All about longing.

My new posts are all about longing. They edge towards the romantic. I am going soft in my post-40 fug. I wonder what I would be like, unleashed into the world. Would I mistake my lust for love, just as now I mistake love for lust. Would my choices become erratic? Sleeping with random strangers just to have someone to lie in bed with sipping tea? Is that actually such a bad thing?

My body betrays me, trudging towards its eventual decay, but I am more clear now about my desires, more confidant perhaps to delay your gratification till my own has been achieved. I will have more orgasms than I used to because I will demand them.

I have learned, also, about the erotic potential of conversation. Perhaps I will flirt. Perhaps I will demand that a potential lover has some knowledge of literature or film or art. We will talk for hours about Delillo or McCarthy and I will come to him or her, lubricated by Delillo's smell of burned toast or the scent of a McCarthy battle leaching out into a sunset.

All of this is anticipating an eventual fall from grace, the loss of my lover, my beautiful boy who talks passionately about films and the structure of a novel. Without his perfect body that matures like fine wine, I would be dissapointed by all the lovers who do not take the kind of care that he has developed over years of practice.

Today I am sad and endings seem inevitable. Inevitable too the sad, low creep towards loneliness. A consolidation of the sense of loss and longing that underlines my general day to day.

Knee

Some part of your body in contact with mine. The brush of a hand in the small of my back, the warm brief pressure of your knee. This is all of my body pressed against yours, a screen kiss with the naked pushing of breasts against your chest, groins locked together. Of course it is never like that. It is always elbows poking and teeth clacking and a clumsy redistribution of weight. But this small point of contact is perfect in itself. All that I need, I say, but it is not. I indulge in the necessity of full body contact later, with my eyes closed and the little slide show flickering on the dark screen of my imagination.

flirt

That little upward motion in my groin. Not in my stomach, it is lower than that, it is all centred around my inner thighs and my clitoris. And it will not leave me in peace. It is a distraction. A ride on a roller coaster that just keeps going around until I am forced to physically put a stop to it. The embarrassing rise and fall of my nipples in a public place. My body reeling out of control, and yet I have some control over it. My face is impassive. You wouldn't know about the intermittent contractions unless you placed your fingers just there. Small spasms that are not reflected in my face. I have practiced a rather bored attitude and I wear it now to mask the crazy oscillations of the flesh. I used to orgasm in public frequently. Once or twice on a bus, a small clench of the legs, a bored yawn to mask the moment of climax. I walk in front of you without looking back as if your physical presence means nothing to me. You noticed my breasts and I am suddenly unable to stand. All of this tumult and I glance up when someone says hello as if it is nothing. This tiny flirtation that is amplified by a body tuned to the subtlety of your nuance. I am your sympathetic vibration. Speak and I will hum in harmony with you.

Sexy Book

I want to know if you masturbated whilst reading my book. I want to know which parts aroused you. Surely you could not read it without thinking about sex at least once. It is not like you can check a manuscript for a cracked spine. I want to know that you have been reading a passage and become unsettled. I want to know that you had to take a break, locking yourself in the bathroom for a minute or two. This is the question I want to ask of all my readers. Did it make you come? Which parts and how many times.

Reading a Graphic novel

You are always looking for sex when you are reading a graphic novel. Firstly there are the panels, a few of them, three or four that show the protagonist in bed with someone. It is always furtive sex, abortive, drunken, unwanted, prematurely over, clumsy, full of apologies and ending in regret. There is something so truthful about the sex in a graphic novel. Of course they leave out the hysterical laughter, the play, the segue into some other game, but they leave in the stretchmarks and the middle age spread, or the teenage acne.

There is more to it, of course than the four or so panels of naked entanglement, there is the rolling over from one panel into the other. There is the physical negotiation of the space that often feels a little like a dance except if you imagine that you are naked and the artist is that awkward, prematurely ejaculating nerd in those three or four panels, and he often is. Or that girl who feels lost and empty and awkward and misunderstood. With a small shift of perspective, this dance is lovemaking, you and the artist via the slow waltz of images. You are physically embracing this story, you and he or she. You are following the same side step back step down step and you could physically merge with the ink, the colour overwhelms you, a muted colour, not a gloss, just a pale tan or blue or sepia.

And sometimes you are so enchanted with the work that you flip back to that single panel, the one where there is a breast displayed, or a flaccid penis beside a stain of semen on the sheets. So you masturbate, but not with your usual distracted leaping from clip to clip, abandoning the images ultimately and burying yourself in what should by now be a tired old scenario with your current crush. This time you settle on the quiet embarrassment of a single frame and you are there with it. You have entered it. You have become that sad flaccid boy in the disappointment of a bed. You have become the artist inking the panel, alone in his grandmother's basement with cold Chinese takeaway returning slowly to its glutenous roots at your elbow. You are colour and you are form and you are the slow dance of image after image paused for long enough that you can orgasm in sepia and washed-out blue.

magazine

I am not present in any of the photos in the magazine. There is no hint of me in the doe eyes or the protruding collar bones. I am not in the ads on the television or even in the junk mail. I am nowhere in the upmarket fruit shop down the road, and the cafes are empty of me. I am not in the eyes of my love who describes me and the reflection bares so little resemblance to the person I inhabit. There is the potential reflection of me in our conversation, but maybe not. It is easy to pretend at such a distance.

Unique perhaps, but lonely. Always lonely. So I know what it is like, the hollow loss of something that you have never had, that sense that one good thing could right so many faults that we find in ourselves.

A letter of rejection sends seismic waves that crack what may have seemed like strong foundations. All this is reparable. In time that one good thing will come to shore us up. Even the ravages of so much disappointment will be hidden by the greatness of this final success. But sometimes, when we are tired, or down or lonely, as we always will be lonely, we will wander down into the place of hurt and touch the fissures and remember the pain and the rejections and the insecurities that still scar us and this, my friend is the place where you and I find the strength in our work. Our writing sings with the kind of real hurt that just can't be magicked out of thin air.

So now I feel what you feel and it is not in the faces of the people in the magazines or on the television. It is not in the perfect bodies of the folk at Cirque or La Choquette. It is in you and it is in me and I look at you and I see a reflection of myself and perhaps it makes me less lonely. And I hope that you will feel less lonely too.

Resolution

New Years Resolution:

More words on paper
Learn from the writers around me
More new things
More music whilst making love
more music whilst walking
More reading
Only time for people who deserve it
Be kinder to myself

More outdoor activity
Less paranoia
No hating anyone new
No hating those old foes
More tollerence for those who chafe against me
Work hard to take those I love with me
Be kinder to myself

Less alcohol
Less rich food
More time in water
More time with books
More input
No letting go of the people who love me
Learn from the writers around me
More art
More making art
Be kinder to myself