What I have learned

I have learned things this year and sometimes I think that I am not yet ready to gather this small lessons, but if I delay it any longer I will forget. Mostly I have learned to stand by yourself. Stay fast by what you have written. I have found that there will be more people who like you when you have been deemed successful by some other party. There will be new friends. What I know now is that some of these new friends will be like yourself, dealing with the same things, finding their feet in a new world. Reach out to them because they are lost as you are lost and there is comfort in their company. But stand firm beside the ones who were with you before success. They are the ones who will last. They are forever, or at least for a longish time. This is just a beginning. I will think on it. There will be more to come.

Quiet end to the year

Everything is different. 2009 as trickling through our fingers and I look back on it and it was a year. It was the year. It was a year when I realised that success has its own problems. The insecurity that comes from high expectations, the inability to write because suddenly it seems I have a reputation to live up to. And all the joys. Not fucking up on book tour (except the toilet paper that one time but we won't get into that). The post card from Helen Garner. That surely was the best night. The wonderful quiet joy of recognition by someone I admire. This is the end of a year and it seems that everything has changed. It seems that I have grown older and wiser and calmer.

I thank my friends for this. The ones that have claimed my sucesses as their own. My solid army of supporters, and amongst them the few that I call my family.

Now 2010. Time perhaps for some new year resolutions. The next book / books and a commitment to keep myself honest. I promise to use this venue to keep track of my progress. It worked for the last book. Let it work for this. A return to the furious vagina.

More research. More reading. More good books beside my bed, less job-books as I consider myself more a writer than a bookseller. A month of solid work in Januar. Less chat, more words. The internet will be my friend and not a mere distraction.

2010. Lets look forward to 2010.

chapter

So I wrote a chapter. Not a roll exactly but some kind of traction. Maybe it is alright. Some of it might stick. At least I am engaging with the text on some vague level.

I attribute it all to Susan Sontag. On Photography, and what happens to my head when I read her. I don't have to agree, but my mind feels stimulated enough to have a conversation. Affection was all about the body, now I am flexing my brain. Strange. The change.

We will wait and see.

falling down- from my brain book blog, reclaimed

The bike was all rust. Rust spreading like algae on the tank. Rust on the mirrors and on the handlebars. Thick dusty doilies of it. The battery would be worse than flat, dead. Her dead motorcycle. She squeezed the car in next to it, illuminating it with her headlights and she sat like that engine off, the shadow of it stretching out across the road. She felt it in her body, suddenly, the lean of a corner, that particular ache in her forearms from holding the throttle at its furthest extension for hours, days. All the open road. She remembered a moment when the sunset took her by surprise and she had to pull over, flip her visor up and breathe in the change of season. Just an ordinary day but this moment bedded down in memory like it was her times tables or a recipe for pancakes.

She turned off the headlights and the motorcycle retreated into darkness. She could see the vague outline of it but it might be anything.

She placed the keys in the bowl on the kitchen bench. The place for keys. Everything in it's place Neat stale air. She breathed. There was a time when she would have opened the window, but she had lost that battle to a sudden gust of wind and a broken glass. She turned the air conditioning up a notch thinking about open faced helmets, drops of rain hitting her eyeballs, the scent of night jasmine. Breathing in static dryness and artificial chill.
She could smell him on her.

She moved through the loungeroom and there was evidence of her passing, her bag dropped to the ground and forgotten in an instant, her helmet perched on the table, her gloves on the couch The jacket draped over the bench framing the kitchenette. It wa a regular complaint, her shedding. There were pieces of her everywhere, abandoned, unnoticed even at his place there would be something, old bus tickets fallen from her bag, a pen that she had used to write his home phone number down. The envalope on which she had written his number. (She should have folded it back into her pocket or the zip pocket of her bag) A tampon wrapped in toilet paper and secreted in the very bottm of this kitchen bin. Her mark on his place. Her address, glaring from the window of the envalope dropped onto the floor beside his bed. Pieces of herself.
She took her knickers off and held them in her hands staring at the crotch, expecting blood. She had a sudden flash of that first time in high school and almost laughed. This new first thing. Despite the last days of her period, despite the idea of something done for the first time, it had not drawn blood. No one hurt then, which was a relief.

She stepped into the shower. The sound of the water echoed. She would wake her husband and he would roll over in his sleep and glance at the clock.

She turned the shower to a slow drizzle, but it was no better. Soap, shampoo, bath cream. She rubbed the chemical scent onto her skin. She turned the tap off and reached for a towel. Fresh towels today. Today was Tuesday. There were fresh towels on a tuesday, slightly stiff and smelling of washing powder.

She huddled in it. The temperature had dropped. The sun rising and the cold air rushing in to meet it. There must be some science behind it, but it was a mystery to her.

No point in sleeping. She rummaged in the dirty clothes pile for different underwear, a shirt and trousers, rolling the things still warm from her body and pushing them to the bottom of the basket.

She emerged and there was steam drifting off her skin because of the cold and that was nice. The flat was a mess. She had done nothing more than drift through it and it was untidy. SHe began to stoop and gather. She lifted her helmet and there was a fine layer of sand on the table where it had rested. She wiped the surface with her palm and the sand was no longer on the surface but she could feel it on the floor under her feet. It took her a while to find the dustpan and brush which was embarassing. She found the broom quickly but that was not what she wanted. She looked in the laundry and behind doors and she thought she might have to check the bedroom but she found it in the pantry. She leaned over and she was light-headed. She was unused to this kind of protracted wakefulness.

She scraped the sand into the dustpan and she noticed that she had a headache. A big one. Something fierce and inescapable like you see on the adds for Panadol Forte. A headache, penance for her lack of guilt. At least this is wht she thought when she stood and covered her eyes with her hand. And then she fell, knocking the side table over, spilling sand back onto the floor, setting her helmet to skitter and stop in lazy rolling circles. It was a crash but not a terribly loud one, and in the bedroom her husband shifted once and settled and continued to sleep.
The clock flicked over, one red glowing digit at a time. The shower dripped. She had dropped the towel in the bathroom and it slowly soaked up the damp spill off the tiled floor.

Kissing. This moment of wonder opening, like his lips, a soft kind of understanding, a fruit falling and seeping into the dry earth. She had never put time into kissing. Twenty years of marriage and before that there was no time for something so preparatory. One kiss perhaps or several, but each one a hurried preface to sex. She kissed and she closed her eyes and her mouth softened and it was something that invaded her whole body and the idea of sex was superfluous. The kiss was the whole of it and the idea of sex seemed unimportant next to this momentous. Inside the kiss was a bitter-sweetness, all the love songs she had dismissed as saccharine, all the awful romantic comedies that she had always avoided. Not one kiss, but a series of kisses that might never stop. But they did stop eventually and she put her fingers to her lips as if she could pick up this knowledge with her fingers and remove it.

She replayed it. In this space there was time for it. She rocked away from the kiss, hand to lips. Thought, they were right. Thought, how can there be this new thing after so many years. Thought, I will have to rethink my relationship to a whole genre. Thought, maybe it is too late now. Because there was a glimmer of awareness. At the edges of the kiss there was a falling forward and pain, her body tensing. An overwhelming hurt, like the flip side to the kissing, and when she came close to it she almost woke to it and it was too big. It might swallow her.

She turned back to the kiss, replayed on a loop. This new thing. Tried to link the lyrics to love songs to it, but there was no comparison. The words were specific, fixed, nothing. The kissing was some kind of chemical reaction. It was physical. Some change was taking place inside her body and she would not be the same when it was done. She leaned forward. She touched lips. She softened and slowly opened them.

photographer's advance

At some point he turns the light off. This is the moment when Bec knows that she is being seduced. A lazy kind of seduction. No urgency in it. He stands and turns the light off and says “My eyes are a bit sensitive to glare” and sits back down a little too close.

Bec thinks, I am being seduced, and would have laughed except that would be impolite. Instead she smiles, trying to catch his eye, to let him know that she is onto him, that she wasn’t born yesterday, in fact that she was born a long long long time before him and that this is the oldest trick there is, used so often that it has become a cliche. She wants to let him know that the very idea of him seducing her is ludicrous because of her age and because she has had a husband for so long. In fact, she takes a breathe to say something like this and is surprised by the tightness in her chest the little tremour in her upper lip. When he leans a little closer to her in his chair she feels unsettled. When he holds her hand, she is afraid that the startle in her heart is shaking the chair.

She has responded to him physically from the beginning of it. Who knows what alchemy takes place in a human body when it decides it would like to be in physical contact with another human body. It was sometime between seeing his photographs, all framed up and hanging in perfect symmetry in the university gallery, and finding him leaning over her shoulder as the developer did it’s chemical best to turn shiny white paper into a thing of beauty. Bec caught his smell and he touched her arm lightly for balance or to underline something he was saying. He laughed at a joke she made and no one ever laughed at her jokes, in fact she often joked that she did not have a sense of humour and people would look at her with such pity that it seemed they didn’t realise she was actually making a joke. Anyway, something shifted at some point and his physical presence took on weight that made her slightly anxious.

Soon after she had read an article on Cougars, women of her age who were vilified or perhaps mocked, for finding younger men attractive and actively pursuing them. The word echoed in her head. She began to see them everywhere, these women dressed in leopard print, these women with makeup like war paint. These women who seemed much older than she did but who weren’t at all. Bec stopped wearing the lipstick that she quite liked. She became accutely aware of her cleavage which was ample, and began to wear button up tops where not an inch of it could be sighted, even if a boy was leaning over her shoulder staring down past her cleavage into a tray of chemicles and an image slowly revealing itself like a wonderful secret.

He holds her hand. At first it is a simple gesture to illustrate something he is saying. She can barely hear what he is saying. When he touches her fingers the sound is snapped off. There is only his hand resting gently on hers and the thump of blood rattling her chair and the rythm of her pulse says, I am being seduced, I am being seduced, I am being seduced. She does not mean to respond, would not know how to respond, and when she parts her fingers and catches his between hers it is more to break the intollerable suspence than to respond to his advance. She holds his fingers tightly between hers to stop the inevitable escalation, not to aquiese and yet it seems now she has done it that this response only encourages him. He shifts his chair right up against hers careful not to disturb the delicate lacework of their fingers. He leans his head and kisses the nape of her neck. All this in the dark. The dark he created by turning the light off.

New Thing - breasts

He touched her breast and there was and inevitable lurch in her stomach and she was surprisingly wet. She was rarely ever wet, joked with her husband about desert winds as they lubed up with spit, some from him, some from er, but now she was wet and no one had touched anyones genitals with spit or lube or otherwise. So he touched her breast and she felt the sharp shock of sex twitching her nipples to little daggers at her chest and, simultaneously she thought about the way large breasts, like her own, sag prematurely. That he would never have seen breasts as sagging as her own. He touched her nipple and the point of his thumb focused all of her longing. The skin stretched further than she ever anticipated it could. A lance of a nipple, any tighter and it would tear and yet there was her body, attached to it, her age-wearied wreck of a body washed up on his bed that smelled like wet dog and sweat and he wasn't particularly beautiful at first glance, but he was young, half her age or thereabouts and the girls he would have been with would be just as young and therefore she felt herself judged.

His kisses almost convinced her. They were heart felt. They were closed eyed things, mostly lip and breath with just a hint of tongue. His kisses were designed to reassure her. He took his time with them. There was nothing urgent about his tongue but he wasn't denying her the full force of his passion. He can kiss, she thought. He has practiced kissing. It is one of the things she likes about his most, his studious inhaling of information. When he watched her developing, printing, asking questions, taking it all in. It is how she first decided he might be attractive.

from the new thing again

"Are you going to take your clothes off?"

He folded his arms over the bulk of his chest, let them hang awkwardly at his side, folded them again. She had set him on edge and she was sorry for it, but also, somehow, relieved.

"Not with the light on."

"Really?" he nodded, "I did it with the light on."

There was a clatter, something falling in the flat upstairs. His mother lived up there. His mother who was barely older than she was herself. She had met his mother. His mother knew about Bec's husband. She knew Bec worked at the university where her son was enrolled. Bec turned her back towards him and settled onto the bed that smelled of old dog and boy sweat. Three upturned empty beer stubbies lazed on the ground near her toes. A pile of magazines and books about photographers that she adored were scattered amongst them. Novels that she had read and loved fell in an untidy heap.

She no longer wanted to sleep with him. She wanted to go home to her safe life and her safe husband and her darkroom with its familiar chinks of light that she was forever battling. A boat that did not need rocking.

He turned the bedside light off. He touched her back, the small of it, where the edge of her underpants cut into the flesh. She turned to him nd even in the dark she could see that his body was as imperfect as her own. Stretchmarks, sagging, extra weight carried in all the wrong places. His underpants were old and had too much give in the elastic. She felt tender towards him. There was something sweet about his nervous interface with the world.

He kissed her on the mouth and he could certainly kiss. That was one thing about him. His mouth, so gentle, nothing urgent about it. No tongue, just a soft pressure of his lips against hers and she felt her desire rise up in her and spill over and when he touched her knickers they were wet.

"Here." she took his fingers and slipped them inside the crotch of her pants.

"You are so wet." he said kissing her again.

"I am never wet," she told him and maybe he believed her, it was hard to tell. They knew so little about each other. She lay, then, on his dog-scented pillow and slipped off her bra and then her pants and she was naked. He struggled out of his own, tripping slightly, graceless. And even in this light she could see that the overhang of his belly hid a tiny, frightened looking penis tucked up inside a foreskin that seemed too large for it, as if it were a small child wearing his father's overcoat.

from the new thing

"Why do you put underpants over your stockings?"

There had been no words between them and now this. Bec found herself pausing, the stockings tripping at her ankles. Another boy would have been two shy to speak, but he was curious, this one. This was what she liked most about him. His sharp eyes. His inquisitiveness. She kicked the stockings away and felt somehow more naked, standing like this in her underpants with his question between them.

"It keeps the stockings up. Otherwise they ride down and I chafe."

He would be imagining her chafed thighs. She had betrayed herself. He cocked his head to one side, half listening, half a question.

"And then you have another pair of underpants underneath." He didn't touch her but she was suddenly aware of her second pair of underpants, the striped cotton things. These and the bra she was wearing. A black bra, unmatched.

"Everygirl you have been with has been your age right?" Bec asked him then, slipping her fingers under the waistband of her knickers, pulling them up slightly, hoping that this would hide the roundness of her belly, the stretchmarks, the very faint but also, she imagined, glaringly obvious age spots. Beneath her knickers, her pubic hair tangled like steele wool. She remembered a conversation between two of her students; 'Pubic hair? That's something you only see on fetish sites isn't it?' And then the general laughter that would be expected.

She was of a generation that still clung to their pubic hair as older ladies once clung to their beehives or blue rinses.

"Yes, I suppose so. Most people sleep with girls their own age."

She had moved on from her question and his answer startled her.

"Why do you ask?"

"Well, I suppose I am quite a contrast to them. I suppose my body is different, not quite as - tight."

"I suppose so. I haven't thought about it. It's not like I have a huge list of lovers to compare you against."

She had put the idea of comparison between them now and it could not be removed. She stood her ground, swaying slightly in her mismatched underwear, presenting her older, tireder body as if it were a challenge.

not her student, but someone elses.

She didn't want him to stray too far away from her body. From a distance, he would be able to study her skin, the sad, tiredness of ti, wilting away from her youth. The idea that he might touch the pale stretched scars on her hips and judge her badly for it added a layer of complication to the event. As if it wasn't complicated enough without the shadow of her insecurities. His finger traced a line between the little cluster of moles on her back. A constellation. He was making some kind of picture of them. The water-bearer, the Adulterer, the Hag. She closed her eyes and rested her hand on his hip. A fleshy hip, girlish. He was not the poster-boy for youthful masculinity himself.

Her own students were mostly tall and lean and athletic. They grew their hair long, carried copies of Camus or the poetry of Byron conspicuously protruding from their back pockets.

QWC Blog tour

Where do your words come from?

I read. This is how I ingest words. I have always read. The more you read the more the words become a part of your palatte. You can colour with them. They become richer with the years. You don't need more words you just need more ways to use them. All colours can be created using three colours. All stories can be made with simple words.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I live in a tiny flat. Too small to think in. I go out into the world to give myself space. I grew up inside four walls and I wished, always for the outside, for space and quiet and privacy. I grew up in the arms of loved ones. I now live in the arms of loved ones. I am lucky and have been. Always.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

It keeps changing. At the moment it is - At some point he turns the light off. - this may not be the same tomorrow.

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

I wish I had written The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. It is perfect.

What are you currently working towards?

I am working on a novel, the novel. I want to birth a novel out into the world

Complete this sentence… The future of the book is all in the content. The content will not change. A good story is always a good story. I don't care what shape the vessel comes in. All I can tell you is it won't be a choose your own adventure. It will be a perfectly constructed story. No games, to gimmicks, to bells and whistles. This is the thing that is sure and true.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

Hyperlink: http://www.qwc.asn.au/Resources/TheEmptyPageBlog.aspx

soundtrack

Right now I cannot imagine a time when I will not be as close to you as I am now, but that time will come. Life is relatively long and I have lived too much of it to think in terms of forever. This is a time that I will move on from. One day it will be long gone. If you cut the trunk of me there will be this time, with its particular colour like a stain. If you fell me you will be there. Immovable. Unshakable.

But on a day to day it will seem like you were never there.

I mourn now, in advance, because I believe I will not be able to bare the mourning period. But we bare up. I do, at least, and it seems to me that you have moved on unscathed, finding me in the moment of our meeting like a fond memory.

Sex on the Book Tour

Ethan. Surprisingly, China, because I thought I wouldn't be at all moved by him. Rosemary and the Museum of sex in London. Wells because of the Brown Coast and because he read without ego and seemed personable. Anna for her upturning nose and her talent and her eye of the storm comfort. Christopher. Ever, Christopher because of the incestuous brother love thing and the way that Leesa looks at him now. Angela because you are in my skin, looking for words to tip you over into. Clive, for understanding and for kindness. Bec - vicariously living out the dream for me. Cate, just because she is in her body solid on the earth in a way that catches in me. Michael and Michael for butting up against that line and almost stepping over it. Steven for your wide eyed terror and your freshness and the beer. Chris because you are undeniably and without a doubt. Kirsten for your tentative steps in the same direction as mine. But oh, Maria. Really, dangerously, Maria. And the itch on the back of my neck from where I might be bitten and carried weightlessly. Maria in he palm of one hand. Ethan in the other. Twin poles, equally tempting for such opposite reasons. Then Anthony. Finally and forever. Anthony.

And that, was the tour. Summed up, and with an emphasis on sex.

you teach me

You teach me things I didn't know about myself.

There are elements of my book that I didn't know existed. Your reading divides me into facets and makes me shine in directions that I didn't expect to shine in. I am more exciting, reflected in your eyes. I am brighter. I sit in the corner of the green room and my face is familiar they say. The paper. That photo repeated and in the repetition it becomes better than it once was. It is the kindness you lend to me. It is the aspects of yourself that I am humming along with, sympathetic vibrations. you talk about me in your reviews and I can see you. A part of you that I inhabit for the duration of the read. This pleases me. I like being you. You fit me.

Live Blogging

Live blogging just because I can, from the MWF Wordplay. What an odd experience which makes me wonder if I could live blog a sexual encounter. Not now, of course because what I share with my beautiful boy is out of public hands, but in a past life, perhaps. And is that like phone sex? Internet sex? Hard to live blog and listen and think sex and write FurVag all at once. Multi tasking. Keeps my mind off the experience. Odd here now. blog blog blog live.

autofelatio

Yes, he can suck his own penis. A slow climb from a lick to the whole deep throating dream. Yes his penis is of a good size so perhaps he was encouraged by the length of his erection and the relative surmountable length of his spine. You would if you could. Of course.

We talk about this, shouting to be heard over the music.

One of those parties that leaves me slightly insecure. Everyone so glamorous and people I should know. I am vague on the faces, lost with the names. I pretend to be calm an in my element. I am lost at sea till someone mentions autofelatio. Or was that me? Perhaps I started this discussion, probably. I see the relief on the small circle of faces as they join in the banter. Saved from social anxiety by inappropriate conversations about sex, yet again.

silent vibrator

I have a little thing to travel with. Just a thumb of metal and it is quiet, but not silent. It can't be used discreetly in a toilet cubicle. I could not wake up in the night with someone else sharing my bed and find some comfort with it. Not without waking them up.

She showed me one that was the small sigh of a winged creature creeping past on a slight breeze. Anodized metal, beautiful hues. perfect and expensive. How much should you pay for the comfort of silence?

I am on the road. My blogging is intermittent. My masturbation similarly curtailed. I dream of an anodized hummingbird. I wake to a small thumb of metal and a tell tale buzz.

Fake

When I front up they will know I am a fake. Not fake like Norma Khouri or even fake like James Frey. My empty place is where you take this thing that presents someone exciting, sexy, successful and usher me up onto the podium and I am just me. My ordinariness astounds me. I am too large and too loud at times and too wracked by insecurity. One eye on the audience, the other on the terror of never writing another good book again.

I should bask in the glow of good reviews, but instead I am distraught, wondering if this hype will just serve to dissapoint people when they read my next novel.

I am afraid I will freeze over when I am reading from my work. I am afraid I will not have enough to say about the creation of that work. I will be on the same stage as M J Hyland and Ethan Canin. Enough to make me quake even now, a week out from the thing.

Design and Art

He likes design but he doesn't like art. He subscribes to websites that send him a new designers work every day. He collects books with various gorgeous jackets. He frames postcards of album covers, frames from graphic novels, illustrations.

I don't like art, he says, theis visually obsessed boy. I open a book and there is a glossy print. I can almost smell the oil paint, a grand adventure in colour and texture. I feel it in my gut, and then, suddenly, lower than this. Art. It is crossing the line. Perhaps design is the kissing and the touching of breasts, but art is where you don't care about polite any more. No colouring within the lines. Art is 'put something inside me', my cunt, my hungry open mouth. Art is 'that gets into me'. An end to foreplay, a coming together of disparate things.

Perhaps that is why my lust for him could never last. He was light petting, an illustrators delight. I would have wanted something other than that in the long term. I would have wanted that time when you are in the moment, swept up into each others bodies. The erotic potential of things without edges. The erotic potential of art.

Not right

I am not quite right tonight. Not right in the head. The equilibrium is shot. Every thing said seems to be some slight, a critique. I have the self doubt upon me and there is no crawling out from under it.

There in the dark I feel the familiar twinge of bodily demands and now, I wonder if it would be too much to remove myself to deal with it. Are you touching yourself? No, or maybe, when the answer is yes. Shall I help you? Join in with you? Touch you too? How could I ask this, now, in this odd self conscious buzz of insecurities. So I lie stiff-limbed and hope it does not escalate, thinking of other times when I was more at ease with myself, not second-guessing.

Times like this are harder for me. Before, I would spiral down into more and more denial, no sex, no food, no alcohol, no bus to work, making myself ride in the cold and the dark without a light. Making myself work when I should sleep, making myself suffer for all the bad things I have chosen to shoulder.

This is a new era. I have a book and people like it and the natural end will not be where it once was. I must hook my fingers over the good and haul myself up and out of it. This mire. When things are not quite right in my head.

How you do it

I watch her and I see how she does it.

It is all come on over big boy, poking fun to make friends. Put down love. The kind that makes them squirm but pay attention. Reeling them in by seeming only half attentive. When they are there at her feet she cuts the line and laughs and walks away and they are hers.

A whole party full of men and all of them buzzing around her. It is distressing for me. This treat them mean game. I like her but I see the cruelty in it. I seem them stripped bare, humiliated. I see them lose face and not care.

I see how she does it and know that I too could have any man there. At my feet, kicked and beaten and hoping for scraps off the table.

That horrible game. A cliche. But it works. It works for her. Maybe because she is prettier than I am. Maybe because I can't hurt people like that, even if it makes them love me more.

I would play but I can't. You are either liked, and cared for or I give you a wide berth. There is no middle ground.

Therefore the adoring hordes are at her feet and not mine.

two days without

I missed my first post. A second? Could I leave it one more day? In 530 days I had not missed one night. Now I have. I feel slightly overwhelmed by this week and the one to come. I see my friends, I talk and smile and laugh but on the inside it is just running. I have not given up sex but I am less anxious when I am alone and there is no one there to judge me. I remember my panic and my fear, the feeling that I will be over run.

This is what I wanted. Want. This is my longed for thing. There is sex. It is on offer. But all I want right now is a hug. Just a hug and perhaps a kiss that warms my lips like cognac and helps me to stop running on the inside. Just for a moment.

I talk and laugh with my friends but I want to haul myself into a foetal ball. I want to shout, hug me. hug me. Hug me. But I am silent.

only watched for a second

I saw a clip on facebook today. Someone on the top of a train in India. This filmed on a mobile phone and then uploaded and then passed around. The man hiding. someone trying to make him get off the top of the train. The man standing and walking. The man raising his arms. The sparks, twice, the man twitching then falling then smoking for the longest time.

And I felt nothing. At the time. But now a pervasive wonder at my own emotional disconnection. This replaying of my own non-reaction which is, in itself reaction enough.

But if you saw that on the street you would be effected, he tells me.

But the man died.

Like in ancient Rome where the lions tore apart the men and women but it happens at a remove. It is presented as theatre.

But the man died.

Like the time I saw a woman having sex with a male horse. I only watched for a second but I could tell she didn't want to do it and it wouldn't end well.

But the man died so what happened to the woman.

I didn't watch it till the end. I didn't want to watch it. I think she was forced to do it. It was filmed in mexico or something.

But the man died and the woman what happened to the woman?

Wouldn't end well, have you seen the size of a horse? Hung like a horse? Only watched for a second.

And I wonder how long I would watch it for. All the way through. Like the man on the train. And maybe I would go back and watch it again like I might with the man on the train. Not to reinforce the death or the pain or the disemboweling but to find out why I feel so little. Why I am removed from my own empathy.

Inaginary cities

all the places the story could have been set in. The vast cast of characters. The limitless potential.

Limited.

By one time. One place. One character.

But as I narrow the narrative I know that I have made the correct choice. This was the right decision. I am happy enough. I have opened a world of possibilities just by peering through this particular doorway.

Sex. In a good way, captured and pressed between pages like the remnants of a flower long dead now.

story

The story about the porn stars. How man times have I made a start on it. Of course I keep coming back to it because it is so nice, the chaste embarassment of the post coital interractin. I would write it here now but I am tired and there are still things to do before bed. Masturbate, drink tea, sulk about my lack of literary output, fight with my friend on gchat. Make up again. All this and then I will have to drag myself out of bed and ride my bicycle to work. My joints ache. I am post-viral aparently although there may be other diagnoses. Stress, excitement, happiness. So happy that my ears are aching and my muscles feel like I have swum the English Channel. Jelly fish stings - but there we have it, another sea analogy and I feel self conscious about these things now.

We are down to the honesty of one blog to the next because I have no buffer, just as I have no resillience against the germs and viruses that are feeding on my energy.

So now I will not write about the porn stars, although I will. One day I will. Instead I will play the third mix tape which is maybe my favourite and search the internet with things that might help me cross one thing of my list or another.

feeling

When the feeling comes back I realise it has been a while. I have been sleeping in the kind of smiley faced bliss of someone who has no need to care. When I feel it, return from distant memory, I know that I have begun to think that happy was some kind of natural state. It has a complex flavour but I break it down into its component parts, lonely, self-doubting, angry.

You are not a writer unless you are writing. Therefore I am not a writer. I know this as the positive reviews come flowing in. I know it as I prepare to stand up and chat pleasantly with readers at various festivals. I will want to stand and tell them. I am not a writer because I am not writing.

Yesterday I had three orgasms in a row. Sore, sated, I wondered why the sudden rush of excitement. something to do with my impotence when I settle in front of a computer. Something to do with the dry spell.

I settle in front of the computer. I send words that are nothing but similes all strung together, pretty tricks to hide the fact that there is no heart to the thing. Hard to read, he tells me and he is right, but I want to bite him for it. I want to hunker down like a wolf and howl and snarl. I am suddenly back on the bridge looking down at the water. I am suddenly in the trench and him there telling me I am not allowed back in it. So it leaves me standing in the firing line, a helpless friendless target and I turn my gun on him, friendly fire, because he will not help me now. This small success has left me naked and without a book to shield myself with.

back to the old thing

The manuscript re-emerges like an old school report card, the year I was ill, the year I didn't care, the year I smoked cigarettes and didn't study. Imaginary times because I always put an effort in. Still, the words feel like failure. A manuscript that has been rejected. One that is abandoned. I do not want it to die. Here, I rescue a fragment and send it out into the world. More to follow.


Because she is asleep lying face down on his father’s bed, Simon is free to look at her. There is a sheet. It might once have been pulled discreetly over her flesh but now it serves only to underline her nakedness, drawn loosely around her knees, a slack lasso of white cotton. If someone were to pull on the end of the sheet it would snap her thighs together, hobbling her, but as it is, she is slightly exposed to his gaze. He is gazing. It is wrong for him to be standing here, feasting on the image of this strange naked woman, but this is the first strange naked woman that he has ever encountered and he is instantly, painfully aroused.

He holds his breath because any sound might wake her. He has a limited time to stand here in the doorway. She will wake up. If he moves she will wake up. If he exhales she will open her yes. He makes the most of stolen seconds. He looks at the twin globes of flesh that are her buttocks, the plummet of her waist, the fat curve of a breast squashed out from under her body by her weight. Her nipple is hidden, but the swell of flesh is enough to make his palms clammy. The breast alone would halt him, feeding on the image till his jaw ached and his eyes watered, but then there is the gentle parting of her thighs and all that lies between them.
The image of her nakedness fills up his head.

In this moment Simon would not be able to say if her hair is red or blonde or black, but he would know that her thighs are thick fleshed and that there is a little swollen mouth between them, hidden. He did not expect this. All of the magazines he has seen show a small incision, a cleft. The skin of the airbrushed beauties is neat and bald and dry. He has never seen anything like this fleshy pout. He would never have expected the sweat or juice or whatever it is that glints in the dim light, to be so visceral, so wet. He never anticipated the profusion of dark hair licking the inside of a woman’s thighs.

Simon stands and he stares until it is an image that he will be able to draw from memory, until his hands shake and his knees threaten to topple him. He is light-headed with looking, terrified that a minute more would propel him into the room. He has a terrible foreboding. He imagines the animal side of himself, the side that masturbates till he is red and sore, the side that secretly looks up the skirts of girls on the bus, he imagines this animal Simon ripping free of his skin like the Incredible Hulk, tearing out of his clothing. He imagines the Hulking animal Simon, climbing up onto the bed and throwing itself onto the naked flesh, unrestrained and unrestrainable.

He can no longer hold his breath, red-faced, trembling, Simon exhales.

The naked woman rolls over.

Breasts. Simon sees breasts.

The naked woman opens her eyes.

old habits

Old habits and the long time of their decline. We think we have moved on, but here we are falling into them. The rut. The mundanity of old tired sexual positions, patterns to the masturbatory experience that I swore away from. It is the comfort. Familiarity. Like scraping the ultramarine blue out from under your fingernails.

stories

I remember when they were stories about things. Settings. Characters. Now it is all amorphous.I am too tired and distracted to picture a place and to do things in it. Today, at work, suddenly, I felt very old. Someone told me I looked tired.

I realised I have been behaving like a child. I smiled at a baby and said it was cute to a mother that was ten years younger than I am, or more. I think I meant it at the time. It was smiling. It seemed like an ok baby. When they had gone I just thought about how young she looked, the mother, and how I didn't have the energy for children.

I want a new way to masturbate. I have lost the heart for it tonight.

nude painting

She asks to paint my portrait and I know I will be nude. I will be nude because my body bothers me. It shouldn't but it does. It moves and feels and plays the way I want it to. I love the way it services me. My wonderful skin. But to the naked eye it is a jarring thing, this vessel I am poured into. I will unveil myself as I never unveil myself. The hand full of people who have seen my slowly sagging skin in the last twenty years are special for my trust in them. I will stand unclothed now for her to translate. I will be nude. You will look at me without judgment.

Rose

I have an image of a rose, petals unfurling between parted thighs. The sheer joy of dipping your head to smell it. The velvet of the petals nestling against your upper lip.

I chanced on a tender scrap of pornography last night. A video just like any other but this was different somehow. The two men seemed to like her. One of them dipped his head and tasted her. Some kind of pleasure in the cunnilingus. I remember my first love, now dead. His joy from going down there. His excitement. A never to be repeated love of oral sex. I wonder if it is just me or if all men come to it reluctantly. He wouldn't participate in penetrative sex that one. He made me wonder what it was about me that I couldn't be breached. I couldn't ask. I was young and insecure. He had an answer surely, but he died with it. So I am left to wondering, why did you never enter me? Is it because all else can be kept at arms length? Is it because you do not want an intimate connection? Keep it light. Keep it play. Is it because you never had the heart for it? Or because to leave the bed to get a condom would mean to change your mind about the whole thing.

Too late to ask when he has died. Too late.

So now, with the memory of his lips and the echos of good pornography subsiding, I begin to wonder about cunnilingus and all the worries about my inadequacies surface. Am I too strong tasting? Is this, again, too intimate an act? I imagine the petals of a flower opening. The soft velvet. I would dip my head and taste. I would stay there for the longest time. I would learn the machinations of my own sex by scent and touch and taste. For you, does this seem unclean? The differences between us are underlined. And there is a sadness. but it is a small one. We have other things.

aquatic abandon

Like the feeling that everything opened can be filled. Dream of a Fisherman's wife. The cold wet cunnilingus that peels the lips open. My lips open and there is a desperation for something to fill the hollow place where my scream could be. I suck on my own flesh, a finger, a penis, a beak or a tentacled strap of muscle. I feel the suck in my cunt but also across my skin. I smell fish and salt and sea wrack. I taste pre-come and foam and the grit of sand and pubic hair. sucker feet sticking to breast and pubis. And this is a dream but it is in my skin and on it and I wake to the smell of white bait and crab and my flesh is a tentacled flower tonight.

tell us the dog story 3

This in the night.

Girl, warm. Freshly washed, smelling of sweet chemicals that humans seemed to like. Him, pungent, the stale scotch sweat leaking from his armpits. His pyjamas unwashed for far too long, the yellow stain of his sweat on the back of them. Him with his arm draped around her shoulder. Him with his face pressed against her collar. This moment with him. This shuffling back against him. This contact, the hardness of him. He shifted his hips once, twice. She held her breath. This love. This huge love. And his sob against her neck.


It grew warmer. She shed her winter coat. He shed his clothes and moved about the house naked. Staring at his reflection in the dark windows or the silent television screen as if he had discovered a stranger in his own home. Mild surprise, concern, curiosity. They lay together in his bed and sometimes it was an easy comfort. Other times he grew agitated, pushed at her, ordered her to the foot of the bed, regretted his tone and fell on her with apologies. Girl breathed through it. She turned her rump towards him. Love, she thought, biggest love.



There was nothing to it when it came down to it. It was quick. It was nothing really. Just a physical representation of the big love. After it was done, he clung to the nape of her neck with his fists, shaking. That was the nicest part. She was reminded of her mother, a vague memory of being carried, the loose skin at her neck held tight, a comfort.

He put a mattress at the foot of the bed. She understood. He needed space from it, from her. She sat up on her haunches and rested her chin on the end of the bed and watched him twitch and clasp his knees to his chest. Sometimes at night he cried out in his sleep and then she would leap up onto the bed and lie with him. It was summer, hot, but he had taken to wearing cotton pyjamas that stuck to his skin, damp in patches.

"There," he said, tired, barely awake, but raising his hand to stroke her chest regardless. "Good Girl, good Girl."

And Girl closed her eyes and abandoned herself to love. The biggest love that almost tore the skin off her with its ferocity.

tell us the dog story 2

Since the death of the wife he had taken to leaving the bathroom door ajar. Girl wondered at first if this was a sign of hope that one day his wife might return from the grave and step into the shower beside him. Or perhaps he knew that Girl was there, her paws protruding onto the damp tiles, little hushed sounds at the back of her throat as she scrambled precious centimeters forward, quietly nosing the door a little wider. Perhaps her presence was some sort of comfort.

The sound of the shower stopped suddenly. He stepped out onto the bath mat. It was ludicrous. She looked towards him, the little upward bounce of his penis.

Huge love. An ache.

She watched him stare at his own reflection in the mirror. Lost. Girl shuffled closer.

Not lost. He had her. She knew exactly where they were. Here. In their bathroom, with the cold tiles and the fluffy bath mat that his wife had loved.

tell us the dog story 1

No one could ease the pain he felt, had been feeling for too long now. She raised an eyebrow as he entered the kitchen, held her breath. She could smell the grief off him. Emotional pain like an aura captured by Kirlian photography. He wandered in a fug of it and Girl felt her throat tighten. She would not whine. He always misinterpreted her care for him as hunger. At her most empathetic moments he would open a can of meat and scoop it into her bowl. Sometimes at night he would let her climb onto his bed and curl up beside him. Sometimes he would bury his head in her neck and she could feel his whole body shake with the pain of it.

This had been happening for too long.

He sat in the chair he liked to sit in and she dragged herself closer with her toenails, sidling up along the linoleum till she could rest her chin on his foot. She breathed on his ankle. Each little puff a whispered secret. Your wife is gone. I am here. Your wife is gone. I am here. And as if he had heard and understood he reached down and touched her head. Girl closed her eyes and whined, knowing there was no way she could love something or someone more than this.

She had taken to easing her way into the bathroom. When his wife was alive he would shut the door completely. She would sit outside, and even her thigh pressed against the bathroom door would not budge it. Some mornings, on the weekend the wife would join him in the shower and girl would pause between breaths, listening for the little human sounds, the coos and giggles, the grunts. There was of course something not right about it. Her excitement was ludicrous. They were people. Naked, hairless, ridiculous.

Once they left the bedroom door open and she crept in and sat by the bed. There was something tender about their little naked bodies entwined that way. Rolling like pups, and the mounting that occurred in the middle of it seemed a mimicry of adult love. The smell of them, hot and acid, off-putting at first, but she got used to it, became almost excited by it at one point, hunkered down onto the carpet and pushed against it in that way that felt best.

Stopping

I have flagged the idea of stopping, finishing this blog.527 days of sex and then nothing ever again. I have a book now and that outweighs a blog after all.

I have never been good at stopping. Whispered, 'wait, wait' and me struggling to hold off. I need to be ordered to stop touching it. I need to be restrained, physically, because when the escalation has occurred it is difficult for me to find a place to rest. But wait, wait. I want for this to be a shared pleasure, so for my pleasure and for yours I will not finish here. I will continue. Maybe one day we will come to our collective natural ending.

Affection: a Memoir of Love, Sex and Intimacy.

So. It is done. I have a book.

http://www.textpublishing.com.au/books-and-authors/book/affection/

and can be bought from here

Avid Reader

night before

Night before jitters.

I wonder how it felt. The night before the first sex ever. The night before I left home. The night before seeing him for the second time - the first time doesn't count as there was no anticipation. The night before I left, knowing I would never lie beside him again. The night before the announcement of the prize. The night before my launch. When I wear that dress that makes me look nice and I have a list of people to thank. The night before it goes public. The night before they have started to read it. I am still a closed book this night before. Tomorrow, or the next night, you may see me differently.

best anti climax

I remember rare moments of post orgasmic bliss. The times I have wanted to lie with it. The ones that lasted days, little jolts of memory. Instant replays unexpectedly. So rare. I remember the ones I have had. Wish I could have more. But this kind of thing would wear thin. I must wait for the sneak attack. Sex in the afternoon and the sun falling on my naked body. First time with a new lover. The consummation of something coveted.

by numbers

She puts hand on arse, smooths and then slaps.

She lifts edge of frilly knickers and inches them down.

He steps closer and erection can be sighted by camera.

She starts to moan just at the sight of the erection.

I turn the sound to mute. There is nothing less exciting than the moans of a girl who is directed to do so. I am distracted by the thought of this and follow a memory trail to moans that seemed staged, sounds that were not the real response to physical stimulus. To my own noises which sometimes surprise me, stark piggish grunts or the held-in sound of someone asphyxiating.

He enters her. Lifting her leg for the camera's shaky gaze. In a little, out again, in a little more. All this to show us, the viewers that this is the actual act of coitus that we are paying for.

The actual act of coitus. Staged. Performed for me. And the sight of two bodies working at and into each other is eternally stimulating. My own body responds, readying itself for orgasm. Yes. I know that there is no emotional connection, but this is a vagina and that is a penis and they are in contact with each other and I am watching it. He does that fast thing, that piston hard fuck action that is quite popular. It is not a rythm I can sing to, but he takes his pauses and the camera zooms in for a close shot of a penis entering a vagina.

I come. Quickly. My body locking up as it does, muscles spasming in my back and my neck, toes curling, nipples snapping erect. I know how my body works and what it will do. I know that this is a quick physical release and the come down is sudden and brutal. I am overwhelmed by the emptiness of post-porn orgasms. I feel the weight of loneliness, and that too is associated now with sex. This terrible lack. Sad flourescent glare. My to-do list suddenly visible, throbbing in time to in fading pulsations.

insert amusing story

insert amusing story with vaguely sexual connotations here - perhaps one about seeing someone's penis in the sand pit or one from later in life, one that is about a sexual encounter that was exciting but that left me feeling decidedly insignificant. Yes. I remember when I used to write whole stories. Beginning, middle, end. I am aware that I have become internal. Random shrieks into the void. Hello? Are you there? Is there anybody there? I will turn to fiction. This is the answer I suppose. That last post, ghost post. Was the end of it.

picking your team

I wouldn't pick me either. When it comes to the team, I am not a team player. I can run and at times the pack will follow, but I am more concerned with my own direction than the group trailing behind me. I select my companions carefully and ocasionally. When my choice is made it takes a lot to shift me. You pick people as if you were throwing a party, invitations willy nilly. The more the merrier. It is your style.

I had my hand raised. I wanted to be picked. I still have a small cold place inside me that would have liked to have been selected. I watch the team gathering around you and I know I am not a team player. Not your team. I step aside and let the crowd gather at your feet. What I thought was doubles, tennis, has turned out to be basketball. I put my hand down slowly.

Don't pick me. But you probably weren't going to anyway.

secret museums

And the things we keep teach us more about ourselves than about others. Unearthing. Smelling of soil and dust. The secrets we make in dusty places. The hypocracies. The exhibition of broken condoms. The exhibition of torn and marked skin. The specifics of taste and smell, catalogued. Little pins with name tags attached. The spread-eagled mystery of our flesh. The special collection of things that certain people can do for you that no body else has ever replicated.

lovingly secreted. kept in dusty places. Kissed gently, and from a distance so as not to set off the various protective alarms.

same place

So we get to the same place again and again. They asked this question a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago. Cave-girl wondering if she has been passed over because of her narrow hips. Cave-boy knowing that he throws his stone axe without the same vigour, gets less of the beast to feast on. A restless race of creatures continuously battling with our insecurities. The only constant is our own fear of inadequacy.

He doesn't really see me in that way because there are other cave girls, one for each day of the week and then some. I will never choose him because he is not so good with the axe-throwing. But we want to be picked anyway. Even if nothing will be done in the scheme of things, we each want what we should not and will never have. We each want what we wouldn't want if it was on offer anyway.

I turn to the great philosophers and I see that again, I am not unique. I am up there with the Germans, the Existentialists and the Greeks. I am cave girl in her own corner, withering from the cruel gaze of natural selection.

tangle

When you perform with puppets, sometimes their strings get tangled. There is a lesson in this. I am not sure if it has anything to do with sex, but I can see where there is an overlap. A mess of strings and things entangled.

Ah. Writing about sex. Do we get sick of writing about sex? Tomorrow there will be more sex and the nest day. It is the only constant. That, and the idea that we are not in control of our own strings.

writing about writing about sex

Writing about writing about sex is not very sexy. See instructional video - how to have sex with boy/girl. See 'turn the page now - beeeep'. See hygene documentaries played to 12 year old girls who are about to / have just got their first period / pubic hair. See lecture theatres with 100 sleepy students waiting for the clock to tick over to beer o'clock.

Beer o'clock is more sexy than writing about writing about sex.

Writing about sex is more sexy than writing about writing about sex.

Sex is more sexy.

Sex is way more sexy.

Finding a new position after 20 years of tried and true repertoire is much more informative than my article about writing about writing about sex.

So give me the sex and take away the writing about. Give me the new found pleasure and let someone else provide the instructional video.

Sister

I am certain that my lack of competition irritates you. I yield. I refuse to fight. I am a damp sheet hanging on the line and the speed and ferocity of your attacks have often backfired, causing you harm. You are punching at ghosts. I am insubstantial. You could have taken everything from me and I would have shrugged and walked away.

I remember, as a small child, you would steal a toy and cut its mane, its hair, its fingers off at the knuckle. I would hold my tears until my head ached. I would shrug, dry-eyed as if I never cared about the toy in the first place. Sometimes I would comfort the severed plastic stumps later, smothering the damaged hand with kisses. "You know I love you. You know I will always love you." I would sacrifice all that I cared for in an effort against competition.

when I stop

When I stop circling round the problem of you I will let go.

I want to let go. I want to move on without the problem of my lust dragging behind me, snail trail. Everyone can follow the silvery slipperiness and find you at the end of it.

I am embarrassed by this.

I am in two minds. I see-saw between this double-think. I think of Orwell. Enemy and friend at the same moment. We have always been at war and we have never been at war. And so I circle, hooked on the idea of you and it is beneath me, this erratic behaviour.

On his death bed and his love declared and me knowing that this was something that could not be returned in the same way.

I love you, just not in the way you want me to love you.

And so I wrestle with myself, jumping between the lover and the beloved, knowing that there is no happy solution, that the only way out is to slink off to somewhere else, dragging my snail trail of desire along with me.

I will let you go. And, as is my style, I must let you go completely and utterly. And all this love, all this sad wasted love.

He died with all that sad, wasted love. I move away, love hissing out of me like I'm punctured. Why can I not just re-frame this. Why can I not just hold this love out like a present or a shared secret? Why is it all fisted in my womb like a cancer? Why does it hurt in my groin? Did it hurt in his groin? His love for me?

I am letting it go. Honestly. Just a few more days in the water and I will climb out and towel off. Because it makes me cry when I stop. It makes me lonely. I miss it like tobacco or like alcohol. I miss it like some people miss heroin. I miss it like he missed me, fiercely, irrationally and without any hope of repayment.

women in competition

Impossible not to compare. Her against me. But I have grown older perhaps. I do not bristle with my lack of charm. I will not change myself in the spirit of competition. Perhaps her lips were smoother. Her clothes ironed. Her skin soft, or more compliant. Perhaps she made the right noises and I did not. No matter. I had my climaxes and I enjoyed them and it is a thing of the past. We will not compete over who was more so. It is unimportant now anyway.

Michel Houllebeq

My back goes out. Then I remember Atomised. Not a particularly pleasant memory. The spine that cracks, the death of the final fuck. I couldn't withstand to pummeling right now. I make creaking noises when I look to one side. The heart is willing but the body should be confined to a wheelchair. Sexy wheelchair. Sex in a wheelchair. Endless possibilities with a back brace. I fling my head back in orgasmic glee and hear the knuckle crunch of a spine that is unhappy. Put me down like a dieing horse. Someone. Kill me while the pained glow is still post-coital.

Review

Perhaps it is impolite to give you a star rating Kneen. A simple pull-quote perhaps

"fine. Room for improvement"

because I put such little effort into performance. the orgasm that I am seeking is my own. Yours is just something that I use to turn myself on. Your excitement, an inspiration. Your climax a little visual stimulus.

It wasn't always so. I am sure I remember times when my sighs were there to make you harder. My mouth around a penis, purely for his pleasure.

More recently it has been selfishness that motivates me. My mouth that likes to be filled, my breasts that need to be sucked. My various penetrations that all add to the pleasure. All for me. I swallow if I feel like it, if the taste is right on the back of my tongue. I will spit if I chose to. I will take the pain or the kindness in my own time and my own way.

A sign of age no doubt. I hear about women who live alone and wear a groove for themselves in time. My groove is my selfish climb towards orgasm. Mine. For me. And who are you again? My love? My lover? Thank you then, but the pleasure is all mine. And no, I do not fake those orgasms. I never have. If you don't believe me, put your fingers in here now and feel it for yourself.

Rating? Five star full body orgasm for me and your fingers, your penis noting the excitement. You? What were you doing again?

Girl

My, she is pretty. What a striking face, underplayed. She dresses down but it is impossible to hide the gorgeous eyes, the crazy jut of her cheekbones. Her perfect mouth. She is luminous. I could eat her lips. I won't. But I could. I appreciate the strength of her and her intelligence. She reads. She thinks about what she has read. She is a breath of life in a dead place. I would talk to her for hours, but we have other lives. Other places to be. I would run and run beside her and when I tired she would run in circles around me. She is where I want to be. She is my conscience. She is me.

who chooses the porn? This is a tricky point we have come to. You select the site, it is up to me then to choose the porn. Here is where we find out most about each other. Here is where our differences are underlined. I could pick the clips that you would watch from the thumbnail photos of them. Perhaps you could click on my preferences without much thought. Anal sex, the double penetration, fisting, if it comes to that, the body, opening to another, the body swallowing more than it could handle. Perhaps you judge me badly for the extremes of my taste as I know and judge you for the things you will choose. I do not share your passions or perversions. I will try them. I am easily pleased when it comes down to it. But there is a rift, and I am aware of it. Perhaps this is a fundamental fissure in something that is firm and unshakable.

Still, I will watch your pornography and you will watch mine. I will come while watching yours. You will come while watching mine. This is the thing about relationships. The subtle give and take.

two things I do not need in the bath.

Wine and masturbation.

Some times I can just have a bath to read my book, or listen to a fiction podcast from the New Yorker. It is just an association. Pavlovian. I run the water and I crave sex and alcohol. Easy as that. Today I will refrain. I have a handful of pages left to read and I do not need the regular distractions. Today a bath is for cleanliness, warmth and a good book.

no porn

a vain attempt to return to normalcy. I force myself back to pornography. I skip. A second from here, a visual from there, none of it to my liking? What was it that I liked again? Certainly not the way he holds her head and forces his penis into her mouth. Perhaps it is the way he hits her, spits on her, does that fast and furious piston action with his hips. No?

I struggle to imagine what I could find sexy in it as my body readies itself for whatever I may settle on, the skin flushing, my nipples pulling erect, the thickening of the labia. Anything really. I could come from the thought of someone walking around upstairs. I could come from the idea that all the little green lights on my gmail are people watching me. I could come from the warmth of the water and from the thought of all that has come before. I come from the pornography. It is relatively easy but when it is done I feel nothing. There are no small aftershocks. Only tenderness can stay with me through the day. Only intimacy. Perhaps, only the idea of beauty in the form of tenderness. Perhaps, only from the idea of a kiss.

the end of it.

The end of it was very sad even though the course had been run and there was nothing left in it. Neither of them had anticipated this level of melancholy, although she had suspected it might make her sad for a few days and had bought a block of chocolate and a packet of fancy tea to get her through the worst

He moped, opened the refrigerator door, closed it. He opened packets of things and then realised this was not what he had wanted but ate them anyway. They would both gain the weight of sadness. Still. It was over. There would be no repair.

She found a hand towel with the scent of him still on it and thought briefly that she might keep it. A momento of something that was once nice. She threw it into the wash with the sheets and the socks and her underthings. When she took the towel off the line there was nothing left of him. It was the end then.

The nature of love.

Bec knows that David is watching her and for a moment the idea of this gives her pause. She pulls back from this new embrace, she feels the slick gloss of spit onher lips, knows that the lipstick she applied for fun will be smudged but perhaps that in itself is sexy. She looks towwards him. He is sitting on the edge of the couch and yes, he is watching her. Some men like to see women kissing. She has already removed the girl's tiny breasts from the scrap of lace that was holding them. THey are like little pillows of nothing on her chest but the nipples are huge and rock hard and he could be looking at the girl's nipples but David's eyes never leave her face.

Bec pulls her face into an amused frown. Perhaps he has been studying her kissing technique. She remembers David's kisses, big sloppy things that engulfed her whole face at times. The over-zealous enthusiasm of a puppy. Bad kisser. Good intentions. She is remembering this when he opens his mouth and forms silent precise words with his lips.

I LOVE YOU.

And again.

I LOVE YOU.

eratic

Ah eratic behaviour. Does the word have anything to do with eros? Perhaps grammatically not and yet one leads to the other ultimately. I am ridiculously inconsistent. I have always been so. I reconnect with his family and I remember how I flitted from one idea to the next. And yet, behind this is the solid guard dog of my love and care. Always. If I have said that I love you, I will love you forever. This is the truth of it. I may rage and tear my hair and unwind in jealous tangles. I may become some dirvish, some succubus, some crazed creature you would rather avoid. Still I stand at your door panting, through the decades.

I love you now and always is not some trap. I bristled. I thought it was meant to scold me for my lack of contact and my distance. I understand it now. Love, now and always, no matter how distant we become. Our separate parts of the world forever connected by this thin thread of concern that will never be broken.

end

so it fades out. Like this. with an aftertaste and the memories lingering. So something new begins tomorrow and we walk off into it, those who are still alive. We survive it. We do what we can with what we have been given.

I did love you. You know that. And I think you may have felt some kind of love too.

ah. well. that was something.

one about a horse

I am not yet ready to tell you the one about a horse. I start with horses because there are so many references. Equus, Zoo, the passions of my sister who drew horses obsessively. Little girls, their genitals rubbing in time to a gallop. I understand the appeal. A horse is all warm breath and sweat heat and muscle. They smell good, strong and sharp and healthy but with a pungency that reeks of sex. Soon I will tell you the one about the horse because it will be a good one, visceral. It will be full of words that mimic the pace of a canter. It will be arousing. I won't tell you yet because it will not be a true story. I must see the act. I must immerse myself in it. I must feel as close to the horse as any little girl or grown man who clambers up on a ladder to find his comfort and release. I must think about stallions mounting one person or another. The size and shape of it, the livid pink. For this true story I must be closer to the subject.

As a child, I was not so into horses. I prefered the dollhouse, the spaceship, the cave.

This then will be something new.

what is wrong

what you consider wrong today you may not consider wrong tomorrow. In the heat of pleasure nothing seems to be a problem. No line too wide to cross. Pleasure spent and we begin to back away but there is always the cycle of escalation. The scent of sex, the taste of it, the various perversions that seem wrong until we are desperate to try them. Our judgement is clouded by the morality of the here and now. When it is done we long for innocence. Perhaps we can be innocent and guilty all at once. This is the line that I must take. This is the key to the story.

book

He is in the book. He is dead but there he is, in my book and a thank you in the back and he is dead and he never got to see the book. And I never got to tell him he is in the book.

Sometimes I don't care how much others care about me. My own care is enough. It is huge. Sometimes their reciprocation is just a nice thing that happens if it does. Often my love is enough.

Other times I feel the lack of care from them and I would cut my love off cold, a severed vein, the last of my concern gushing out of me, leaving me pale and emptied out.

I love you. I've always loved you. I think about you every day.

I want to stamp my feet at the complications of this love. I want to rage and cry and rage again. I want to tear it up. I will not love like that. It is unfair for him to have loved like that. Someone stop me from loving like that.

How can you not love me? How could I not love him? Why did he chose to love me so stubbornly? What a stupid fucking waste of all that love. What a stupid fucking waste.

Two people in my book now dead. And all the love running out onto the floor where it will make a mess and have to be cleaned up anyway.

Fucking waste.

Horse

I find myself looking up 'sex with horse'. It has come to this. My short foray into bestiality has been in the most odd venue. The Stately library. The quiet and hallowed halls. I open my laptop and my headphones are plugged in. In Ear Park. I hear it, but quietly and I turn the volume up before I realise that the headphone jack is not completely settled in place. The music piped into the quiet air. In Ear Park, echoing out to all the Asian students settled at their desks beside me.

Quiet finally and Googling bestiality. A hunt that takes me to odd places. Finally, YouTube and each click a slow pause for intermittent streaming. Girl and Horse, Sexy Girl and Horse, Horse Sex. And me uncertain how this will end.

This is not something I have ever looked for. Yet the idea of this research, the idea that I can arouse as I disturb with the writing that will follow this research. This makes me shake. An odd excitement.

steal

I would steal it. Surely there will be no trouble. If I am caught I will shrug and say, no harm done. Nothing a few dollars can't fix. I will say I stole it because when the envelope is opened he will seek you out and show you and you will say: awesome. I will be awesome in your eyes and this is how I long to be seen.

silly. silly reckless juvenile stunt. But I would steal it for him. For you.

Paul Auster's missing sex scene

I read Paul Auster's Invisible.

Humming with the potential for sex and damage. There is sex but it is hidden from us. The magician pulls the curtain and there is just the knowledge that it has happened. We hear pale skin, the softest ever and we imagine the buttery girls that have been at our fingertips.

Do all girls taste the same? You think they might, but I remember something acidic on my tongue, a strong scent to it and I would have pulled away if it had not been impolite. I tasted disease or lack of cleanliness or her nasty edge, bitter sticky. No, nothing to do with her mean streak I suppose because another was all sugar, honey sweet when I suspect that she was more insidiously manipulative.

Auster and his triste and my mind wanders to the girls I have known because this girl, Auster's beautiful poised older woman with her striking face and her femme fatal body, this girl is someone I am having on the page. I taste her in the missing sentences. I feel her fingers in my body. Auster's empty sex. I open the curtain and reveal it.

watching

are you watching?

yes

are you watching me?

yes

out there somewhere in the bitter dark, out there in the world with your hands curled around my book. My secret pornography. Not so secret.

with your hand curled into a fist around your penis.

with your hand snapped tight like a flower and inserted into your sticky body. Watching my sex open before you on the page. in your mind. in my bedroom. and yours.

and yes that is my arse on the cover since you ask so many times. Yes you can use the visual stimulus. You can use the internet. Silent pictures. My words like subtitles. Some little fisting scene. Some anal sex, double entry, whatever takes your fancy but the impetus is mine. My sex. Affection is something different. Love another thing. All three of these then brought together and you reading it braille-like. I would show you how slick it is to touch if I could. Some say my work is visceral. Is it? Turn the page. On the little beep. Turn the page now.

Peter Rowbotham

Peter.

You deserve to be named and remembered.

I give you a day of silence.

We had some times.

Goodbye

I would write a post to mark it, but all I have is the words you left me with and no clever way to contextualise them.


So inside it feels like I am running. That is all. There should be more but I have nothing.

Love and tears

So I don't believe in love. Don't really think I should be advocating it. Not in the he loves, she loves kind of vein. So when she reappears, un-erasable it is not love but something else. Still, I listen to love songs, read about it in books. Heartbreaking. I am moved. I look at art. I hug. I kiss. I feel the harsh fist of something in my chest and I know what the the romantics would say about this. Care plus sex. A heady mix of chemicals unbalancing me. I would call it love if I were so inclined. I would convince myself. It would be easy enough. It is the way I tear up. The hormonal wash. I am getting old and softening.

obsessions

It is not the love. Obsession comes from within. Some vital thing missing and the potential to fill the gap with someone else. The need to feel better about yourself. The glimpse of something you have always wanted to be. A scrap of talent that makes you feel forever inferior.

And so you covet.

The physical comes after. The physicality is the usual thing. You are used to finding the warm bodies irresistible. This is nothing new. But add to this the terrible emptiness, the lack and there is alchemy.

But do not mistake it for love. The love is there and there is an intersection but it is not the thing that binds you. The love is familial. Recognition of commonality. Obsession comes from a place where something is missing, the need to repair. The love does not come with a sense of urgency. I must unpick it so that I can put it together for myself. I am making this thing from scratch, and each thread must be perfectly placed and perfectly coloured.

erasures

The things that can't be erased sustain us. We pretend to forget but the memories return like wine stains on a carpet. They are in the meat of us. They are like bruising and we imagine that time will fade the livid colour and perhaps it will. Time eases everything from acute to a muted sepia.

I can't imagine that passion will withstand this erosion, but this is the premise that I will begin from. Maybe it is not the specific passion itself, but the idea of passion that is so long lived. We come to this point and there will be a juncture. The intensity of it is about timing, circumstance. I cannot bring myself to call it love. But it lodges physically. It is a disease that settles into our bones, making our legs shake. Eventually we will be worn away by it, but for now it is molten. It pulls focus. A veneer of normality is brittle. This thing will crack it. Passion spilled out all over the place. Like blood. Like ink from that squid I once caught in the night. Noticing the stain of it, only later, in the morning, when the light had come around once more.

escalation

Don't talk to a boy because talking will lead to sitting beside him on a couch. This will lead to an arm around your shoulder which will lead to the inhalation of your perfumed hair. One thing leads to another is the warning they give to you. You have been warned and yet you sit with a boy and you are anticipating the escalation before it has begun. Do not touch or you will kiss. Do not kiss or you will make love. And so talking opens up the possibility of his penis. Sitting foreshadows the possibility that you might shift slightly on the couch and throw your leg over his lap and it would be done in a second, this entering into something.

Potential tristes, each and every conversation. Your vagina settling onto his penis at the warm heart of every interaction. You are filled by the potential to be filled.

In the playground they draw a line across the asphalt. Girls on one side. Boys on the other. And they meet at the line to learn games that involve clapping hands. If it weren't for the line they would remain coyly in their segregated groups. It is the warning that drives them to link fingers. It is the banning of books leads to more reading.

small child

Good to have had empathy, says the small child in the lolly aisle. Breath like chocolate, the taste of the denied still on the lips which are stretched to screaming. Empty hands. I have anticipated this furious tearing away. I have empathised. On the point of shriek or tantrum I pause, strange dejavu. It settles me to know these things in advance. Everything has been before. This strange future knowledge is the echo of past lessons. I close my mouth, the shriek unuttered. I relax into the lesson.

New Novel

You feel nothing but you do it anyway. All in your head. Head work. We use this term as an acusation. Murakami, Auster in his weakest moments, Beethoven. We still have a symphony to perform and perhaps my heat is enough to warm it. You feel nothing but you play the notes, not with the skill of the savante but with enough knowledge to get by.

How is it that we are so completely unaligned. I dance, you follow awkwardly. I am all flesh and heart. You do the head work.

A + B = an equation that you have practiced. And so it goes, this thing between us figured, decimal place by decimal place until we come to our separate conclusions.

The joke

The joke is that he is under her skirt in an elevator.

They laugh.

I wonder if they are laughing because they are in an elevator doing this or because it is funny that he would lick her vagina. This kind of behaviour seems ordinary but I wonder if they don't do this, these boys. All of these boys. Not liking it because it tastes of flesh and juice. Not liking it because it is too intimate. Not liking it because there is hair. Not liking it because that is where we bleed from.

The audience laugh and I do not. It is not funny because I like to be the recipient of this kind of attention, not all the time, but some of the time. I wonder how many head jobs, how much spit or swallow, how much hand on the back of the head a woman has to get down to before a man can kneel and put his mouth to her and not snicker.

2am

The 2am seduction. The witching hour. The time when novels are written, homes broken and entered. The time when lights are switched off and arms are stretched out over couches. A yawn becomes an embrace because, perhaps, we are at a low point. The time I wake, haul myself up in bed and wait for the clock to come clear in my focus, just a vague glow at first but I know the time regardless. I wake at 2am. Sometimes at some minutes past the hour. Sometimes before. Anticipatory. I wake and I think about words unwritten and words being spoken in other places, battlements breached, the lowpoint of the high point depending how you see it. My low point. Your high point. Strange that I wake to it. Strange that I know in this ridiculous way. This witchy way. My eyes focus, the numbers solidify and it is 2am.

In the story

In the story it could all end at the resolution. It could stop at the moment where they come together, mutual understanding. Making good a bad note held too long. In the story they could find themselves in bed together, one chance to salvage a little of their self respect. Knowing that this unrepeatable kiss would sustain them for a while. Knowing that the clamour of fighting can be drowned out by the muffled grunt of a single orgasm. In the story there can be a neat ending, but life has no neat endings, not unless you choose the moment and walk away from it, tying the thing in a knot.

I watch Disgrace and I see the ending followed by a lack of resolution. A drawing out of the resolution. What might be neat is followed by a limping string of events that serve to muddy things again.

In my story they do not walk away from each other at the moment of resolution. They choose to stay, and so the muffled orgasm will be followed by more fighting and more fighting without the relief of sex to clear the decks once more. Their timing will be perpetually out, a toy bird ducking its head to drink the water then stuttering into a graceless fall and bob and nod. Forever if you let it drink and fall away again. The pattern can not be broken unless someone steps in to remove the glass or, better yet, the bird.

learn this

Lessons learned and repeated and learned again only to be repeated. Circle. Change now. Now. Learn now. Grow up. Remember that you are alone no matter how you trick yourself into thinking you have others. There is just you to lean on, you to find yourself attractive, you to change the battery in your vibrator and run your bath and entertain yourself. You are alone with your work and no one else can make it better. You admire others, but really they are undeserving of your admiration. You put yourself out to help them but it is a distraction from the fact that they do not appreciate you as they should. You do not appreciate yourself as you should.

Buy the fucking battery Krissy. Take the old one out and go to the shop and buy it because you must not rely on the world to make you feel whole and sexy. You must be alone in this and all things. Have you not learned?

Learn learn learn learn learn learn.

Your time is up.

sense memory

When I walk down that street and stop and I feel that time we walked down it together. When I glance into that cafe - first date. I waited for hours for you to arrive, arriving early, my work a pretense. When I fill the bike with petrol and I remember setting out for the ride, early, like it is today, like I am leaving.

All this is fine for now, for today because the memories are good and clean but one day the smoke traces will lead me back to people I miss. People who are gone. Dead perhaps or disappeared in a stamp of feet and a barrage of fists.

The secret lurch down in my bowels as I remember sex, touches, kisses. Sense memory stirring me like a drug, like the acid sweat smell of a trip coming on and all the trepidation and excitement that goes with it. Sometimes the memory of a thing is almost better than the thing itself.

before

In the before times. In memory. In bed, lying face to face and should be sleeping but can't. The race of a heartbeat. The breasts that feel so taut and full that they might rise off my chest like dough that has been left too long. I remember my breasts most of all, the ache in them, and wanting your hand on them, the little reach, the fingers kneading, the nip of teeth. Now as it was then. still fresh. still making my nipples hard and tight to think of it.

Will this ever go away? This longing for a distant past? This flesh knowledge? Wet. I become wet when I think of it for any length of time. I do not become wet for other memories. I save this for you.

They ask about obsession and I remember. Distant past that might have been last week or the one before. You do not leave me. I return to you. Will this be forever? Is this single train of thought a faithlessness when the one I love is here and tangible and cared for?

You are a symbol of yourself. This is not a hat. This is not a pipe. This is not you, this is me and the memory I drag up over and over. This is you worn smooth and turned into the thing I want of you. This is me, my orgasm, my orgasms. Over and over without much effort. Minimum effort. Maximum result.

Note

To those who have written comments. They are read. Thank you for your feedback. It is important to me. I have decided to post only the comments that directly add to the work for an audience. I am using this blog to find my way into my next project, not as a diary, and often, comments posted just distract from the flow of ideas and make it seem that Furious Vaginas is a personal account of what is happening in my life. It is not. My own life is far more tedious. FV is an experiment in language and a gathering of material for a new book.

Many thanks for your continued support.

people to have sex with

We sit up and there is the kind of buzz that can't be dulled by alcohol. It is the aftermath of good company and a string of hours suffused by happiness. It is the knowledge that loneliness lurks beyond the glow of the hearth but that for now the fire is in it's final moments of blaze and all is well with the world.

We talk of people you could have sex with. I imagine this in gentle sepia. I imagine you dipping your head to kiss their necks, these girls, some of whom love you. You are surprised to be loved, it seems, or perhaps this is just a conceit because you know all too well that you are lusted after. Still, when I imagine you with each one, I imagine you clothed and doe-eyed. I imagine the romance of it when you have never been a romantic soul.

You ask for a list of people I could see you with because your judgement is blinded by the lack of sex and your proximity to the possibilities. You ask me to picture you with your perfect other. I picture you, but they are faceless, these others, because it has been a good night and we are here in the early hours of the morning and the picture of us is infused in that same sepia glow. All I can see is the laying down of memories, our memories.

We will be friends for ever you say and it might be true. You with your indistinguishable other. Me with your children close as family. But I cannot picture the sex because this is all about talking way into the night, fond smiles across a conversation-lit room, and the safe wonderful hug at the end of it. This is the wonderous idea that now, finally I can be a friend for you, just for the sake of it.

Old friend

He holds my hand. He touches me on the shoulder. He hugs me and it is a hug starved of skin. He is rarely hugged. He shambles. He has become monstrous, and yet he is diminished. Lost weight. Lost life. Lost dreams. A life coralled by so many losses. He needs. I can give some things but not enough. I do not want to give him more. He is not my person. Even my person feels the lack of me. I have nothing to give. I have so little for myself and this small amount I cling on to jealously.

So he touches me and it is a man touching a woman, and it is an old friend, knowing that most of his old friends have abandoned him and I will not do so.

I am not the abandoning type. I am loyal. Kisses me on the cheek and I am reminded of other similar kisses. Other, closer, newer friends who I worry for. Don't let them fall as my old friend has fallen. Keep them safe. I love them more and if they fell I would catch them without question, I would keep this faith that I have in them.A hard promise, but one that feels right.

Publisher

I have found a publisher. A publisher has picked me. Suddenly my work has been elevated to something that others would want to read. I am chosen. I am no longer the wallflower with her pile of words that might be awful or, worse embarrasing. I am now chosen.

Nothing has changed, and yet importance has been given to a body of work.

This is what happens when you pick me. Suddenly, I am given credibility. I can relax in to an easy confidence. I think of all the times I have been picked. Someone agrees to have sex with me, not the next girl or the one before, but me. Legitimacy I become someone desired.

After the picking is done with I know that nothing has changed. My work is still as good or as bad as it always was. My body is as questionable. My sexual prowess has not been transformed by the fact that I have been chosen.

I am considering the idea of sexual verses sexy. I am considering the concept of beautiful. All this for something I am writing, but I pause and I think, before I was published I was still this good. Before I was picked to be someone's lover I was still as full of sex.

I need to learn how to pick me. I pick me. I don't need you to pick me at all. I know when the work is good. I know when I am all sex in a thin skin. All this is up to me.

Other story

There is always some other story. I see you curled around your guitar and there is a story somewhere, behind the things we assume to know about each other. You are the stranger to me. I am the stranger to you. We keep an image of each other in our heads but it is never the whole truth. I like the you that I keep. You like the me. This is enough for both of us. We live our lives separately and invisibly. We say we love.

At night we roll away from each other and curl our arms up and hug nothing, very tightly.

This is the way we keep love for the longest time. This is the way we mind each other without becoming disappointed. This is love and I am comfortable with that.

Desired

I am desired because I am desirable. I am desirable because I am, at heart, a good person. I do not set out to hurt or to belittle. I am honest and upfront about almost everything. I do not fit the mainstream mould but that is part of my charm. I am funny. I come easily. I find good things in people I love and bring this to their attention. I enjoy sex. More than all else I enjoy sex.

For these reasons if you do not desire me then the loss is specific and acute. This does not affect me or my desirability. Look at how I move, I will make a good dance partner, given time, I follow easily and am not afraid to take the lead. All the criticisms I sometimes hurl at myself are irrelevant. I store them up because I am a good catch, double entendres intended.

I have been caught, and I fall into his hands and he puts his fingers inside me and he says, 'you are desirable' and he is right. I have to nod, although at times I can't see through the hurly burly of the day to day to recognise this as truth. I am desirable, and despite the silence from the audience of poe-faced gazers, I am desired.

Empathy

My skin is not so thick after all. I carry this small seed of empathy that grows where it should not. Cuckoos egg. I can't help imagining her loss as my own. The poignant tearing away of something I thought I could own. The child in the lolly aisles weeping, empty-handed, my fingers still curled around nothing. I feel all the pain of rejection, the insecurities rise up, I am too large, too out-spoken, too unfeminine. Then I remind myself that this is her loss I am feeling and she is none of these things.

I feel the mean snap of his chatter and am reminded that I am privileged and may not complain. But there is still pain. Nothing gets easier with these blessings I have collected up. There are still the dark nights and I am still no less lonely. Only now I have no story and must remain silent. Or that is what he tells me.

I see her hurt and I am moved. I do not want to be moved but I am. I am sorry for your loss because I am no longer supposed to be sorry for my own.

ah huh

So maybe I am not sexy. I have no control over that. Sexy is how you see me and although I often long for this, right now I just don't need it. I am sexual. I enjoy my sex. I never tire of it. This body with its various flaws is just so perfectly tuned to scent and touch and taste. A finely tuned instrument in fact. I don't care about the output, the way I make you feel when you see me. Today, no amount of underwear shopping could shatter my mood. I am in my skin and, you know what? I like it here.

ah

ah the line. I butted up against it. Perhaps I stepped over it. Any way you look at it I overstepped something. Wracked by insecurities I think back to all the other lines I use like a game of elastics in the playground.

My fault entirely. No point apologising because I apologise every day. I am sorry but this will happen again.

Maybe all I need is silence.

Hensen

The new Bill Hensen. The furor. The flaccid young penises. The barely formed breasts. The available light. The darkness. This is about sex. This is about my sex. On landscape formatted pages, high gloss and a scent of binder's glue.

before work

Tired old images. I return, exhausted, in need or relief. I settle under the doona and think of things that never were and will never be and my vibrator is old and the batteries are almost flat but I manage it in that way that makes me sad afterward. I should stop doing this perhaps, dog at a bone, wearing it away to nothing. It is already so thin that I can see through it.

In the quietening of my heart I think about the way my friendships follow this same pattern. So thin that I could break them. And I do. Eventually. I rattle the fragments of us in my fist, pull the wings off it, throw it into a breeze. When there is no life in it I cry. When will I learn to be more gentle with my things.

I struggle into my clothes. Catch a glance in the mirror. Habitual wince. All this before dragging myself back to work.

aborted tussle

the weekend of aborted wrestling. So I thought maybe, stripped naked and with all the time metered out to us we might achieve some success. I came to it with my arms open. I came to it full bodied, only vaguely distracted by the housework and the washing up. Weekend away together, or something close to it.

What a joke. Weekend of growling and barking and standing tight lipped in our corners. We are less than friends now. This aborted attempt to come to grips with each other. I bring all my intellect to the task but no amount of craft and structural truths will save this shambles of a love. You and I for years, coming to some kind of internal truth. I stare at you and you are nothing but a manuscript. You are not my person anymore. I have no person. I have no new thing to go onto. Damn you were fine. We were fine. I miss something. You. I think I miss you.

father and son

so this is about a father and son and therefore it is not about sex but instead about competition and generational change and the horn-clashing foot stomping spring display. So therefore it is about sex. Penis like an elephant, like a zebra. The whole animal protrusion looking ridiculous in the light of day. A Hemingway-esque pissing on territory. A climbing up on her back mid-velt. A quick penetration more for display than for pleasure.

I am more experienced and therefore I am better. I am more virile, more orgasms in any one day therefore I win the king of the jungle.

It is about father's and sons and therefore it is inextricably about sex. Eating and fucking the human animal reveals itself. All of it about sex. You can hide it behind science or philosophy, volcanoes or gods, but still it erupts a thousand times a day. This territorial fucking. This beating of chests. And yes, I am impressed. And yes, I am interested. A female of the species, ever-attuned to the scent of fathers and their sons.