Maybe I am wrong

Maybe he is right and music touches closer than the written word. Certainly I feel the pain of this. Of beating my head against the keyboard, honing something awkward and clumsy into something smaller, but still awkward, still clumsy.

140 days of sex and all I have to say about it is that it was done and that I quite liked it. I learned nothing from any of it. I am myself as I always was still the clumsy awkward child hunkered down between the speakers and the music getting closer to it than the thousands of words. 140 days of sex and still I have written nothing that could be called beautiful. Pissing syllables into the ocean.

I want to say 'there is no point to it.' I want to say 'we are, I am so small and mean nothing ultimately'. I want to say 'we fucked and it passed the time and then one day we died and none of it was worth the poetry.' I want to tell you that the words dissolve in the getting on with things, in the hollowing out of mountains, in the rising tides, in the trudge towards the grand destruction. I want to say all this but in a way that will touch you and make you feel that you have come to these ideas alongside me. I want to trick you into thinking that you are not alone when we all are, endlessly and pointlessly insignificant.

But words fail me.

Maybe I slept with Him

I do remember him. I remember that he has a famous name, the same as an actor or a singer or perhaps a playwright. I remember that he borrowed my friend's novel and that he never returned it. I remember that he lived with her for a while and they became friends, the kind of friends who see each other every day till one of them moves on and then not at all.
There is something in his grin that suggests that perhaps we knew each other in other ways. I trawl back through my memory but there is nothing tangible. It is possible of course. It is always possible. I remember that he moved up north and that someone said he was doing well.

"Are you doing well?" I ask.

"Oh yes."

He is doing well.

"So." he says with that same knowing grin. "I'll see you another time." And then he is off.

She tells me that I slept with him and I am sure she is right, but it is a gaping chasm in my memory. I don't remember where it was or how we came to it. I don't remember the size and shape of him or whether it was just the once or a series of meetings.

'The Bone People' by Keri Hulme. That is the book that he did not return to my friend and she was cross about it. He had a famous name, but although my friend reminded me and I said "of course", I have forgotten it again. He is like sand in my memory and a scant few pieces of him have caught in my filtration of our shared history, but nothing more.

Slicing Up Eyeballs

An eyeball he tells me, and I know exactly what he means. It is the texture of it, an egg is almost there, but an eyeball is more visceral. I think of agar agar, wallpaper paste, oyster mushrooms, muscles and oysters and octopus and so many kinds of bottom feeders. I think of sex, the burrowing into, the juice of a cunt or a young coconut, the textures that squeak under your back teeth or that stick to your pallette with an exquisite sensation that might be slightly distasteful.

Eggs and eyeballs and sex and somewhere the whiff of decay. I understand the erotic potential of this perfect combination not just a metaphor but the objects themselves.

Striptease

The urge to unveil greater and greater secrets, to expose myself one misdemeanor at a time. Here is a darkened room and a woman hidden in the lack of light. We see her when she chooses to illuminate us. She switches on the light and we see her clothed in many layers. She is swaddled tight in every piece of clothing that she owns. We see the whole package and therefore we see nothing but the outer layer. We wonder about her skin but only fleetingly. Her bones are hidden beneath the surface. The excavation would be laborious.

This is a strange but fascinating striptease. With the light turned up my systematic undressing is available to any casual glance. I leave an invitation to the dance in various venues. My exhibitionist urges see me leafleting the bathroom at the BAFTAs. A writer's festival, a cafe, a bookshop. I slip a note into the kicked and scarred metal grille of a telephone box in London, my own striptease beside the other nudges and winks from various naked, prostrate girls. I drop my notices on a train in the outer suburbs.
I remove the pieces of clothing one by one and when it seems that I am naked, I slip the veil of nakedness from myself like a catsuit and there is more flesh beneath. We will never come to the end of it. I am set to a continuous striptease loop.

There is a scene in a film by Hanneke where a man plays a table tennis machine. The rhythm of his strokes is hypnotic, the hollow clacking of the ping pong ball when he misses. There is a momentary break in the sound of it and it is the pause that we focus on, the relief of a break in what might have been a hypnotic loop of sound.

I think of this as I sit with my computer day by day, a loop of breasts and arseholes and semen and vaginal juices. Sex and sex and sex and sex until flesh itself becomes the disguise that I am hidden behind.

In the Hanneke film the young man glances down from a high window in the building. He glances up once more from a place on the pavement. We are told nothing, but we know that he is imagining the fall.

I glance back at the hundred and something days of sex and sex and sex. I gaze ahead to the empty moments that are left to fill, the evenings when I will climb back into the frame of my high window and turn the light back on and peel off the layers of my nude-suit one by one. My hypnotic rhythm.

I tell you nothing as I am revealed, but still i wonder if perhaps I have revealed it all.

shy

He was shaking.

It was flattering to see him like this, his shy inability to meet the fierceness of my gaze. The blush that started on his neck and raced down his chest. A surprisingly strong chest for someone who spends his life at the computer or locked in a room with a group of boys playing dungeons and dragons. He had that kind of wiry strength that emerges from the veil of clothing as a pleasant surprise. He glanced up at me briefly, gratefully. He seemed surprised to be here with me at all. And there was that shy penis, hiding in its foreskin. An strange new piece of male anatomy that I had never seen before. He shuddered when I sucked on it. He seemed to feel every small movement of my tongue. He eased my head away when I became to fierce in my attentions. His tender shy penis, a pleasant surprise hiding beneath the horror show of 80's clothing.

stereotype

A Stereotype is: a process, now often replaced by more advanced methods, for making metal printing plates by taking a mold of composed type or the like in papier-mâché or other material and then taking from this mold a cast in type metal.

I am a process of moulding and remoulding

I am a replica of myself presented to the world in a form that is repeatable.

I am not myself and yet I am repeated and repeated day after day in stories that are like the original in all ways and yet, when examined close up you will find that I am not present in the representation of myself. I am not here and no one knows me. I have been 'known' by so many and yet they each have their own distinct and untrue image imprinted on their skin. I am not there and maybe I was never there to know.

It is an unlikely confidant who listens to the secret fears and insecurities. He sees me as I see myself, another illusion perhaps, the gnomic ugliness of my inner monologue twisting the reality into something that others may not recognise.

He knows that I am my own worst enemy, taking the mold, casting, re-molding, the vapid repetition of my sex, a cunt repeated and repeatable like a piece of yoni jewelry made in bronze. I fuck therefore I am. My mouth drips expletives, my body sheds the memories of hands and tongues and penises, a drift that falls in my wake like dandruff, dry and shapeless white noise.

The sex is nothing to me. The sex is sex. It always has been sex. The secret things, the longings and the insecurities, the picking at my own frayed sanity is reserved for those I call upon in the hour of need, a tiny inner circle. One person at a time. Someone who listens to the car wreck of my life, over and over, each head-on collision paring me down to basics. Brain-stem function, knee jerk reaction. My friend. My secret friend. My imaginary friend. Until that friend has watched the traffic accident of my life so often that they bore of their role as spectator. Then they turn and walk away and I am left to my butting against my life, alone and unobserved.

Waterbed

The first thing I bought was a bed. A bed and sheets. I had an image in my head of silk sheets, thick and heavy. Sheets that you could wrap your naked flesh in and have pleasure just from the shrouding. The satin was a concession to my status as a student. The sheets were cheap but they were a bright red and they looked beautiful and felt quite nice until the airlessness of synthetic fibres dragged a fine layer of sweat from my skin.

A bed was more difficult. I wanted something large, some king sized wonder of engineering. I wanted a bed for languid fucking. Something that you could spend months on, a virtual boat of a bed, pillows like marshmallows, smelling faintly of expensive perfume.

Maybe I didn't think it through. I decided on a waterbed on someone else's recommendation. There was the glitz of porno-chic that appealed to me. An excessiveness that suited. I imagined a thousand liquid nights and the delight of a back and forth rocking, a boat tied to the shore, but still caught by a gentle tide, tugging me towards a boundless ocean.

We lay on the bed and the ice cold caught me in the kidneys. I shivered. The thing would take 24 hours to warm up. I was determined to have sex on it despite this, but the positioning was impossible. If you lay on your back there was the issue of the cold. If you knelt there was the impossibility of the waves, each little thrust caught on a tide and magnified in a series of ever larger ripples. It made us laugh. It made us tumble over onto our sides, in this position we took to shivering. We put on jumpers, coats, socks. We made a wooly bundle of our bodies leaving peepholes in the layers through which to touch each other. We spent a joyous time experimenting with the oceanic roll of waves. There was much laughter, but at the end of it all we climbed down onto the carpet, shedding layers of winter woollies on the way and we burned our knees on the old short pile. We lay on the post-coital carpet and I dragged the satin sheets off the bed and they were too hot and made us sweat and gifted me with dreams of abandoned babies, lost to a shoe box in the cupboard. I woke and rolled over onto the hard ache of the space beside him and I told him about the dream and my dissapointment of the sheets and the fact that I had probably spent everything I had on a kingsized bed that I couldn't fuck in.

"We'll fuck on the floor." He pulled me to him and he had the most beautiful clear blue eyes, full of a need for me to like him. I liked him. I lay on the floor beside my waterbed and I shut my eyes tight and I hugged and I wondered if I had finally come home.