside your viny paw.
And whisper green song to the tune of daylight pause.
Make yourself a bed of light and hide us, lovers in noon-tide sheets.
Noisy bars bring them out, words, flyby’s, glances, guffaws and shouts,
The teeming television barrage: run, skate, tackle, hit, fly, and fall.
It’s all that motion that sickens me, I think, causes me to open the wrong door,
Trying to get out, the populous din of greasy chomps and cheer, too much.
And my left eye, the throbbing reminded me that nights like these…
Well, running into your past hurts, like the face plant into the wall it is.
The years, the years, the years swimming in your clogged ears,
Suck out the details, the exact dates, times, names and numbers.
Never any good at any of them, I just kept doing what needed doing–as I do.
And tonight’s no different with all that begged to be said and felt, all along
With your voice inside my head, telling me not to go, and asking who’s there
With that menace, that hint of cabined, caged control ripping at your will
Your mind round with edges like that pool, your legs wrapped around me
By the waist, by the mouth, by the threads unraveling between our fingers,
That darned holes in our visions, sepia snapshots on silk screen partitions.
We decided our favorite coffee is wine on this sweaty hot summer late afternoon. The temps rose to about 88 degrees even here at the beach. So we met at a wine bar by the water instead of our usual siesta hour coffee place. I enjoyed a Patson Hall Chardonnay, chilled, and she a Central Valley Pinot Noir, whose name I forgot. Cheers, clink, and she was off. First the job, politics, and then her current “person of interest.”
Her: I like a guy who talks me up dirty. Just gets me going, like when D***** says, “Gonna pump sum jiz in you” right before he cums. I want to scream, “Go, go, go for it, fucker!!” And her voice does get loud.
I wince, probably visibly. I mused how I’m more of a Nike kind of girl. Don’t announce. Just do it.
Her: I must have some sort of oral fixation that I get off on sex talk like that, his mouth clenched in urgency, coughing out, “Here it cums, baby.” Makes the finale all the more spectacular. I should have been an actress, not a business major. It all seems so meta sexual, you know, like acting out sex inside the sex act. You know what I mean?
I nod. Honestly I did. Like sex in front of a mirror. The self-consciousness of the act as act. The wine buzz would not let me fall into the full possibilities of sex, mirrors, and performance. I shook it off, silently.
Her: I mean when T** and I were seeing each other, he was the quiet church mouse type. He performed all right, but I never could gauge the decibels of his pleasure like I can with D*****. I can coordinate my own orgasm much easier with the verbal cues.
The church mouse visual stuck in my mind, I just then remembered the guy who shushed me during sex. We had been dating for a few months; it wasn’t the first time we were going at it. But he all of the sudden unquestionably shushed me, like I was making too much noise. The only thing missing was the hand covering my mouth.
We were at a hotel. He had kids, a divorce, too soon, all of that. And what? He didn’t want to disturb other hotel guests? I wasn’t screaming, that’s for sure. He was a serviceable lover but not scream-worthy. I was stunned, totally thrown off. I didn’t even question why or how or what. But afterward, I became hyper aware of the sounds I would have made had I not stifled them before they came out. I couldn’t cum.
It wasn’t long after that we broke up. I’m not sure if it was because of that. We just didn’t have enough gelling to get over the breach.
The server came by just then. “Yes, I’ll have another. Same.”
Image: the Purple Passport
A lover once taught me shapes of fair, fragile snowflakes,
Their pockets of space designing mass and configuration
As much as frozen rain mists, cloud-fallen and drifting.
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Another one telescoped me the distance and size of stars,
Colored me planetary pictures of rings and ovals, spheres
In spotty galaxies smudged by gaseous gems on sky maps.
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One modeled his lessons to me in structured time slots,
Configured inside meetings and lunch, clocking out hour
And over-time pay shifts, allowances for home absence.
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And yet another, this one, schooled me in the art of love,
A rare calligraphy of swirling letters adorning words in
Poems and stories that beat true passion into thick skin.
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All of these and more have lent a lesson to have and hold
By imagery water-colored on silk screen partitions placed
Between my heart and ribs, thighs and brain, sculpting me.
NEVER, no
I never expected you, never saw you coming, not at all,
but there you were, wearing all the wrong clothing:
horizontal striped collared button down shirt, like
colored bands ringing a thick, redwood tree trunk.
Middle aged folk fallen prey to time and gravity
don’t wear bold-colorful advertisements to widening
perimeters, especially for one with no boundaries,
sexually speaking, of course, not morally or politically.
And logo’d button down polos reek conservative bean
counter, occupation-ally bound to count kisses, time and
orgasms, sans deductions for the unholy of holies among the
fiscally, vaginally vigilant.
And there I was, a raven, coated and shiny like wet ink newly
splotched on your parchment paper computer screen, dark
and waiting to be lit, turned and transformed beyond the
shadowy picture created in your imagination, confessions
and slick-wicked liquid words sliding thick viscous
through your keyboard fingers, just like we wrote, painted
pictures in sentences spelling out, enumerating, if you
will, voracious mimicry, want and want some more, only not
wanting all that just can’t have, not then, not now, but
something else arose, grew from our impossibility, your
straight laces strung tightly, fronting the devilry in your
daydreams, drooly lasciviousness set free, not freely given.
Yeah, we really did it for each other, whatever it was that
needed doing, and still do to both no one’s and yet everyone’s
surprise, including us who love so much so little of the
time, no time all the time, we who live separate lives
lived in broad daylight secrecy, while we storybook
pieces and patches of once upon a time we were other
people than we are and were then who could be us now.
You often ask, “Who knew you’d still be around?” And
“How could I have known? I didn’t see you coming.”
No, we didn’t see each other coming but we sure do now.
Marked by forever embrace
arms to mind
nose to heart,
I will never recover
a touching scent like you;
no other lover
rapes pelvic thoughts
musks up a spell
pushes my deep
and levels a deadly wrench kiss
like hammers
to pulpy plum;
in your leave
I hollow gourds of song
await the pine needle drop
and hum Jesus and rum.
I could have written all those fucking 7,8,9 or 100 ways to save your marriage articles. I tried everything I read for decades.
How many relationship “experts”, writers and doctors preach honesty and openness? How many times in 20 years have I opened my heart to her, told her my hopes and dreams, listened to hers, answered her most probing questions about what turned me on or off, what she needed in bed…I tried. It was so hard to be honest, despite her insisting. I didn’t want to hurt her. I knew my words would hurt her. The truth hurts.
What she didn’t tell me, probably didn’t know herself was that she couldn’t handle hearing what she wanted to know. Early in our marriage she would ask me about my fantasies, first like it was a game, like she was being cute about it. And when I refused to tell her, she got irritated and moody.
But I was embarrassed and it was hard to talk about. It was extremely uncomfortable and felt a little dangerous, like exposing my weaknesses. After a while I think she was driven by this thing, this idea of something I was holding back from her, and demanded to know what I fantasized about–she wanted it in the name of honesty. While it was important to be honest, I also knew some things just needed to be kept to myself. I resisted hard.
But she was clearly disturbed about me keeping something from her, so I gave in. When I told her some of the things I got off on masturbating in my younger days…and occasionally afterward, she got quiet, then distant and then hurt. I watched it happen, the changes cross over her face like a quick moving time-lapsed eclipse.
She wouldn’t talk about it for a long time. And when she did, she tearfully confessed she couldn’t do what I wanted. She didn’t like anything that might be painful and then it got so messy because I told her I didn’t actually want these things from her, which was the right thing to say but she took it wrong like I wanted it from someone else or didn’t think her capable; it broke down from there into silence and brooding anger.
Just one of the many breakdowns and resentments that collect and heap up over time.
Be open and honest. Right. How much is too much honesty? Not enough? This is the person I chose to share everything with, who I counted on to build me up not tear me down for what I think or say. I always felt she was on my side and wanted what was best for me. I still do. But there is a slow but steady growing crack widening in us we can’t seem to repair.
There were other misunderstandings that ended in injured feelings, both of us shut down and protective of our own. She casually mentioned one too many times that the company should give me more time off, more pay, more respect, just more of… what? What SHE wanted? Was she defending me or looking out for her own interest?
It’s degrading to be reminded you don’t make as much as you should or have as much as you deserve. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t work there. There’s a sense of how things operate, something she couldn’t know. And for someone so sensitive, it’s downright insensitive not to know how that burns.
Now I sound like her with the mindreading. She should know…I should know…No, I should have told her how that humiliated me. Not angrily but calmly. But then…I’d been burned so many times by that whole honesty thing before.
My head just spins with this shit. No wonder so many of my college buddies weren’t too keen on getting married any time soon, preferring sex, partying and freedom. Funny, how I judged them then as shallow. Maybe they in their blind denial intuited the danger, all the pitfalls of relationships going long, going stale, expecting too much, tolerating too little…I just chalked them up to chickenshits. But maybe they were right.
And yet I couldn’t imagine life without her. Too painful. The struggles you suffer and overcome, my dad described as the ups and downs of marriage: “it ain’t easy but it ain’t that hard either.” Yeah? Seems pretty damned difficult sometimes. It’s fucking hard!
Then again, it’s harder to give up…until there’s nothing to give up, like knowing when you’re bested or outdone, checkmated. There’s no point in trying. Until then, you just keep figuring it out.
I am sorry.
I brought her into bed with us again, she who worries
too much about her breath and her b.o.
all the wrinkles of offense, she who cringes at the thought,
the very idea that she may be seen,
imperfect as the smoke hiding the fireworks the other day,
left a trail of sooty stink looming,
threatening to mar our view, dim the shiny glee of us.
And now you know.
Though the end is not the all, not the being or culminating cause,
we were groomed to believe so,
such that her presence stays me, stems the flow, ebbing waves,
impenetrable shield, a barrier, firm and illusory, still
and empty as the notion that we need to be THE image
the key to keyhole fit
when with a flick of a switch, lights on to view the truth
veins and skin and twisted mouth
invisibly drawn to be erased in one full sweeping hearty sigh
honestly gut-of-the-mind uttered
by body belief in beauty larger than sight
holier than the mountain
we delve in for deliverance in undeniably desirous delight
release and respite, fulfilling
in its wholeness, this acceptance, this release,
this trust in blind care
for the principle, for the knowledge of us we share
enfolded, in threaded limbs
that nothing but fear she wedges between permeable doors
open-shut as the thought leaping over the falls
cascading down an embracing grip caught in the pupils’ deep
in careful sense, fragile fortitude as the spine of a lover.
photo credit: static.yourtango.com
In the gaze of the other 