Fecundities
178.
The jerks must’ve made it look like we didn’t know what we were doing (true, I didn’t,
but I know what getting off feels like
and that was it.)
with our clothes still on, my scarf choking me, we
nudge and urge the topsides of our thighs into the crevice of the other’s pelvis.
Like a babe I lay my head on the round of her shoulder, pull aside her shirt, find the tit.
She’s impatient for me to find the pleasure.
I wouldn’t tell her, not even if she asked, but she was gentle as a peach
and I seek to be bruised up like one.
She knows the mechanics of the knobs and levers. My thrill is in smashing the machine.
When I put whole hand up inside her she musta been afraid, but didn’t say.
I couldn’t help it. I did to her what I wished had been done to me.
There’s some loopholes in the golden rule:
Have sex with someone of the same sex. Pretend she is you,
that you’re finally getting(giving) what you need.
185.
Today: mood: poetry
but I can only think of shit & cum.
Semen, the symbol of man's creations turned pitiful;
Sperm dies on splayed, swaying tits: White & Warm to Clear & Clingy.
Sad as old white men in Senate seats whose potential went limp long before their dicks,
their power just gesture, their bald heads bowed.
How I like to wash my hands (and face) of it.
Oh shit.
Oh, glorious shit.
Ever looked down between your legs as you were taking one and realized you were giving birth?
Congratulations!
What I call a speedball--
not that kind, I don't touch the stuff. Not since my boyfriend started to the needle so bad ain't nothing but god could bring him back.
--is what comes out when you take it up the ass and, after, sit on the toilet waiting for gravity to undo what went up.
The asshole is not immune to Newton's laws, which
According to Wikipedia,
"...describe the relationship between a body and the forces acting upon it, and its motion in response to said forces."
That motion, in this instance, was to throw my legs behind my head so I look like a roast turkey and feel like a dream.
To misquote Harry Crews, love is taking it up the ass and god damn true love is taking it out of your ass and putting it in your mouth.
I haven't gotten as far as all that but I can't say I don't like the idea
of true love.
If you're a modern gal but still want to snag a hubby, suck as many defecated dicks as you can! Just make sure to rinse with Listerine in-between. You don't want the man of your dreams to find out you have a bitter taste in your mouth because of it.
The allure of anal: a "having it all" old wive's tale told by the young & single.
"Dear Cosmo, how do I balance a career, making time for my ladies, AND constantly keeping my bf from trying to have butt sex with me?"
What, is your ass a virgin? Your pussy's prudish next-door neighbor?
You're so tight-assed he probably couldn't get in even if you granted him access.
Let go and let god, honey. Even if it turns out it's not for you, the way a guy treats the asshole says more about his character than the way he treats a cunt. Is he gonna take the time, patience, and special care to get it comfy and cozy? Or is gonna jump right in and pump like a teenage boy?
And, girl, IF HE DOES NOT PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR CLIT BEFORE, DURING, & AFTER, you have got to tell him ASAP.
If he still doesn't, dump him. Leave his dirty dick in the dust.
189.
The hotel bed has
been broken in by so many bodies.
She showers off the gin he showered her in.
When they fuck, here, she screams because she can.
219.
Normally, I am not so Normal as to go out, and get drunk,
and cling to the waist of a Canadian stranger who is not, it turns out, as slutty as I thought.
Normally I am not quite predictable enough to be the girl from America who rants philosophical on feminism for fifteen minutes before being bought a shot called a Blow Job.
Slid across the counter coiled by Cool Whip, this beverage is to be enjoyed with “no hands.”
“Excuse me?”
“No hands.”
It wasn’t that I misunderstand the bartender’s Catalan accent, just the command.
“Put your hands behind your back and lick it.” She shrugs. I shrug. I lap it up like a kitten eating cream.
It was highly Abnormal, though, when the Canadian and I lay on the couch, his shirt having gone missing with our wine, and he wouldn’t lay a hand on me, and my liquor said to him,
“Look, I have a much more comfortable place to sleep if you’re going to be shy.”
“Yeah, I can’t. I have a girlfriend.”
This girl, she must be a pretty groovy girlfriend: Buy girls drinks called Titty Twister and Hairy Pussy and cuddle on couches an ocean away from home? That’s fine. Just draw the line at getting her off. That’ll really make her mad.
And how Abnormally proud I was to saunter past him in my skivvies later when I got up to piss out the Blow Job and the Blonde Ambition and the O-Face, glancing at him sideways to make sure he peeked.
222.
“I’m off all day and have a bottle of tequila. Who’s trying to quench a violent thirst?”
-Wesley, FB, April 21
Drunk again and not the cute kind.
The something to prove kind.
The unremitting rage kind.
The please-fuck-me-don’t-touch-me kind.
The eating saltines in bed kind.
225.
Requirements for sexul desire (Note: different than sexual desperation)
-witty banter
-mysterious well of energy
-tries to dance (bad is fine)
-engages others (not hyperfocused on me)
-listens/remembers what i fucking said
-sense of humor. (but more importantly, knows i’m funny)
231.
Spent all day inside myself (I can’t imagine anyone better to be inside me right now).
[Sunset boy]’s enthusiasm and innocence towards romance horrifies me. The cheerful intimacy of his company makes me question my own existance. He seems as if he’s never been in love, and certainly seems as if he’s never gotten his heart broken.
I cannot relate to people for whom love flows out familiar and natural as mother’s milk. They come across as sexless even while I’m fucking them. There is a metaphor or freudian stance here about having a void to fill that mirrors the vaginal void or void of the womb. Those who felt safe in the womb don’t need to crawl back in--a feeling of unfinished business haunts those who were malcontent from conception, leading them again and again to the fecundity of fucking. It’s the closest thing to rebirth.
It’s fascinating that I, now, am the person who’s “no good” for someone. I give him less than nothing, coldness. Not even a compliment. I could feign intimacy, play-act it out, if he were acting too. He’s earnest and well-intentioned. Playing the role of romancer would likely morally alarm him; it would inch too close to deceit.
I know why his Goodness lacks a certain magnetism for me, especially sexually, but I don’t know why it proves psychologically jarring. “Disturbing” and “repulsive” are are only slightly stronger adjectives than I’ll allow. He leaps up to open the door for a friend and I recoil, reverting to a mantra I unconsciously developed after our first date: “Don’t”.
Don’t kiss me outside of fucking. Don’t hold me after. Don’t say I look great. Don’t give me a flower. Don’t bond with my roommates. Don’t tickle me good-naturedly. Don’t offer to give me a ride. DO NOT whimper and say my name while we fuck. For God’s sake.
237.
Maya Angelou said, “There are many ways to prostitute oneself.”
The concept, out of context, is simple:
Unless you’re fucking for love,
it’s no more than an exchange of needs.
A dick in the mouth is worth two in the hand.
Sex is a barter economy. Mouth to mouth, head for head.
Prostitution is patriotic,
a gen-u-ine American capitalistic venture.
242.
Yoga guy will not stop texting me,
saying, “God I’m so horny right now”
and, “I’m so fucking horny”
and, “I want to taste you”
shortly followed by “Is that weird?”
Not, it’s not. It’s equally mundane as every other thing you’ve said.
When I picture the kind of body I want
up against my body
squished up inside my body
it often looks like a body
that looks like yoga guy’s body.
But I can’t get over how his face is a bearded blur
with a hole that says nothing,
and when I picture a face to mush up against my face
I picture a face that has a point of view:
like a fearsome schnoz
or lips incapable of closing all the way
or eyes just the thinnest hair too far apart.
244.
I’m sitting in bed wearing underwear that used to be white & pink
which now are grey & pink
(but they were always zebra striped).
They cover everything, all of my ass, except
for the pubes that have begun to creep further along the crease of my thighs.
Mom-pubes.
I must be getting old.
flashback:
“What is that?”
“Moss”
“Where’s mine?”
“In time”
“Is it soft?”
“Feels like Frannie’s fur”
I birth Frannie’s puppies, a brand new batch of wire-haired Jack Russell terriers, in our kitchen a few years later.
Mom is laid up in the living room. She had knee surgery. I am 8. I am the hero. My dog’s vagina is turning inside out. Mom shouts me directions. I am worried because she is on pain medication and might mix things up. I pop open their sacs like she says. I am gleeful with a child’s notion of disgust.
Because I birthed them, and because I insist, I get to name them. I am a smart child but perhaps not a clever child--I call them things like “Joe” and “Genius” and “Scooter”.
Before we give them away my brother throws a party, a big kegger in the pasture where Mom’s greenhouses once were. I participate by sitting in the living room to watch for groups of girls coming in to pee. Nonchalantly, I’m sure, I fetch the puppies when the moment arrives and wait with them in my arms just outside the bathroom door.
The girls pet them, pet me, pet us, and I long only to be older and wiser and wear animal print underwear and know everything.
247.
Have you ever pet a dog whose muscles contract beneath your nails? You can feel it under their fur.
I want to fuck someone whose skin does the same, whose skin
is buried with tectonic plates which move for me, whose tides
I change with the crescent moon
marks I make in his back.
I want a man to try to hurt me. I want to prove I cannot be hurt.
When I mention, over dinner, that I am rough in bed
men listen.
But when later I say “harder”
they go soft.
I’ve had two men who could hit me hard enough.
Soon as they did, I limped out the door and was done.
So what do I want?
Not the moment, but the memory, of a dick in my ass.
248.
There are rattlesnakes in the air. It’s summertime,
when even the gods can’t keep their cool.
I search for shade where the fault lines lay;
shimmy down shirk the bright white
questions day asks of the night before.
Boy, what a bummer it is
when a guy starts talking about his career insecurities
as your cum on his lips catches the light.
“I am no man’s mother.
Do not desxualize me.
My tits are for ogling, not suckling.”
My friend Ciara offers to make me a gay OK Cupid account and I accept.
249.
“Precious angel”, a woman calls me at Mary’s, pulls me closer with one hand.
If a man said that to me I’d laugh in his face but she was a girl and knew just how to touch me in the curve of my waist in a way that made me feel delicate and wanted.
Besides, we were both killing time in line for the bathroom.
“Precious angel”, she says, and tomorrow I will laugh at the absurdity of the phrase but tonight I lean in for a kiss for a kiss for a kiss for a kiss for a kiss with as little hesitation as I’ve felt about anything in 3 or 4 months or a year I don’t know.
To kiss this woman’s lips is to roll a marble around in my mouth: smooth and tasteless.
“Precious angel” she says, “How old are you?” And upon hearing the answer, leaves.
Across the hall, a woman waves me over who had been watching this unfold.
“My girlfriend is out of town this weekend. She said I could have over anyone I wanted.”
I lean in like this is the Girl Scouts and we’re sharing secrets.
I am too obtuse to reach through the mist of my intoxication and act upon her offer
and, at any rate, the bathroom becomes available so I must take it.
252.
I’ve described a lover’s body, god, how many times since I was 16 or 17.
Currently I am not in love with anyone, save for the city.
Which of its many phalluses should I start with,
if I ever wish to explain the sexual energy of a late evening summer stroll?
And how can I describe each and every one of my new lover’s bodies
when I only pass them on the street for a second?
Chubby saints in the garden
Cigarette dangling from the mouth vagrant
Man with kind eyes and too much cologne
The new couple kissing, in which the woman pulls away and laughs, “this is crazy”
I walk down Flat Shoals, I am drunk, I eat hot cheetos, I feel guilt for avoiding crackheads, I brush flesh with those I will only ever imagine intimacy with, I fear to be robbed or raped.
At Midway I watched the man who took himself out for a drink and I admired him.
256.
I don’t know if eating weed peanut butter will help anything.
It is the middle of summer in the South.
The air is made of trampoline fabric.
It throws everything back in your face.
Nights like this I go outside with my dog and pee on the lawn,
to see if he’ll pee on my pee.
Mostly he does.
I walk in the street to see what the concrete feels like.
It is warmer, rougher, more honest than the air
which will leave in a few months
just when I’ve started to think about forgiving it.
259.
I don’t think this guy understands my jokes.
I daydream about him asking me why we can’t go out:
“I don’t think you get my jokes.”
This is not likely to happen.
Likely, he will text me half-heartedly a few times
and I’ll neglect to respond
and we’ll both have been half-hearted
like those keychains that say
BEST / FRIENDS
except both of ours say friends
and don’t fit together.
263.
Drank a lot of wine last night.
My red cheeks revealed the vapors
risen in me via evaporation
and condensation
of my summer skin.
Painted bodies stiffen in this humidity
(you’d think
that they might melt)
unable to endure the weight of unspoken words
cling in the still air.
B & I hashed out lost loves
whose bodies were never recovered, that we
hold out hopes of finding
in our coffee mugs full of wine.
If I could discern my wants from my needs, or my wants from what is good for me,
I wouldn’t need to fall for love anymore.
Holding the box of red above our heads we are sacrifices to Dionysus
we are spectres from our pasts
we are the tinkerers of fate, we are Jesus
at the party convincing water to convert
and not trying (for once) to prove holy
just trying to impress.
I’ve been anointed with cum
more times than i can count.
It’s brought me close
to martyrdom,
done nothing for my divinity.
I think I’ll tuck my crucifix into my bedside drawer
and start worshipping instead
the Jesus fish.
I sure hope god is a lady not for political reasons
because I don’t think I want I want any more men inside me for a while
while I’m getting saved.
267.
When I feel sad, it is in the sense that one says,
“My eyes are crying”
not “I am crying”
while she’s cutting onions.
It is not me.
It is something my body does to me.
270.
Touch me and my skin will turn into a saltine cracker
eat me: i’ll give you great thirst
lick from me salt i’ll cut with tiny crystals your tongue
3 holes up 3 holes across my body is aerodynamic can’t you see
a size that, with practice, can be shoved into the mouth whole
angle the edges right they won’t slice the corners of your mouth
gnash into me i’m for the sick
throw me up into the toilet
i’ll do my best to stay with you in sickness
and, if you’ll have me, in health.
274.
Grammar lesson: declarative sentences
1. I fucked him last week.
2. The dog ate the condom.
3. I found it in his shit.
4. I guess he came inside my dog, too.
275.
Things I can remember saying to my latest hook up:
“Bite me” (he didn’t)
“You’re going to fuck me in a bathroom?” (he didn’t)
“lay down” (he did)
in response to “why are you laughing?”
“I like to not let you finish”
in response to “what do you want?”
“I want you to fingerfuck me”
in response to “are we going to have sex?”
“Not on a bathroom floor. When are you going to fuck me proper?”
in response to “oh, sorry I can’t I’m going on tour”
“Yeah, so, I’ll see you tomorrow”
in response to “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. I thought about it today when I saw [your ex-boyfriend]”
silence.
I get a Lyft home with some guy I’ve been stringing along. His bike is in my car. My car has a flat tire. It is 3 AM and it’s raining and he has nowhere to go. I tell him to sleep on my couch. I give him a blanket and a pillow. The next day I asked him how he slept.
“How did you sleep?”
He tells me in a painfully polite way that the blanket smelled like cat piss.
We get a ride to my car and have brunch along the way. My mom comes to help me with my tire. This guy gets to meet my mom.
I should feel bad. I don’t feel bad.
I play the role I’m given.
I’m a bad actress with charisma.
I am off-off-Broadway.
I am becoming dead like a star.
I make light of this because I am adept at cold readings.
I cannot account for the props:
in which my back, flat on the bathroom floor, would suction to the ceramic in such a way that when I arched it to the rhythm of his fingers the release of said suction would make a farting sound.
I cannot account for how I couldn’t improvise well enough to make a clever remark that clarify that I was neither farting nor queefing.
I leaned against him, leaned into his arm on the floor and lips on his face, to get away from the farty tile.
in response to “what do you want?”
“I want you to make me cum.” (he didn’t)
277.
What do we do with beautiful women?
Often I see them I look at them.
Sometimes I am one.
I am too shy to talk
or touch them
in early evening when
men are pageboys announcing “yr beautiful”
Often this is objectively true.
Sometimes I’d like to say so too
All the time I don’t want to publicize
the patriarchy.
I shut my mouth I buy hot cheetos.
I open my mouth I eat hot cheetos.
What do we do with beautiful women?
We eat hot cheetos we sit in our car we think about them.
279.
I like this older beer-bellied man’s shirt
with a wolf or a tiger or something’s face
I would turn it into a side-boob crop-top shirt
I don’t like what it says about me, although
it probably just says I have
nice tits
and a nice waist
and know it
I don’t like knowing it.
I may or may not have known it if so many men hadn’t shouted it out car windows,
made eyes at the fact.
280.
I’ve been acting afraid of decadence in small doses,
unsure of where the indulgences stop:
if I have a drink I might have a feeling
I might feel that feeling I might
contract close as I can to my spine
I might call my ex I might
fuck someone I don’t love I might
fuck someone I don’t like I might
fuck myself to the thought of a stranger’s Occam’s razor fist
I might wake up and need a drink
281.
Love is that I fried up quiches
and I took the uglier one, I think
I took the uglier one.
Love is to tell you who I am, not
to tell you who you should be,
I think, I don’t tell you how to be.
282.
The things I would do
to cure this insatiable thirst
this insatiable thirst
The things I would do if I knew
how to cure this insatiable thirst
this insatiable thirst
Tongue thick with thirst
tongue a salted body with thirst
tongue cut and chunked and smothered
If I knew what to say to cure this insatiable thirst
I couldn’t say it
My tongue too swole too much like fish in a can
so much a moist sponge
brine and cod liver
pickles and cigarettes
so swole it would limp around lazy in another’s mouth
if it knew what to say to earn entrance
Tongue would tie if it could but it can’t
moves motionless knowing its place
finds fruitless warmth
dies of dehydration
better off anyway
Tongue had no water, was all muscle,
a washed-up bodybuilder
Tongue Schwarzenegger.
Tell me someone with a working one,
what should I do, how should I be,
to cure this insatiable thirst?
tongue don’t listen tongue don’t care
made to speak not to hear.
283.
I smoke this cigarette//
a party trick
284.
Fucked an earnest man
in the mouth his tongue was sturdy
from all the talking he does
i kept expecting the taste of bullshit on his breath i tasted
cigarettes, optimism, my own cunt.
Notes 08/04
Can you imagine a man saying to you every morning the things he might say if he thought it was the first and only morning the two of you would spend together? What a shocking mouthful of sugar to go with your morning coffee (which you prefer black).
One of the last men I spent the morning with was “not surprised” I take my coffee black. I took this as a compliment. Neither of us was sure if it was given as one.
J told me that my kisses were like potato chips after smoking weed: constant, slow, satisfying but unable to be let go.
I needed his words to reach further from what I have heard before, so I wouldn’t have time to outsmart his act.
D claimed I wasn’t scared of him. Little does he know that fear is the point. Fear, the antithesis of boredom (the only thing I’m scared of which doesn’t thrill me).
He said this as he pinned me down and made me hold his gaze.
“I’m glad I met you. You’re not afraid of me.”
I almost believe him, but the way his skull trembled below his skin keeps me immobile underneath him in a way his thin arms are incapable of.
There is a dilation in the eyes of madmen who have learned to intellectualize their insanity which leads me straight into their beds, to see what madness they will inflict upon me. They have strong tongues, sturdy on my clit, from carrying on infinite conversations with whomever they can about where along the madness took hold; and where does yours hide? and let me see it; and how does it work? Nervous hands, holding gestures like magicians flowers, can pull a rabbit from my cunt.
285.
you, your body composed of egon schiele sketches
You are dynamism in the outline
borrowing of your body’s composition to serve it boundaries
traced with sparklers
charcoal smudges
ribbons
effervescent
get back into your body egon schiele
touch your dick but do not strangle it
i won’t hurt you because i’m comforted by your smallness
knowing that i could hurt you
but just as every well-loved book gets coffee spilt on its pages
you, egon schiele, will have to wear your blood on the outside some days
287.
I was a slippery slope.
You were a thing to slide down me.
292
A woman births a baby needing to hear its cry to know that it’s alive.
Please, god, let it be be alive. Let it live to live.
Each day she awakens to the baby’s anguish.
Each day she blinks her eyes at heaven.
Thank god it lived to live.
It lives on her hip as she tends the cabbage. On her hip as she slaps spices into meats. On her hip as she kneads dough. On her hip as she scrubs the pot with lye.
Neighbors knock with casseroles. They try to ease the baby from her hip.
Thank god I have a door to close, so that I and my baby may live.
When she and the baby are asleep, only then are they apart.
She dreams of snakes slipping inside of her. They lay a lair.
She swallows hard, wondering where in their bodies they lay their eggs.
Brewing a tea to put her to sleep induces a waking dream.
With each sip she imagines the serpentine tongue flickering,
wills it further near her,
then up her,
then of her.
Her sleeps from then on are sweet.
Her nights open up to her like the moon gone full, deciding never to turn its back to Earth again
Like how the Moon fucks the Earth nightly and tells her each time “You’re beautiful”
& each time the Earth says “I know that, because I’ve worked hard to make it so.” & the Moon each time says “My love for you won’t wane” & each time the Earth says “You fool, I feed on you just as you feed on me . But don’t think you’re the only food I eat.”
The Woman, when she was young, would ask the Moon, the Sun, the Stars, the Wind, the Lightning Bugs to stay.
She’d put them in a jar. She’d watch them dim to dark.
The Baby filled her jar with breath and asked her to exhale.
Rheumatic lungs were never made to work so hard.
Her jars on the shelves are filled with dried herbs, given by the Grandmother.
“Drink them when you have no time to drink them, so that you might live to live.”
The jerks must’ve made it look like we didn’t know what we were doing (true, I didn’t,
but I know what getting off feels like
and that was it.)
with our clothes still on, my scarf choking me, we
nudge and urge the topsides of our thighs into the crevice of the other’s pelvis.
Like a babe I lay my head on the round of her shoulder, pull aside her shirt, find the tit.
She’s impatient for me to find the pleasure.
I wouldn’t tell her, not even if she asked, but she was gentle as a peach
and I seek to be bruised up like one.
She knows the mechanics of the knobs and levers. My thrill is in smashing the machine.
When I put whole hand up inside her she musta been afraid, but didn’t say.
I couldn’t help it. I did to her what I wished had been done to me.
There’s some loopholes in the golden rule:
Have sex with someone of the same sex. Pretend she is you,
that you’re finally getting(giving) what you need.
185.
Today: mood: poetry
but I can only think of shit & cum.
Semen, the symbol of man's creations turned pitiful;
Sperm dies on splayed, swaying tits: White & Warm to Clear & Clingy.
Sad as old white men in Senate seats whose potential went limp long before their dicks,
their power just gesture, their bald heads bowed.
How I like to wash my hands (and face) of it.
Oh shit.
Oh, glorious shit.
Ever looked down between your legs as you were taking one and realized you were giving birth?
Congratulations!
What I call a speedball--
not that kind, I don't touch the stuff. Not since my boyfriend started to the needle so bad ain't nothing but god could bring him back.
--is what comes out when you take it up the ass and, after, sit on the toilet waiting for gravity to undo what went up.
The asshole is not immune to Newton's laws, which
According to Wikipedia,
"...describe the relationship between a body and the forces acting upon it, and its motion in response to said forces."
That motion, in this instance, was to throw my legs behind my head so I look like a roast turkey and feel like a dream.
To misquote Harry Crews, love is taking it up the ass and god damn true love is taking it out of your ass and putting it in your mouth.
I haven't gotten as far as all that but I can't say I don't like the idea
of true love.
If you're a modern gal but still want to snag a hubby, suck as many defecated dicks as you can! Just make sure to rinse with Listerine in-between. You don't want the man of your dreams to find out you have a bitter taste in your mouth because of it.
The allure of anal: a "having it all" old wive's tale told by the young & single.
"Dear Cosmo, how do I balance a career, making time for my ladies, AND constantly keeping my bf from trying to have butt sex with me?"
What, is your ass a virgin? Your pussy's prudish next-door neighbor?
You're so tight-assed he probably couldn't get in even if you granted him access.
Let go and let god, honey. Even if it turns out it's not for you, the way a guy treats the asshole says more about his character than the way he treats a cunt. Is he gonna take the time, patience, and special care to get it comfy and cozy? Or is gonna jump right in and pump like a teenage boy?
And, girl, IF HE DOES NOT PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR CLIT BEFORE, DURING, & AFTER, you have got to tell him ASAP.
If he still doesn't, dump him. Leave his dirty dick in the dust.
189.
The hotel bed has
been broken in by so many bodies.
She showers off the gin he showered her in.
When they fuck, here, she screams because she can.
219.
Normally, I am not so Normal as to go out, and get drunk,
and cling to the waist of a Canadian stranger who is not, it turns out, as slutty as I thought.
Normally I am not quite predictable enough to be the girl from America who rants philosophical on feminism for fifteen minutes before being bought a shot called a Blow Job.
Slid across the counter coiled by Cool Whip, this beverage is to be enjoyed with “no hands.”
“Excuse me?”
“No hands.”
It wasn’t that I misunderstand the bartender’s Catalan accent, just the command.
“Put your hands behind your back and lick it.” She shrugs. I shrug. I lap it up like a kitten eating cream.
It was highly Abnormal, though, when the Canadian and I lay on the couch, his shirt having gone missing with our wine, and he wouldn’t lay a hand on me, and my liquor said to him,
“Look, I have a much more comfortable place to sleep if you’re going to be shy.”
“Yeah, I can’t. I have a girlfriend.”
This girl, she must be a pretty groovy girlfriend: Buy girls drinks called Titty Twister and Hairy Pussy and cuddle on couches an ocean away from home? That’s fine. Just draw the line at getting her off. That’ll really make her mad.
And how Abnormally proud I was to saunter past him in my skivvies later when I got up to piss out the Blow Job and the Blonde Ambition and the O-Face, glancing at him sideways to make sure he peeked.
222.
“I’m off all day and have a bottle of tequila. Who’s trying to quench a violent thirst?”
-Wesley, FB, April 21
Drunk again and not the cute kind.
The something to prove kind.
The unremitting rage kind.
The please-fuck-me-don’t-touch-me kind.
The eating saltines in bed kind.
225.
Requirements for sexul desire (Note: different than sexual desperation)
-witty banter
-mysterious well of energy
-tries to dance (bad is fine)
-engages others (not hyperfocused on me)
-listens/remembers what i fucking said
-sense of humor. (but more importantly, knows i’m funny)
231.
Spent all day inside myself (I can’t imagine anyone better to be inside me right now).
[Sunset boy]’s enthusiasm and innocence towards romance horrifies me. The cheerful intimacy of his company makes me question my own existance. He seems as if he’s never been in love, and certainly seems as if he’s never gotten his heart broken.
I cannot relate to people for whom love flows out familiar and natural as mother’s milk. They come across as sexless even while I’m fucking them. There is a metaphor or freudian stance here about having a void to fill that mirrors the vaginal void or void of the womb. Those who felt safe in the womb don’t need to crawl back in--a feeling of unfinished business haunts those who were malcontent from conception, leading them again and again to the fecundity of fucking. It’s the closest thing to rebirth.
It’s fascinating that I, now, am the person who’s “no good” for someone. I give him less than nothing, coldness. Not even a compliment. I could feign intimacy, play-act it out, if he were acting too. He’s earnest and well-intentioned. Playing the role of romancer would likely morally alarm him; it would inch too close to deceit.
I know why his Goodness lacks a certain magnetism for me, especially sexually, but I don’t know why it proves psychologically jarring. “Disturbing” and “repulsive” are are only slightly stronger adjectives than I’ll allow. He leaps up to open the door for a friend and I recoil, reverting to a mantra I unconsciously developed after our first date: “Don’t”.
Don’t kiss me outside of fucking. Don’t hold me after. Don’t say I look great. Don’t give me a flower. Don’t bond with my roommates. Don’t tickle me good-naturedly. Don’t offer to give me a ride. DO NOT whimper and say my name while we fuck. For God’s sake.
237.
Maya Angelou said, “There are many ways to prostitute oneself.”
The concept, out of context, is simple:
Unless you’re fucking for love,
it’s no more than an exchange of needs.
A dick in the mouth is worth two in the hand.
Sex is a barter economy. Mouth to mouth, head for head.
Prostitution is patriotic,
a gen-u-ine American capitalistic venture.
242.
Yoga guy will not stop texting me,
saying, “God I’m so horny right now”
and, “I’m so fucking horny”
and, “I want to taste you”
shortly followed by “Is that weird?”
Not, it’s not. It’s equally mundane as every other thing you’ve said.
When I picture the kind of body I want
up against my body
squished up inside my body
it often looks like a body
that looks like yoga guy’s body.
But I can’t get over how his face is a bearded blur
with a hole that says nothing,
and when I picture a face to mush up against my face
I picture a face that has a point of view:
like a fearsome schnoz
or lips incapable of closing all the way
or eyes just the thinnest hair too far apart.
244.
I’m sitting in bed wearing underwear that used to be white & pink
which now are grey & pink
(but they were always zebra striped).
They cover everything, all of my ass, except
for the pubes that have begun to creep further along the crease of my thighs.
Mom-pubes.
I must be getting old.
flashback:
“What is that?”
“Moss”
“Where’s mine?”
“In time”
“Is it soft?”
“Feels like Frannie’s fur”
I birth Frannie’s puppies, a brand new batch of wire-haired Jack Russell terriers, in our kitchen a few years later.
Mom is laid up in the living room. She had knee surgery. I am 8. I am the hero. My dog’s vagina is turning inside out. Mom shouts me directions. I am worried because she is on pain medication and might mix things up. I pop open their sacs like she says. I am gleeful with a child’s notion of disgust.
Because I birthed them, and because I insist, I get to name them. I am a smart child but perhaps not a clever child--I call them things like “Joe” and “Genius” and “Scooter”.
Before we give them away my brother throws a party, a big kegger in the pasture where Mom’s greenhouses once were. I participate by sitting in the living room to watch for groups of girls coming in to pee. Nonchalantly, I’m sure, I fetch the puppies when the moment arrives and wait with them in my arms just outside the bathroom door.
The girls pet them, pet me, pet us, and I long only to be older and wiser and wear animal print underwear and know everything.
247.
Have you ever pet a dog whose muscles contract beneath your nails? You can feel it under their fur.
I want to fuck someone whose skin does the same, whose skin
is buried with tectonic plates which move for me, whose tides
I change with the crescent moon
marks I make in his back.
I want a man to try to hurt me. I want to prove I cannot be hurt.
When I mention, over dinner, that I am rough in bed
men listen.
But when later I say “harder”
they go soft.
I’ve had two men who could hit me hard enough.
Soon as they did, I limped out the door and was done.
So what do I want?
Not the moment, but the memory, of a dick in my ass.
248.
There are rattlesnakes in the air. It’s summertime,
when even the gods can’t keep their cool.
I search for shade where the fault lines lay;
shimmy down shirk the bright white
questions day asks of the night before.
Boy, what a bummer it is
when a guy starts talking about his career insecurities
as your cum on his lips catches the light.
“I am no man’s mother.
Do not desxualize me.
My tits are for ogling, not suckling.”
My friend Ciara offers to make me a gay OK Cupid account and I accept.
249.
“Precious angel”, a woman calls me at Mary’s, pulls me closer with one hand.
If a man said that to me I’d laugh in his face but she was a girl and knew just how to touch me in the curve of my waist in a way that made me feel delicate and wanted.
Besides, we were both killing time in line for the bathroom.
“Precious angel”, she says, and tomorrow I will laugh at the absurdity of the phrase but tonight I lean in for a kiss for a kiss for a kiss for a kiss for a kiss with as little hesitation as I’ve felt about anything in 3 or 4 months or a year I don’t know.
To kiss this woman’s lips is to roll a marble around in my mouth: smooth and tasteless.
“Precious angel” she says, “How old are you?” And upon hearing the answer, leaves.
Across the hall, a woman waves me over who had been watching this unfold.
“My girlfriend is out of town this weekend. She said I could have over anyone I wanted.”
I lean in like this is the Girl Scouts and we’re sharing secrets.
I am too obtuse to reach through the mist of my intoxication and act upon her offer
and, at any rate, the bathroom becomes available so I must take it.
252.
I’ve described a lover’s body, god, how many times since I was 16 or 17.
Currently I am not in love with anyone, save for the city.
Which of its many phalluses should I start with,
if I ever wish to explain the sexual energy of a late evening summer stroll?
And how can I describe each and every one of my new lover’s bodies
when I only pass them on the street for a second?
Chubby saints in the garden
Cigarette dangling from the mouth vagrant
Man with kind eyes and too much cologne
The new couple kissing, in which the woman pulls away and laughs, “this is crazy”
I walk down Flat Shoals, I am drunk, I eat hot cheetos, I feel guilt for avoiding crackheads, I brush flesh with those I will only ever imagine intimacy with, I fear to be robbed or raped.
At Midway I watched the man who took himself out for a drink and I admired him.
256.
I don’t know if eating weed peanut butter will help anything.
It is the middle of summer in the South.
The air is made of trampoline fabric.
It throws everything back in your face.
Nights like this I go outside with my dog and pee on the lawn,
to see if he’ll pee on my pee.
Mostly he does.
I walk in the street to see what the concrete feels like.
It is warmer, rougher, more honest than the air
which will leave in a few months
just when I’ve started to think about forgiving it.
259.
I don’t think this guy understands my jokes.
I daydream about him asking me why we can’t go out:
“I don’t think you get my jokes.”
This is not likely to happen.
Likely, he will text me half-heartedly a few times
and I’ll neglect to respond
and we’ll both have been half-hearted
like those keychains that say
BEST / FRIENDS
except both of ours say friends
and don’t fit together.
263.
Drank a lot of wine last night.
My red cheeks revealed the vapors
risen in me via evaporation
and condensation
of my summer skin.
Painted bodies stiffen in this humidity
(you’d think
that they might melt)
unable to endure the weight of unspoken words
cling in the still air.
B & I hashed out lost loves
whose bodies were never recovered, that we
hold out hopes of finding
in our coffee mugs full of wine.
If I could discern my wants from my needs, or my wants from what is good for me,
I wouldn’t need to fall for love anymore.
Holding the box of red above our heads we are sacrifices to Dionysus
we are spectres from our pasts
we are the tinkerers of fate, we are Jesus
at the party convincing water to convert
and not trying (for once) to prove holy
just trying to impress.
I’ve been anointed with cum
more times than i can count.
It’s brought me close
to martyrdom,
done nothing for my divinity.
I think I’ll tuck my crucifix into my bedside drawer
and start worshipping instead
the Jesus fish.
I sure hope god is a lady not for political reasons
because I don’t think I want I want any more men inside me for a while
while I’m getting saved.
267.
When I feel sad, it is in the sense that one says,
“My eyes are crying”
not “I am crying”
while she’s cutting onions.
It is not me.
It is something my body does to me.
270.
Touch me and my skin will turn into a saltine cracker
eat me: i’ll give you great thirst
lick from me salt i’ll cut with tiny crystals your tongue
3 holes up 3 holes across my body is aerodynamic can’t you see
a size that, with practice, can be shoved into the mouth whole
angle the edges right they won’t slice the corners of your mouth
gnash into me i’m for the sick
throw me up into the toilet
i’ll do my best to stay with you in sickness
and, if you’ll have me, in health.
274.
Grammar lesson: declarative sentences
1. I fucked him last week.
2. The dog ate the condom.
3. I found it in his shit.
4. I guess he came inside my dog, too.
275.
Things I can remember saying to my latest hook up:
“Bite me” (he didn’t)
“You’re going to fuck me in a bathroom?” (he didn’t)
“lay down” (he did)
in response to “why are you laughing?”
“I like to not let you finish”
in response to “what do you want?”
“I want you to fingerfuck me”
in response to “are we going to have sex?”
“Not on a bathroom floor. When are you going to fuck me proper?”
in response to “oh, sorry I can’t I’m going on tour”
“Yeah, so, I’ll see you tomorrow”
in response to “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. I thought about it today when I saw [your ex-boyfriend]”
silence.
I get a Lyft home with some guy I’ve been stringing along. His bike is in my car. My car has a flat tire. It is 3 AM and it’s raining and he has nowhere to go. I tell him to sleep on my couch. I give him a blanket and a pillow. The next day I asked him how he slept.
“How did you sleep?”
He tells me in a painfully polite way that the blanket smelled like cat piss.
We get a ride to my car and have brunch along the way. My mom comes to help me with my tire. This guy gets to meet my mom.
I should feel bad. I don’t feel bad.
I play the role I’m given.
I’m a bad actress with charisma.
I am off-off-Broadway.
I am becoming dead like a star.
I make light of this because I am adept at cold readings.
I cannot account for the props:
in which my back, flat on the bathroom floor, would suction to the ceramic in such a way that when I arched it to the rhythm of his fingers the release of said suction would make a farting sound.
I cannot account for how I couldn’t improvise well enough to make a clever remark that clarify that I was neither farting nor queefing.
I leaned against him, leaned into his arm on the floor and lips on his face, to get away from the farty tile.
in response to “what do you want?”
“I want you to make me cum.” (he didn’t)
277.
What do we do with beautiful women?
Often I see them I look at them.
Sometimes I am one.
I am too shy to talk
or touch them
in early evening when
men are pageboys announcing “yr beautiful”
Often this is objectively true.
Sometimes I’d like to say so too
All the time I don’t want to publicize
the patriarchy.
I shut my mouth I buy hot cheetos.
I open my mouth I eat hot cheetos.
What do we do with beautiful women?
We eat hot cheetos we sit in our car we think about them.
279.
I like this older beer-bellied man’s shirt
with a wolf or a tiger or something’s face
I would turn it into a side-boob crop-top shirt
I don’t like what it says about me, although
it probably just says I have
nice tits
and a nice waist
and know it
I don’t like knowing it.
I may or may not have known it if so many men hadn’t shouted it out car windows,
made eyes at the fact.
280.
I’ve been acting afraid of decadence in small doses,
unsure of where the indulgences stop:
if I have a drink I might have a feeling
I might feel that feeling I might
contract close as I can to my spine
I might call my ex I might
fuck someone I don’t love I might
fuck someone I don’t like I might
fuck myself to the thought of a stranger’s Occam’s razor fist
I might wake up and need a drink
281.
Love is that I fried up quiches
and I took the uglier one, I think
I took the uglier one.
Love is to tell you who I am, not
to tell you who you should be,
I think, I don’t tell you how to be.
282.
The things I would do
to cure this insatiable thirst
this insatiable thirst
The things I would do if I knew
how to cure this insatiable thirst
this insatiable thirst
Tongue thick with thirst
tongue a salted body with thirst
tongue cut and chunked and smothered
If I knew what to say to cure this insatiable thirst
I couldn’t say it
My tongue too swole too much like fish in a can
so much a moist sponge
brine and cod liver
pickles and cigarettes
so swole it would limp around lazy in another’s mouth
if it knew what to say to earn entrance
Tongue would tie if it could but it can’t
moves motionless knowing its place
finds fruitless warmth
dies of dehydration
better off anyway
Tongue had no water, was all muscle,
a washed-up bodybuilder
Tongue Schwarzenegger.
Tell me someone with a working one,
what should I do, how should I be,
to cure this insatiable thirst?
tongue don’t listen tongue don’t care
made to speak not to hear.
283.
I smoke this cigarette//
a party trick
284.
Fucked an earnest man
in the mouth his tongue was sturdy
from all the talking he does
i kept expecting the taste of bullshit on his breath i tasted
cigarettes, optimism, my own cunt.
Notes 08/04
Can you imagine a man saying to you every morning the things he might say if he thought it was the first and only morning the two of you would spend together? What a shocking mouthful of sugar to go with your morning coffee (which you prefer black).
One of the last men I spent the morning with was “not surprised” I take my coffee black. I took this as a compliment. Neither of us was sure if it was given as one.
J told me that my kisses were like potato chips after smoking weed: constant, slow, satisfying but unable to be let go.
I needed his words to reach further from what I have heard before, so I wouldn’t have time to outsmart his act.
D claimed I wasn’t scared of him. Little does he know that fear is the point. Fear, the antithesis of boredom (the only thing I’m scared of which doesn’t thrill me).
He said this as he pinned me down and made me hold his gaze.
“I’m glad I met you. You’re not afraid of me.”
I almost believe him, but the way his skull trembled below his skin keeps me immobile underneath him in a way his thin arms are incapable of.
There is a dilation in the eyes of madmen who have learned to intellectualize their insanity which leads me straight into their beds, to see what madness they will inflict upon me. They have strong tongues, sturdy on my clit, from carrying on infinite conversations with whomever they can about where along the madness took hold; and where does yours hide? and let me see it; and how does it work? Nervous hands, holding gestures like magicians flowers, can pull a rabbit from my cunt.
285.
you, your body composed of egon schiele sketches
You are dynamism in the outline
borrowing of your body’s composition to serve it boundaries
traced with sparklers
charcoal smudges
ribbons
effervescent
get back into your body egon schiele
touch your dick but do not strangle it
i won’t hurt you because i’m comforted by your smallness
knowing that i could hurt you
but just as every well-loved book gets coffee spilt on its pages
you, egon schiele, will have to wear your blood on the outside some days
287.
I was a slippery slope.
You were a thing to slide down me.
292
A woman births a baby needing to hear its cry to know that it’s alive.
Please, god, let it be be alive. Let it live to live.
Each day she awakens to the baby’s anguish.
Each day she blinks her eyes at heaven.
Thank god it lived to live.
It lives on her hip as she tends the cabbage. On her hip as she slaps spices into meats. On her hip as she kneads dough. On her hip as she scrubs the pot with lye.
Neighbors knock with casseroles. They try to ease the baby from her hip.
Thank god I have a door to close, so that I and my baby may live.
When she and the baby are asleep, only then are they apart.
She dreams of snakes slipping inside of her. They lay a lair.
She swallows hard, wondering where in their bodies they lay their eggs.
Brewing a tea to put her to sleep induces a waking dream.
With each sip she imagines the serpentine tongue flickering,
wills it further near her,
then up her,
then of her.
Her sleeps from then on are sweet.
Her nights open up to her like the moon gone full, deciding never to turn its back to Earth again
Like how the Moon fucks the Earth nightly and tells her each time “You’re beautiful”
& each time the Earth says “I know that, because I’ve worked hard to make it so.” & the Moon each time says “My love for you won’t wane” & each time the Earth says “You fool, I feed on you just as you feed on me . But don’t think you’re the only food I eat.”
The Woman, when she was young, would ask the Moon, the Sun, the Stars, the Wind, the Lightning Bugs to stay.
She’d put them in a jar. She’d watch them dim to dark.
The Baby filled her jar with breath and asked her to exhale.
Rheumatic lungs were never made to work so hard.
Her jars on the shelves are filled with dried herbs, given by the Grandmother.
“Drink them when you have no time to drink them, so that you might live to live.”