To begin, let me reiterate that this is an act of love for you, my beloved. I want to emphasize this. This, like my poetry, like the tortured confessions of my tongue, is the extent of my madness. The world can share my body, for it is mine to lend as I see fit; but my poetic madness comes to your call and to no other living soul.
Which season of the heart shall I place this ranting in? Shall I begin with traditional autumn, the season of falling silks when I first wrote you, first confessed in a drunken outpouring that I craved your hardness and could not eradicate it from my memory? Should I begin in winter, just before the snow? The blanket of snow could not muffle the confession of my love. Spring is sweet: an endless soft breath of frustration and intrigue. But no, I shall begin in the summer. Summer seems to be our season. Summer is for coupling. Summer is when we first met.
This is the other side of the mirror you see in my face, my beloved. This is what you pass when you stumble through the looking glass darkly, when you fall down the rabbit hole.
You see me dance, and see my appointed role. The fire clings to me. Fire is a possessive element.
You have written poetry on this, therefore I have proof that it has indeed happened. This can be summoned.
I dance for the glory of my goddess alone, for I am her expression. My goddess prefers not to have a name. A name would make her human, easy, commandable. When she answers to need, she goes by names like Aphrodite, Ania, Eleyn, names that conjure up flowers, sunlight, nakedness. My goddess is chthonic. She does not need a name when everybody has acknowleded her presence.
My uplifted hands catch the moon and frame it in fire; the rags of silk and leather that adorn me glow, responsive to night’s touch. (The leather and silk are an illusion. Underneath my clothing, I am as naked as a needle).
When at last I stand before you, displaying my gratitude, you see my brazen nakedness and give it the only homage that it understands. Already, you have revealed to me that you are hard.
I moan and writhe against you, rebelling against the shaft that has pierced me. The ground is deaf to my cries. Cold, rock-strewn, it wounds me in imitation of the hawk god who has brought down his prey. Fate is unyielding. My body, that thing of earth, was meant to love you. The flowers that bloom from me open to you. Nectar from my loins clings to your member and to your thighs.
When I cry out for mercy, I do not cry “hold;” I am merely protesting against the little death that is my fate. That is a cry to the goddess. If offered your mercy, I would not accept it.
We have only talked for minutes, but it seems as though I have known you for centuries. I still do not know your name. Nor have I told you mine. For you, I am still nameless, I have not yet donned a human form. This firmly establishes our coupling in the land of myth.
This is important.
Myth, or fact: that night when you first encountered me, and came inside me, you left a mark.
It was not left in any of the obvious places, for that would be a crime against politeness. It was red, like a rose or a wound, and it was the second gift that you gave me. I keep it hidden, but only under protest I would rather the world see the proof that I have been touched by an angel, or at least a lord.
I do not know where to place my hands when I play with myself, remembering you. I am trying to find the scar, which is the mark that was left behind when you withdrew from me. I finger my clit and my flower-petal lips, and drive my longest finger inside, into moist walls, but I do not know if that is where the mark is I may be merely trying to ease the pain of our separation by giving myself pleasure. I wish you were here to watch, to witness what I have done for myself.
My other hand is left free to wander. It glides aimlessly. My arse beckons, since you are fond of it, but that is not where you left your mark, and so I find myself clutching my breast, the left one, the one near the heart. I cannot penetrate my chest as easily as I penetrate my cunt. When I come, I cry out and clutch at my heart. Passion has burned me to ashes.
Sometimes, when I come, my left hand is not on my heart’s cage, but on my forehead, or covering my mouth. I think I am trying to hold in my soul, although by then of course it is too late.
*
By some reports, it occurred at a twelfth night revel. That was when the gods laughed at us.
This time I was wearing skirts and petticoats, and underpinnings that caught my breath and caged it in bars of whalebone. I was white. Like many of my other lovers, you see my astral form as a woman clothed in a white frock.
I was straining to sing for you, in my caged nightengale form. Though outwardly dumb and longing for freedom, the nightengale sings sweetly. Unfortunately, the bars of the cage can be too tight.
Will you not unlace me? Free my heart. I shall grow faint, and the world will grow black in your embrace as my knees give in. But I cannot sing as long as I am bound; it is for you to release my voice. With it will come all the heartbeats that feared to thump too hard, all the cries stifled, the tears of longing unshed. Free, I shall sing to the world all that I love.
Perhaps it is as well that I am tightly corsetted. Restrained, our love is safe. Loosed, and it is beyond control.
*
My poetry to you is a screaming confession. You cannot silence it, nor will any other being of the world silence it. Tie my wrists, and I will cry it to the heavens. Cover my mouth, and my body will writhe hieroglyphic figures onto the sheets. Bind me, pin me down, and the poetry will seep into your flesh osmotically. This is the way that I can penetrate you. This I know: that you are hard, hard as marble, hard as diamond, hard as iron but I have seen your soul, and it is soft, yearning, almost yielding. If I reach out in patience, I know that I will eventually be able to touch this, caress it to orgasmic ecstasy. I continue to scream. I am an instrument, and I demand to be kept in tune.
*
Where am I? I am disoriented. The world is a kaleidoscope of colours. I cannot get you out of my mind.
You write to me: you are worried that I am fixated too much on you, that my husband-to-be does not get as much attention. I should give my passion to him, or, perhaps, to my art; not to an unavailable married man old enough if only barely to be my father.
I commend myself unto the goddess, who alone possesses me, and continue to fixate. Love touches me and changes me. I would not marry for this, this love is too commanding, it wreaks havoc on my flesh as though it were a disease. Better to be the eternal lover.
This love is my art.
*
A single letter from you can play symbolic chaos with my daily esistence.
I make my pilgrimage to the mailbox daily, in hopes of receiving a sign. No sign appears, neither vision nor relic. My heart falls from its lofty height and sits in earth once more. For this day, and the next, I dwell in the land of the real. Its disappointments and grey duties fill my waking thoughts, threatening to drive out the image of the god that I pray to.
One day, after long hours of prayer, of falling to my knees, a sign appears. Pages upon pages of words. You exist after all, and in a soul’s response…I cavort for joy in the foyer, skipping in circles. I clutch your letter. I run upstairs. I can barely wait to tear you open and examine you like a haruspex might, for more clues to your being.
I save every piece of your soul. I reread every letter, scrutinizing it, committing the epistle to memory. If you are a hawk, then I have hawk’s feathers in my fingers. If I collect enough, I can seal them together with wax, make wings to fly with. I will fly to you one day. Soaring through the impossible blue of the heaven, I will see your face in the sun, and reach out with my wings to embrace you. If only I could caress your cheek I must fly harder, harder!
Who cares that I plummet to the earth? Not I. I am touched, innocent. I die in union, a happy little death. I will be reborn as a bird.
*
It is important to me that you know that I consent to whatever you do with me. I may rail against fate, calling curses and screaming aloud, but that is between myself and the goddess. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
The night that we first met, you took my life. That was an act of mercy, for my previous life had been nothing worth keeping. A sordid story of I, full of assault, tears, hatred, rape, and self-recrimination. I would have killed myself had you not performed the act for me.
From my dying corpse grew a new soul, a new being: like a phoenix, a sapling, a swan, it grew from death and looked upon the world with blinking eyes.
That which takes away also gives. I accept both of your hands upon me, the one that takes and the one that gives, knowing that every taking is really a gift in disguise; that every gift has a price, and that price is taking.
My life is yours, my keeper and my lover. I only pray that the next death will be likewise so gentle a violence, so bright a gateway into a new existence.
I also pray, of course, that you never really leave my side.
*
Witness my young form: I wish to give you this inventory, that you may take stock of me later
Red hair: as read as fire, as red as blood. Red is the colour that I have always preferred. I rebel against my tendency to go blonde.
Neck soft, throat bared, waiting for the kiss of your teeth. It has received such kisses before. It heals quickly from such love marks.
Lips forever ready to devour your mouth, your fingers, your spine, your cock. They do not have to be parted to be ready. However, they are usually parted anyway in a laughing smile. Smiles have of late infected my mouth. It must be your doing.
Hands trembling, even as they write this expression of desire.
Slender wrists, slender ankles, tiny waist a waist that does not need corseting, save perhaps as adornment. I am filled with you, what need have I of food? Tiny breasts that rise immediately to your caress.
Sweet, heavy juices that drip from a snatch that forever awaits your presence. How empty, and yet how full, am I. Desire’s function is to remain unconsummated. Even the final solace of intercourse does nothing to slake this desire (and yet, tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!)
Let me not forget to show you my eyes. They frequently cast themselves down, for fear of sun-blindness; yet, from time to time, when bold, they do gaze upon you. My eyes are what I want you to remember, my eyes, my soul: green as summer, gold as desire. Sometimes they glow almost white-hot. This has been witnessed by others, so I know that it is true. They are only earth-brown when they are at rest. I do not open my eyes when I am asleep in your arms.
Against all conventions, I want you to remember my young, blind eyes. When my hair is white, my neck saggy and peeling, my lips cracked, my throat hoarse; when my limbs are tortured by arthritis, osteoporosis, and an even more bent spine; when my breasts have long since swollen to give milk and sagged with age; when all of me is dry, dry, dry as parchment if you remain to look upon me, gaze at my eyes. They will be blind, but not faint, and as they recognize your wizened face they will fill with liquid fire once again. Not age, not wisdom, not freedom can alter this, for my love for you is an immovable force of nature. My eyes will gaze upon you as long as this tortured frame draws breath.
*
I do homage to each of your hands, then kneel as if in prayer to receive your cock. Your nakedness glows brightly and blinds me before I can shut my eyes. I feel, not see, your hardness. Warmth takes my mouth as I pull you into me. My tongue would write poetry on your cock, and illumine calligraphed pages, but your thrusts jostle the letters that I trace. You are strong, but I am deep, and I can force a groan from those sealed lips. I can swallow you up even as you have devoured me.
But you are innocent, you protest. Never once have you fed on my soul, nor crossed a threshold without knocking. It is I who have made the overtures, I who have dissolved into your pores, into your mouth. I am the creature that brazenly asked to be eaten. You were not hungry.
Is a lion innocent? Is a dragon beyond temptation?
To the sucking void, innocence is irrelevant. This hardness I take for my own. I caress it with my lips, moisten it with my tongue, until little drops of dew appear on its tip. Have I said nothing of my hands? I have left them unmentioned, behind my back or in your hands; but they long to hold your cock at the base. They would hold you steady as I suck.
An eternity attached to you like this, in rhythmic abandon. Where is my bottom? I will not let you find it, thiugh you have fathomed me so deep that it is all I can do to keep from biting and choking. I will win this battle.
Tears of joy, when you come. I cry out with you, in an ecstasy of longing. I have won. My waters are not still, but they are deep.
*
We are alone so little always, there is this masquerade of propriety, our visored faces the gossips of the court, your children, your wife, your muse, time, privacy, all these conspiracies we dance and rarely touch, except in the twilight. But in our times together, do you ever see the blooming apple trees, the starless sky? In these silvery snatched moments, you always seem to be reaching for my hand. It is not my neck you seize, nor my waist, nor even my attention. You and you alone search out my hand. You alone understand the significance of hands. It is your hand that I conjure in my memory, and do homage to. It is your hand on me that I desire. Without the reassurance of your hand, this quest for the place of the grail would be little but a request for annihilation.
*
Can we ever close this terrible distance between us, and still remain the eternal lovers? Or is our distance necessary to bring us closer in spirit? All I am aware of is the pain that this separation gives me I cannot tell if I am in ecstasy or in profoundest grief. Constant contemplation of you has left me confused. I am in love.
Know this, o object of my passion: I would do anything to join with you. To join, and never again be parted.
Do you know that it is only recently that passion has meant sexual desire? Yes. Originally the word meant suffering, specifically, the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Later it came to refer to any suffering. When it was used by the poets of the nineteenth century, then and only then did it begin to be associated with sexual desire. The ladies so worshipped by the troubadours were more often than not aethereal muses, hardly real women to lust after and screw. Petrarch’s Laura was dead of plague long after he composed his best sonnets.
I would suffer for love, even though you would see me happy. Believe me, my love, I am no more fond of sorrow than the next person. I dream of an end to suffering. But I fear that such an end will only come with my own death, and I am not quite ready for that. Unable to act, I suffer. I am deprived of you. Would it comfort you to know that my constant thought of you transmutes this base suffering into tears of joy? I laugh. I weep aloud. Even suffering is joy. I consent. O Mercurius.
*
I remember an endless pageant of frustration, where we wandered lost, desperately seeking an out of the way place where we could lay claim to each others bodies. Fumblings in the back seats of vans, as though we were teenaged children on a first date. Eyes everywhere, inhibiting our hands. I would run away, and beg you to follow me to a place where we are allowed to be complete…
I will give any part to bring about this miracle. I have given you my tongue, my hands, my poetry; through my mouth, my womb, I have given you the road to divinity. I have given you all of my thoughts, my dreams, my shame, and the force of my action in the defense of your reputation. What more may I give you? Tell me. I would give you my freedom, but it is not mine to give I am as free as any mortal, and cannot escape the cage of my imagination to know your dreams.
I ask only that you love me, and keep me preserved from the death of my dreams. It is an impossible request, but I continue to ask, because to cease asking would be to abandon all hope.
I want the affirmation of your hands.
Do I frighten you, with my endless and confused babble of submission? I can offer you no reassurance save the proven fact of my own indestructability. I long to prove my strength to you, but I beg of you not to put my rock to the test. That which is, is. This is the truth, this is all I have…Truth, then, that you have never really conquered me; is it truly that I know you, or must I lose myself entire? Would you test me so? …I think I have failed the primary test of strength, by succumbing to obsession of you. I should have held out against obsession, and waited to know your entire being in fullness. It is too late now, and I drown in dreams, in seeing my world in a grain of sand. Will you not help me? I no longer understand what I say.
*
And so it comes to pass that I have read my manifesto aloud. All the things which could never be spoken, the mysteries of my existence. Will they now disappear in the same direction as your song?
Most of all, I long to be loud, to not have to watch my voice, to actually be congratulated on the heights I reach…In my mind, I create an image for myself. I chase after it the way I chase after my elusive hope. This vision I would drown in:
It is a revel, crowded and full of eyes. You thirst, and I ache. I would slake your thirst. I would give you all of myself to satisfy you, that you might get drunken on my joy. I crave the obliteration of me that is your dissolving warmth.
I gaze at you, at your gentle hands, your eyes that regard me and do not look away.
Oblivious to the throng of onlookers, I absorb you in my kiss.