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| Wednesday, April 01, 2009 |
| Period. Interrobang. |
I've got my period. This makes me murderously cranky and yet yowly like a cat in heat. In other words, I want to fuck you and then fuck you up.
Like those cats that will suffer themselves to be petted and even rub against you before savagely biting you and raking their claws down your arm. I should have been a pair of retractable claws; I think they'd be nice to have. I could scuttle across your back and claw you ragged. I would like to bleed on someone and make him bleed on me. I can see the blood on the sheet like hieroglyphs. A nice stippling on the back. Yeah, like that.
Then, in the welcome respite from cramps which orgasm affords me, I plan to completely ignore you while I eat some ice cream and watch episodes of Project Runway back to back. I may also claw your couch. And your curtains are not safe. I will (probably) not wee on your carpet. Don't touch me. Thank you.Labels: bitey, bloody hell, punctuation, T.S. Eliot |
posted by O @ 13:33
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| Sunday, March 22, 2009 |
| all apologies |
"I'm sorry." I can pull them forth like a magician pulling a string of coloured knotted scarves out of her fist. I have one for every occasion. Formal, informal; pro forma and full frontal. Sub rosa and infra dig. Don't you?
"I'm sorry." Passive-aggressive: I'm sorry that you feel that way. Purely aggressive: I'm sorry...and you should be too! Sometimes it means I love you, don't leave me. Transatlantic: I'm sorry? as in Pardon? or Say that again, I dare you. Sometimes accusatory: I'm sorry...that you stepped on my foot, you oaf. Sometimes self-loathing: I'm sorry as in I am a sorry state of affairs. We can swap them like Scrabble tiles, pass them like Hearts.
Sometimes it's grief. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, like calling Come back. Stay. Don't. Go away. Don't leave me. Those are all stacked above me, I feel them; they're circling above me in the rainy grey sky like planes piled up waiting to land. If I once started apologising I would never stop.
I am shaking you out of my hair; I am washing you out of my eyes. I am scraping you off the soles of my feet. I am peeling your name off my body. I am lifting the imprints of your hands off me. I will change my sheets and my name and the locks on my door. I am wiping down my room for fingerprints. I'm sorry. I'm not sorry. I'm sorry.Labels: no-one in particular, random shit |
posted by O @ 18:34
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| Tuesday, March 17, 2009 |
| spring |
Closing my eyes when I came but all I saw was your mouth, shining and rainwet. I want to drink from it.
(I want to consume your words; I would steal your breath and make it mine.)
Your violent heartbeat haunts me; all I feel is mine hurrying after.
You lifted the latch and the ice unlocked.
So winter closed its fist
And got it stuck in the pump.
The plunger froze up a lump
In its throat, ice founding itself
Upon iron. The handle
Paralysed at an angle.
Then the twisting of wheat straw
into ropes, lapping them tight
Round stem and snout, then a light
That sent the pump up in a flame
It cooled, we lifted her latch,
Her entrance was wet, and she came.
Seamus Heaney, Rite of Spring
Labels: confusion, flood, spring |
posted by O @ 12:25
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| Thursday, March 12, 2009 |
| an unequal music |
I once loved someone, quite passionately, and he did not love me.
He loved me later, and he loved me before, and this is the story about it.
He always loved me in bed, oh yes.
And sometimes he loved me out of it.....earlier, before I loved him, and later, again.
I felt in his touch that he loved me, before he could say it, and after he'd become able to say it, and even when he stopped being able to say it. Even then, I felt it still, somewhere in his touch, though more distant.
And when he said it again it was there again too, in his touch, and I knew before he said it again, some weeks before, that he loved me again.
But it was only in his touch that he revealed he loved me, for some weeks, or months, and this pained me.
I had to make a choice, and the choice I made was to continue. To continue to love him, and to never say that word. To love him as best I could, and as much as he would let me, and to give up the hope that he would love me--or at least, be able to say that word.
I weighed the options, I considered, I decided also, that I would rather love him, and that I would continue to do so, and make no demands upon him, at all to love me in return. I promised myself I would never speak that word, nor would I play games with him.
How can I explain? Why would I choose this?
I did choose, and I did so mindfully.
In part, I did so because he was my lover, and because it was like nothing I'd ever known. The awakening of sensual appetite, that had been so long denied, the joy we found in each other. The way we had loved. And when he grew cold to me, I was like the moon, the side that has never seen the sun.
but I *had* seen the sun, and so now I felt the loss of its warmth.
Its heat.
I knew also somehow, for we know everything of the beloved, --or rather, I did, and he did of me, because we were so close--that this was *because* he loved me, and was afraid. For what would this do, Love, to my life, to his?
(I was with another then, as was he.)
One night a week he would come to me, and we would make love all night, and not speak of this.
And so we continued.
Our lovemaking changed.
I was naked, on a couch, my feet on the floor, lying back
he was naked also, and on his knees.
he was between my legs
I had taken him to a sex shop. He had not been before, had not the nerve, nor the support. I had taken him there and encouraged him to buy a cock, because he wanted secretly to have one in his mouth, This I knew.
(He was partly exorcising a childhood trauma, as so many of us do in this way.)
I was wet and aching to have him inside me, and he brought out instead this toy, this shadow, this simulacrum.
He teased me with it, running it over me, my clit, my pussy.
I felt his eyes on me in curiosity, detached, like a scientist. Or an astronomer observing some remote object, far removed in time and space, the light that is millions of years old and perhaps gone already when he can see it.
I felt like an experiment, I felt myself become an object, felt myself not seen, for all he watched me.
I was not seen, although his eyes could not leave me.
He pushed it into me, slowly, watching me. My face.
He fucked me with it, thoroughly.
Part of me stood aside. I watched also myself, and I was inside cold now too.
There are some things I know, and can do, and coming is one of them.
And I did.
I came quite coldly, as women can do too, though perhaps not always as easily as men. Shutting off my emotions and my mind, choosing to concentrate on sensation.
But I was not the same again. And when he loved me again, I could not love him too, not the same way. The moon, sterile, airless....I was the moon, again, and solitary.
And when he saw me again, really saw me, and loved me, I saw him too--I'd always seen him--but pitilessly and remotely, from the moon's distance., with that cold light.
Too late.
I feel estrangement, yes. As I've felt dawn
pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light - ?
Close between grief and anger, a space opens
where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder.
Adrienne Rich, 21 Love Poems, XVIII
Labels: memory, repost |
posted by O @ 14:09
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| Sunday, March 08, 2009 |
| ancient history: sunday mass |
It's sunday morning and that is where my lover is, at mass, with his wife and children.
He often texts me during the service, and sometimes demands that I masturbate and come for him during it, though he won't be able to check his voicemail until it is over.
Although I comply, I feel contempt for him over this. Although I am, now, the atheist, I was once a good Catholic, and his notions of sin and trangression and forgiveness are so very far removed from mine. I am the atheist yet I judge him harshly because he does not hold his faith dear enough--his principles. My former Catholicism is why I find boundaries and transgression so compelling, but I don't think one can truly understand transgression or sin, or guilt, without having such boundaries.
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He tells me he doesn't worry about discovery, that he believes his marriage would survive it. What is between them would be strong enough to endure that revelation.
I have my doubts about this. One can love and wish to forgive, and yet ultimately find it impossible to forgive such a betrayal. I do not think any of us can predict in advance how such a betrayal will take us, much less another. The theory has a way of coming apart from the practice.
What would not survive that discovery would be us, him and me. I have no doubt that it would be a condition for her that he sever all contact with me.
I also have no doubt that he would comply.
My wife, he calls her to me, sometimes. My wife. I know her name and we use it, and these words from him, my wife, they fall on me like a blow to my chest. In those words and tone I hear finality. I hear both possession and being owned. I hear the weight of the things that hold him together, these things he has freely assumed that give him identity, that help constitute his self, the public one and the one he holds most dear.
I am no part of that identity; I am inimical to it. There is no place for me in his public world. Men shouldn't leave their families, he has said to me, and I do not think he sees why this causes me pain. It's not for any trivial and obvious reason--I don't want him to leave them.
It's because what this means to me is that I am shameful to him; it is not love for others, but shame and the fear of shame that will ultimately keep him where he is. Like Peter, he would deny me three times and turn his face from me.
She is his other half, but I am his other self, the secret one. Yet I know and have always known–I am only transient to him, an obsession he secretly hopes will lift and fade with time.
What is between us merely adds to the sum of his happiness, although it is the whole of mine.
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
Philip Larkin, Church Going
Reminder: all posts starting with 'ancient history' are posts I wrote but didn't publish then about my old situation, not now.Labels: ancient history, old news, X |
posted by O @ 11:37
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| Friday, March 06, 2009 |
| don't be ignorant |
Here's an...er... interesting photo from a rally in favour of Proposition 8 in California, which eliminates gay couples' right to marry:
"Homosexuality is not a race", this woman claims. (?!)
I agree. We should slow down and take our time to enjoy it, just like with all sexuality. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
There's nothin' wrong
With me lovin' you
Baby, no, no
You know what I'm talkin' 'bout
Come on, baby, hey, hey
Let your love come out
If you believe in love
LA Times live coverage of the ongoing CA Supreme Court hearing here.Labels: eX-pat Files, gay rights, politics, stupid right wing |
posted by O @ 02:32
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| Sunday, March 01, 2009 |
| autopsy |
'Autopsy' comes from two Greek words meaning 'to see for oneself', and writing often feels to me like an autopsy; it feels like I'm assisting at my own. Much of it is a matter of holding the knife properly, being careful not to cut too deeply or flay too much, too quickly.
(I do feel naked, often; I feel naked and splayed and laid bare by writing here. It's my own choice: to open myself like a book, to let eager hand and eye unveil me.)
Sometimes I feel like a science experiment, like I'm something he dissects and pins back despite my bleeding.
Or it's worse. I am the experiment and he peels everything away and pins me back not despite but because of the bleeding, and he touches and probes all those places because he knows that his deft and skilled touch placed exactly there will make me bleed.
It's a cover of sorts for his own bleeding, but also his desire to cut me.
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
- and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Adrienne Rich, 21 Love Poems, VII. Labels: meta, obscurity |
posted by O @ 21:19
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| Thursday, February 26, 2009 |
| [redacted] |
He made me kneel over  then he spreading me open.  I felt . I moaned biting . In the morning bruises and .
I want you to , he tells me, , .
You dirty fucking bitch, he curses me softly and , he .
Yes, . Now say it. Say you like it.
I do. I love it. I adore it. His voice shakes and , the way he .
Now he takes over and two fingers, . . .
I pleading, . sloppy that I , swollen and springy.
.
When he comes for me I , and because I make him. groan, , but I hold off, rocking on the brink, because I love , greedily and selfishly .Labels: privacy, speechless, totally stole this idea from a joyce carol oates story |
posted by O @ 07:47
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| Monday, February 23, 2009 |
| one art |
Sometimes it seems to me that I have spent my life in a process of discarding things, rather than acquiring them. One symbol or symptom of this is the material--It's not that I am not a sentimental person. I am. But for some reason my sentiment doesn't attach to possessions or material things. I don't have photos, for example, or photo albums. I don't have keepsakes, I travel light. This is the opposite it seems of how we usually go through life, acquiring houses, possessions...I practice losing farther, losing faster...keys and phone numbers and shoes, and mementos I meant to keep, train tickets, silly things.
I wish I did have these things sometimes, but they run through my fingers like water, like air. The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Sometimes it makes me sad, this seeming inability I have to save material things...I think it's that I dont trust them, or that I cant bear to hold them and then lose them--so i lose them myself, first, like leaving people also.
I look for you automatically in this airport, scene of so many partings and meetings for us. I cannot help expecting to find you among the expectant faces there. How long will it be, I wonder, til I cease doing this? The involuntary lift of my heart upon arrival, the drop, when I remember, you will not be meeting me this time, --and when you do, when i allow you to again, it will not be the same. Not those meetings we once had, for so long...one of us jumping the barrier and running to the other. How many times did people applaud us, when we'd stop kissing finally? I'd blush always, we couldn't look at the crowd, only each other...and then we'd hurry, to get to the car, so we could kiss again, no audience this time.
This flight, I looked out at the dear and familar country below me, where I have so recently been, the plane banks, drops, beginning its final descent...always before I'd feel my heart lift at that moment, and it did again, but then dropped with the plane. I pressed my hand against the glass, felt the coldness sink into my hand, the only clue that the air is thin and cold, though the sun was rising and beautiful.
I looked for you in the crowd, helplessly, although it was not you meeting me, but someone else. Travel farther, faster.
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop, One ArtLabels: 2006 |
posted by O @ 09:37
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Closed/on Hiatus
![Your writing in the other hand [sic] is pure filth and disgusting.](http://www.gotbears.com/gund/sesamestreet/75985.jpg){kind=link}