Ecstasy

When labels were collars around necks

ruffled, feathered, leather, yoke

you were either ‘gay‘ or you weren’t

I was. And I fell for a man.

Boy really. Once. Only time.

Hips smaller than mine, delving into my bones

like cream poured through coffee we burned calcium

our former labels damp at the door.

The value of a woman is in her smell

the rustle of her soul, how gentle and tough

merge together into womanhood

he was none of these

acrid, funny tasting (masculine?) Sinewy arms wrapping around

like a lost bear it didn’t feel ‘right‘ it didn’t feel ‘wrong‘

we were very young, his mind on fire trying to figure out the world

popping little tabs like they could pause time

because God, someone had to.

In Winter’s loose ends, we holed up at his brother’s flat

half-Thai eyes and burnt toast skin, along with the tang of marijuana

it’s hard not to fall for genius’s and sexual beings with magnetism in their lips

we lay in the dark, he emulated a girl and then became a boy

shadows on the wall, male, female, something more

I clung to him through torrent, it didn’t feel ‘wrong‘ it didn’t feel ‘right‘

night stretched out in submission, he loved me being a woman

in ways maybe another woman never has

joined we were, hard to separate, laughter, solace, grief, shards of joy

his body sleek like a girls, hard to accept the difference, I looked away

feeling him move inside me like a word

aching for punctuation.

I felt like a woman, a woman, a woman

contrast, a figure of eight in reflection

kinder than any girl I knew, smarter than any other human

a girl will touch your breasts with knowing, then ask you to find her bra

he brought me gypsy guitar and red wine and sucked until I screamed.

Dancers, we, danced in detail, scratching out labels defining

what this was, who, what?

I didn’t love him, no. Love an underdeveloped muscle

in a closed box, only women and their sharpness can pick

he searched my face, my breasts, my thighs, for signs

of relenting, wanting to bury himself within, become one

stay together, two cusps, why not? Be mine. Marriage

some papered form of devotion. Not ownership, just need.

I wanted to give him a child then, birth it

right there on the futon, beneath moon, hollering; “eat me until

I become glutted on your goodness,” We shook together

a ritual, procession into silvered ore earth’s center

letting go, the child came, bidden, quickening, like opening

your mouth and accepting change, drink me down

between my legs, the writhe of us, male/female/female/male

losing edges, the blurred outline of pretense.

We woke when the light came

to an empty room

nothing left of us to consume

just condom wrapper

unused by the bedside

and life in my belly rounding music

he wore my silver ring

I told him, don’t cut your hair

remember nothing

we walked in opposite directions

he took a bus

I, a train

he never knew I took him too

in my belly, quiet and full.

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Walk over

Walk over

on those long satin legs

with ankles crossing

like idle thoughts saturated

in honey

Skin on skin

when it matters most

don’t push away

move nearer

touch until it hurts to touch

remedy that disappointment we carry

in little cherry pink pill boxes

find in me, the answer to the puzzle

if we’re alone let’s make the most

of being able to move close

the rest of the world is spinning

obsessing about varied concerns and things

that don’t matter just as much as

those that do

take this second

to put aside your walk

and dance in my arms

inhaling the intensity

that is us

Never look back

Amidst worry, distraction, hunger, noise,

there is the brand, the scorch of you

sealing me in wax

pressing me to Florentine paper

sending me by leathered mail

with a longing as woven

as pulp that becomes a letter

writing out felted words

my throat cannot swallow.

The world is burning, in once-removed chaos

I find an unsteady peace, imagining us.

Everything is flammable, people smite each other

with little tools and heavy words

we forget our humanity often

we are caught with our pants down

jacking off to lies & hate in little jars

sometimes it seems the world would fair

better without our penchant for harm

but we subsist, in fragments, shards, pieces

of goodness separated and flung apart.

I should be considering the state of the planet

why it’s searing in October, why people

shoot someone for the color of their skin, how

evil can stand in White Houses and other

necessary questions …

but for this cupped moment, I am idle in my desire to save

not a lack of caring, but rather

the need to step outside the fray and

stand in the rain with you .

The rain here is warm, before we met

I did not know rain could be warm

I lived in a concrete trap with sad faced

buildings that many would give their eye

teeth for and I wished passionately, to escape

from

there was no softness in the city of my birth

no reduction of clamor

we spun like dervish on a wheel

forgetful of what mattered in the perpetual lean

to survive

I am here with you now, although

we are often not together, in my etched soul

you hold me every night and the candle

I placed in my window does not go out

for it burns eternal.

A song will reduce me to tears, driving wet

cheeked and aching for your touch, the surround

of your movement against me, a kiss that consumes

my cold center, turns me to the moon

shining and nude.

We are shimmering fish beneath dark water, finding our way

with our mouths, our fingers, the brail of need

containing sea pearls ready to sacrifice their shell

only you can lift me away from

the sorrows of the world and our many

pitted attempts to remedy what seems to be

our nature

only you can run yourself down my stomach

and opening me like a fan, find within, my

raw chorus

only you, with your pitch eyes and raven heart

can cause me to tumble, weightless over white cliffs

into our own private film

playing the days of our lives, for an empty house

the tick of our time, slowing now.

I should clean my teeth, brush my hair, push my

cuticles back and cross my legs in public, but for

the need to wear no hose, and driving 70mph down

empty streets, push you into me, finding

piano keys beneath our lilting surface.

By day I am a plain-faced woman with

ill-fitting bra and the marks of time sponged

on my face like imprints from a wild cat

who walked over me once, twice, forever

as you pull me from the world with your

electricity and I urge you

implore

to not

to never

look back.

The sum of us

Good Girls don’t write about sex

Overtly

They disguise their want in paralipsis

And allegory

Hoping the one they wrote it for

Reads in between watery lines

Just as we think we know and we don’t know

How to play a violin to life

What specific string to rub dulce, with bow and how?

To produce the exact sound

Of heaven

For we rely on machines purchased

In stores that wrap them in paper and

Blush behind their make-up

To soften the blow of loneliness

They even offer them in pink with ears.

I decided long ago to

Forgo batteries and think of you instead

With my flesh and my bones

Nothing more but those images in my head

Of you lying back unclothed

Ready for feasting

I’m long past apologizing

For my need at midday to think

About sex

Women do it too

Maybe not in the office bathroom with a magazine

Or tiny screen zooming in

But quieter, and softer, lying in the bath

Lights out, candles giving off waxy

Myth

The world is changed outside and we

No longer obey fluorescent lights

I dim ours and the moon in turn

Shies from long curtains

In dusk I see the curves of you

Reminding me, as if I needed reminder

Of why I think of you all the long day

And how and in what ways

For I don’t believe there will be a time

I’ll stop boiling my blood in imagining

And the moment we come together

Is ever more for waiting

It seems at times I wait, more than I actually find

Perhaps the rejoinder of fantasy is

We can inhabit it more, than what lies real

Yet as you undress, I know

Nothing I can conjure up, can compete

With the real feel of your skin against mine

The human touch of our hands enjoined

I may be called creative, but I could never

Describe those pleasured hours well

We are it seems, beyond all living illustration

For beauty when it is actual

Is not the plastic doll on the shelf

Nor her vibrating friend, who promises

To get you off so easily.

Some things are worth waiting for

Some people are necessary, chasing eternal

For even one night with you, would suffice

Against a hundred with someone else

I cannot replace what you do to my heart

Every time I see you turn a corner

And smile that crooked smile of yours

Eyes glinting, a little cocked half walk, half run

We meet in our dreams

We stay together when apart

It is the sum of us

We add up

Even as everything else

Does not

Don’t go home tonight

Don’t go home tonight

don’t leave this warm circle we built with our skin and bones

I killed an ant earlier and I felt badly

as I had watched it climb up a book and grab on to a little morsel

it has always made me feel remorseful for killing even the smallest creature

I don’t eat flesh for that reason

aside, you, I eat you, feast upon, alive and laughing your deep throated mirth

it never occurred to me one day I would have in my arms

the vibrating surround of a whole woman

the majesty of her glory, how she shifts like light

from somber to ejubilent in the fracture of a moment

women are not easy creatures, to tame a little, or keep satisfied

their minds, their bodies, are compartments of mystery

open the same drawer twice, out comes a different response

I will never understand or fathom, your maze of contradictions

that may be half the pleasure, for we who are simple clay

love the complexity and madness that is your fire

your dimpled skin and reddened throat leaning backward to my entreaty

the sounds you make, when I bring you close

a high keening like joy is just out of focus, a mayfly touching surface

I hold those memories inside me like water

crossing the empty desert of a day without you

night comes and goes as fast as pleasure

resisting my petition to remain static and eternal

if it would just slow and stay, I’d render you speechless in slow movement

the stirring of cream into coffee, languorous and ancient in ritual

until you flung yourself back into enervated ocean

where together we met beneath water and the whole world

was lit from beneath us

my love, asseyez-vous à côté de moi. faire battre mon cœur

stay

stay with me tonight

let us both be lulled into believing

morning does not need to dawn

The night I went out without shoes on

Wasn’t it a miracle?

Neither of us died trying to get to the meeting place

all the lights in the world seemed out that night

I had only known how to drive a few months

you were an old hat who routinely broke laws

with bottles wedged between your legs, a

cigarette burning ash down your fingers

there had always been a desire in me

for brokenness, as if I recognized in those

souls, something in myself

or a freedom in people who abandoned ettiquette

and discarding it, became suddenly free

I liked the wild, I liked women with untamed eyes

and dirty minds

the moon was full that night and we watched owls

gather themselves in flight and swoop

cloudy restaurant lights flickering in and out on the side

of the empty high way

I had watched films about a life like this

I said to you, films like Gas Food Lodgings or Paris Texas

where the greatest landscape was the tarmac

and the wide abundant merciless sky

where people sheltered in shadow and night creatures

crawled unseen and women met by closed restaurants

the flicker of their 24 hour advertising, sizzling against blackness

you were strange looking as if you had

deliberately tried to destroy yourself and I

forgot to wear shoes, my feet hot against still baked

soil, biting fiends flying in humid air, thick with ‘unspoken

entreaties

I wanted you to slam me there and then against

the unresisting brake of my car

leaving a bruise the size of texas clouds

I wanted to break apart like rocks with gem stones

inside, find something in both of us

bigger than the sky, deeper than weary darkness

but I was too young then and fear wrapped herself

like a blanket of stars and pulled me back

into the world, into doing what is right, into being careful

and sitting up straight when you eat at the table

all these years later, I still think

if we had set the car on automatic and just ridden

away

down that empty highway, into hushed, blooming night

we might have found the part of us

still lacking

every day we wake up

wash our face, comb our hair

and look too long in the mirror

searching for the lost parts

of our dark dreams

Pirate radio

Totems she left behind

what lost?

What gained?

cinereal clouds pierce cimmerian dusk

your fingers fastening in my hair

we interlaced in one another

le plus vieux pont, la plus jeune émotion

lineament of women,

crossing from mortal to sempiternal

drawing you to me, redolent with love-making

I empty myself inside you, like flowers plucked will dry

and retain their incense

your neck a budding posy of marble obsidian, onyx, malachite, rose quartz

pillowed thighs, yielding beneath entreaty

a woman is nectar, ambrosia, a mist on the breath of dusk

her center a temple to invoke

donne-moi ta soif laissez-moi vous rassasier

entreat the reciting of capture til we ripen into rapture

wordless in renewal you lend me promise,

I bestow the eternal endeavor turning metal dial,

through tempest comes outlying supplication of wireless reverie

Dormir sous les vagues

it’s 1999 again and we’re drying our wet socks on hot radiators,

the tips torn by exertion our fingers

chill-blain, curling mouths open to each other

fais moi pleurer de plaisir like blind seals

dipping beneath ocean coming up for air

as fire crackles across pirate radio wave

Stand in radiance

I think of you as I might

the collected soil outline of a beloved plant, died in Wintered frost

slow the creep toward perish, I hold back, I do not want to enter that room

with its antiseptic smell, lolling tongues of linoleum stretching like vast desert

here nothing thrives

not you, in your beige iron bed with metallic purr of machines overhead

nor the sucking out of sight sound of life being apportioned and gentle knock and brush of clutter off stage

I have learned to manage my desires, like labeled things put away and forgotten

they seem inconsequential in the gravity of this moment, elongated into a maw, disabusing itself in perpetuate howl

the green eyed girl who sat astride you devouring your skin with the hunger of the famished, is just a filament of memory, drowsy with being taken out and examined many times

what is real feels false, we fall apart with rules, we are well behaved in chaos

as rain falls, drowning response, we are free briefly, to call for Gods who are sleeping against their fatigue of us

I look down at my fingers entwined in memory, carving the halls of you with journeys taken to your very core

wish I could write like a girl who didn’t need to rinse her eyes of salt and her mouth of violence

there are no mirages in this sterile land, only the abundant hygiene of fear, roasting itself on impotence

here even you, are forgotten to yourself. I wonder if you recall how we were or if

this eclipsed reality, so suffocating and tightly arranged, is your only memory

occasionally I want to do something vulgar and wrong, to break the dreadful count-down

call an old lover, meet them in the broom closet for some rearranging of clothes, we don’t know how to handle things, so we explode quietly inside ourselves

just to feel I am not plummeting alongside you

faithless for sure, my brand of lusting for life and wellness, anything but encroaching perishment, we fear dying even as we seek it

apparently I am not alone in this

strangers will swap bodily fluids in desperate snatching, on top of folded doctors overalls. That strange, nameless brand of green we all loathe

I was a false girl before we met, learning to reign in her impulses against a backdrop of damage
thriving under the rental of youth with no care for those far-off dates waiting in distant wings

life was already its own brand of unbearable, it felt yet, too searing to imagine decrepitude or bad luck

instead, thrive on the daydream, liquor up the inside of your nightmares and send them galloping and sweaty into the abyss

rest in the drowsy arms of indifference, for everyone wants something and nothing is as it seems

stop caring

until blinded or crippled, you crawl to your date with the inevitable

hearing your ancestors crow their dissatisfaction at your cliched rejection of fate

compassion doesn’t cost, but as I stare at the vacancy in your eyes I know

i’d say yes to the proffered ease of escape

yes to anonymous lovers and things to someday regret

but not now whilst we stand under the radiance

when life still reigns and I know how to squeeze from it, that ounce of pleasure

not hedonist but survivor. Some survive in the calm shallows

I want to wade waist deep in warm water, feel your touch bringing me back to life

not forget what it was to circle the varied heavens and their demands

nor the feeling of my heart in my throat, birthing color and chaos in equal order

I imagine you as you were, impossibly alive, bright in ways that hurt my eyes

our dance around the mandala of us, ever decreasing, unawares of our own diminishment

your last words lingering in pre-storm humid air, like fruit left a little long in sun

sticky and soft we meld together and break apart with the astringent sting of broken clay

turning again to earth, as if it had never, not once, not even in dream

held water.

One such devoured moment

I am not overt

even when good green absinthe is poured over

a sugar cube

the silver tongs holding

sweetness just.

I am not overt

will not tell you of my sinning urge to

strip you dear of clothing and chew

the very mercy from you

beneath my aching layers

where frill and fancy and the soft cotton of

longing

lie on top of one another, spilling over

in quiet crescendo.

I’m not overt

as you bend toward sunlight, creating a halo of

light beneath your breasts and I see

the coffee cream and the glory of

all that I have ever desired

drawn in chafed clamor.

With reddened mouths, we

empty our aching into indigo rivers

for to release them

and become that thing of wanting

does not possess a language sufficient.

If it did, I fear I would

spend decades

describing what it feels like

to surrender to you,  feel the rounding

of dark silver, begin to etch my spine

its crescent capture, a moon within my

shuddering limbs

as we cascade over the other

swimming like night swans

oblivious to the beckon of dawn.

I fear, should it be translated

my throaty cries will be colors without

meaning, a lake of pleasure, where finding you

I sink beneath, without need of air

your fingers playing me

like a waterlogged flute

for the merfolk who surely have

no rest in their abandon.

It is my greatest secret

that you own my heart and I

supplicate myself in yours, with the

rosy thirst of a child seeking measure

I find myself in the echo of you

your fingers deep in me, striking urgent note

sonorous and defeating sound

together we listen to the rabbit stitch beat

of our hearts, pressed in uttered motion

as you enter my blood and I

absorb a little more of you

as suppliant as a beggar for your

nectar.

I fear should you ever not exist

the part of me wedded to you in between

the trees and through time would

perish like starlight.

For only you bid this girl

alive like ancient wood-maker, setting finish

the sound of us, abseiling into the other, our

wordless joy, limbs bound, skin hot to touch

this thimble of love vibrating its frequency

out to lighthouses and beyond.

Lost from you, I would be no more than

a figment of what was, tortured by

recollection, denied the warm sustaining of

your cherished arms about me.

I am not overt

yet if I were, I should

spill like a warm wax, the seal of you

pressing permanently into my epidermis

a shape of longing and need

where mouths are elongated into song

throats flung back in instrument.

You inhabit me, as I reach for you

cresting waves, growing barefoot dance

a chant in time with quickening pulse

your eyes black in half moon shade

swish of violent love, simmering damp and lush

I release to the witching smell of your

skin surrounding us like points of

flame in absolute blackness

rising up, exhausting their burn

falling down to rise again ever

defiant and pleasured

by the anonymity of their

evoking spectacle

as if I were alive

only in that moment

when you struck me

bright with sulphur

the sabotage of my sanity

given willingly for one

such devoured

moment.

To all but I

To all but I

this thickly guarded auburn sky

muted by restless wing

shocking in tight formation

this wonder of unseen & witnessed

edging crimson filigree against invading night

I am wrought in your divining spell

one word & we molt

episodes of grief shedding their fur coats

at our warm door way

how you haunt the periphery

of day, glossed over by time’s measured fold

it does nothing but stick firm &

intractable, a welt of bleating remembrance

turning up at the edges

you reduce me to ash

& I go to bed alone

touching the gloaming dark

with my hot fingertips like braille

reader might

possess the inveigling of

pure understanding.

I need your touch like

wood resists flame & then hungry

she tears herself nude of life

& burns for the glory &

actuating sate.  I want

your red mouth fevered, tongues

pushing inward, little fearing

& pain between my legs at

the exquisite wait you

torment me with as mercy

strokes me laughing, relishing in your

cruel game.

Such redress of norms

lose their ravishing clothes

dropping like forgotten prayer

& mislaid intentions

pretty jewels in ravens beak

my passioned abandon is found

against the long relief of your arms

supporting

us both in strength &

urge — Oh! What

infinite color you make beneath

me, one cheek turned rosy, the

other lost in cry & what dissolving

hour passes over us, conjoined

by similarity & difference

your dark eyes watching my

gilded reaching til cresting on

thundering waves we reunite

sore from our shout &

the varied cascade of joy

shining bright as youth’s

best cherry

heavy on Summer’s

day. It is this vapor of

your presence, indented in

my heart, sweet with redolence

& her sisters of undressed moments

crashing to shore, urging me

closer, losing myself readied to your

invite & the warm supper

we feast upon, as others will

find remedy in owning the world

& all her riches, we have discovered

in each other the best place

to live & die.

To all but I

this sonorous song resting on

rushing humid air shall chase your

fleeing gathered form till reunited

again, alchemy beneath

beating heart-blood

of two

told souls

with nothing

but all

to lose in

the other.