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.