drought

In this drought I go quietly mad. My skin hardens. I prickle. I flinch if there is the possibility of contact of any kind. I should have kissed the cheek of that lady the other day but I knew that my flesh would have turned to dust and crumbled away from my face. I do not want to see my friends who may want to touch me on my arm or lean against me or say some kind word that will make the tears scrape from my eyeballs like drifts of sand. I am drying out, as in detox. As in the hideous screams of junkies who feel that their bowls have turned to acid.

First there was a period of sensual overload when even a whiff of the right kind of pheremones would turn my sunflower head towards the promise of flesh. Now there is this locking away, this snapping shut. I am all carapace. I will be not be opened without a great deal of pain and perhaps a shucking knife.

sex

so sex is all about the urge for us to reproduce ourselves. The idea that we will live on, genetically speaking, despite the death that is so very close.

The knowledge of that inevitable death creates a kind of desperation. We tear at each other's bodies as if it is the last thing we will touch. We sense the loneliness of the end times and we want to bury our flesh into some one elses flesh. We want to touch life or make life or experience life.

It is a sad and lonely act, this coming together of naked bodies. It is humiliating. We are exposed. We are ugly and clumsy and a little sad.

So this is sex. Tonight. Steeped in melancholy.

this book

This is a physical thing that I will hold in my hand, put on the shelf, wrap in coloured paper for other people's pleasure. This is a book with pages that smell of new carpet and silence and a jacket that will be matt and cool under my fingers. This will be a solid unchanging fact. I have a book coming out. I have this truth that sits on your shelf and you can read it.

I print out your book. I hold it. I feel the weight of it. I sit your book beside mine on the table. Two thick stacks of paper. Silent as eggs. And this is what women feel when they long for a child I suppose, this tenderness. My hands rest on twin piles of white paper. I feel the words under my fingertips for a moment. I am blind to the imperfections, the disappointments, the inevitable growing out into the world. I am proud of you for finishing this and therefore it follows that I must be proud of myself as well. To have achieved this hard thing that we do with no imminent reward and no punishment. All this long lonely work. A pile of paper that you and I can both be quietly proud of.

no sex ever

tonight I feel like I can hold out.

I saw a girl on the bus and she was pretty in that tanned, honey way that tourists can be pretty. She spoke in an accent. She wore a backless dress. I smelled suntan lotion on her skin and the perfect surface of her flesh made me want to touch her.

I will never have sex again. I will never be touched or touch someone else. I will not do this until the action is driven by desire.

It has been so long since I knew I was desired. I long for that stray glance, the eyes following as you walk by, the double take, the stare that is purposeful and unwavering.

Have I ever been the recipient of that kind of lustful attention? I think back into the void. I am the first one to reach. I am the toucher. I am the one who grabs and drags and removes clothing in a desperate, breathless kind of way. I am the one who lusts.

This has worn me away, one encounter at a time. I put my feet solidly on the ground now and I will not budge. I must be wanted. Sooner or later I will be wanted. Till then I am iced firmly to the shore. Wintering. I will succumb to my own inward turning desires but I will not be moved until the scent of need is thick in the air. I will be the desired one or I will turn to stone and crack off and wash out into the messy wrack and the fickle tide that tumbles it.

setting myself up for the fall

Setting myself up for the fall. That is the state of things. Facing off against the world, all of them on one side of the divide and then there I am. Here. Alone despite the meniscus of friendship and care that I have magnified into something that it is not.

Do not trust anyone, because at the end of it there is no such thing as unconditional love. It all comes with strings, flapping like laces in a reedy wind. I stumble and right myself and stumble yet again. But at the end of this I will be standing here. Me against the world, As luck would have it, I am someone that I know I can rely upon.

The sense of panic

Hello

You pop up for a chat as if it is any ordinary night. It is any ordinary night but it has changed and it is different. I am unsettled by the way the angles have shifted. It is my sight that has changed, not the world, but this evening I view it differently. It is all mismatched, there is no grey, the shading has disappeared as if the world has been scanned and put through photoshop and now it is all stark edges, odd angles. It has become a trap that I must struggle out of. It is full of damage, lurking, the slow poison of a life metered out one day at a time.

Nothing will change. I will keep bouncing between bliss and panic, and the panic is too much to bare.

This is a chemical imbalance in your brain, I tell myself. This will pass, but there are other voices nipping at my consciousness. You will never change. You will always come back around to this. You are useless in the scheme of things. You will hurt your friends. You will hurt your lover. You must hurt yourself.

Hello.

And then there is you. I imagine that your voice is smiling, a little bounce in the word. A cheerful tone that has not a single care. I am at once irritated by this and calmed. you are a constant. You are there somewhere, talking to me or not and either way is a comfort to me.

Oh Hi. I say and it sounds like nothing has changed. It sounds like I am in the world and content with it. You are breezing into a typhoon. I feel barbed and dangerous and perhaps there should be a warning light blinking, pointing out the jagged places.

I am having a rough night.

That is too bad. But you know it will be better in the morning.

Yes. But it is not the morning yet.

We talk until morning. We do this because I want nothing better than to up and storm out into the night. I want to hang off the bank of the river, tipping towards water, weighing up the possibilities. I think of pockets full of stones, I think of the plummet. I think of the possible damage of usually benign objects. I think of this and then you are there, distracting me with questions about William Faulkner, Delillo, Steinbeck. You drag me back to the places of joy that I have settled into briefly. You remind me of my passion for art. We talk about painting. We talk about our need for new voices, we talk about the joy that comes with each new thing completed and how we can never linger in that special and perfect place for long before we are caught up in the undertow which drags us towards a new project.

You are me, I tell you, you are my brother, my twin.

There is, of course the age difference.

You were taken away at birth and kept in suspended animation for so many years. You are the gift to the next generation, but you are of my blood.

It only seems this way because you hear my voice as if it was your own voice. It is the Internet. This is how things translate on the Internet.

I am calmer now, I tell you. I think perhaps I can sleep.

Good night, my friend.

My friend.

I am overwhelmed by a sudden rush and there is no word for this. This is not a wave to a friend, this is a tidal wave of emotion. This is like sex but also more than sex or not exactly sex but, from the way my body responds to it, it might be sex if I squint or place my hand between my legs. I have no way to express what I am feeling and I tell you this.

You say, Things will be fine in the morning.

It is morning now and things are a little better. The sense of panic has settled into a mild wash of grey. Day is coming. Day will be a better place. I know that now.

Goodnight my friend, I tell you, and thank you.

fully aware.

I allow myself to be seduced. It is not a seduction of the body, although my body responds as it often does, finely tuned to the methods of the seduction, responding to the kind words or the whiff of intimacy with random contractions and a ripeness that seems to burst through my thin skin.

This is not the ordinary thing, an affair, a jealous parting, a ripping and tearing at each others bodies. This is a seduction of minds and my heart reluctantly follows where my head is straying, into the fantasy of this intimacy which will one day ease back into it's easy place of friendship.

I have an uneasy relationship with the idea of love. I like the clean separation between the heart and the groin, and yet when love and sex becomes entangled I lose my ability to walk straight and calmly out into the world. My mind cycles around in a feedback loop. I am deafened by the shriek of care and sex rubbing against each other.

You stand, confused watching me as if I were a catherine wheel, vaguely tethered mid air by the tenuous safety of old string. Half pleasure, half terror. Some day in the very near future I may tear free of my moorings. Then perhaps you will run away.