This book smells of old incence dust and pages of old books in which I ensconced myself in the school lending library and here I am still lent out for a period of a few weeks of escapism hush your skepticism leave me clutched in the bindings of unberinged fingers and did I ask for your input? Perhaps I wanted nothing but... For someone like you to dip their quill in my unctuous ink and write a few chapters of my story for me. And now I'm here again writing in the cemetery. Me, a less permanent momument testiment to the times you were in my life now you've absconded from everywhere but my mind to more scorching blue skies while Etna blesses you with the earth's sweet confetti dust. Your body's scent was of every acute aldehyde in your perfume into which I was subsumed of soap and laundry musk of sweat and skin of something alive in that olfactory story. And now what remains but to take that scent memory clear a space for it on the shelf in my mind glass vial containing an essence of time let's call this olfactory delight summer romance twenty twenty one, july.
Narcissus
Let me compare thee to a spider spinning seductive threads to ensnare those whose wings are torn by the ravages of cruel deeds and the weariness of life. And you will promise to teach them once more how to fly. You will be the master they will be in awe of how you spin your yarns bolder, brighter, dangerous faster like that experiment when they gave the spiders acid and marvelled at the patterns. And you sometimes big, sometimes small sometimes barely there at all will loom large like a distended shadow on a wall of the mind of those you seek to bind and entwine. Actor, jester, chef and lover thou canst even feign briefly the tender voice of mother. But how can you be truly the sincere confidante of the two or more of your beautiful amantes both you claim to love the best? And when you play the role of tortured, beautiful, poetic soul wrapped in your words a liar's shroud of finest gauze the foundations of your feelings is the house at the back with hollow walls. The spider, vampiric needs not a hall of mirrors a more complicated narcissus feeds from the sincere emotion of his chéries his dears those suckers don't they see he holds them in contempt the more they love him? They're food for his ego not a person, not at woman he'll suck them dry as the spider feeding on a fly.
Buongiorno
He can't promise to be mine though I dream of waking intertwined there's beautiful sincerity in his curious intellectual levity though he's trapped in a celluline cube stark lights surrounded by flat-pack student life chained to his desk at such heights beholding never-completed building site prisoner of the mind. and in the rosy dawn I woke and failed to proffer him coffee lovingly warmed in the steel cafetière black granules clinging there in the wrong compartment like the sun failing to detach itself from grey chewing gum clouds. And maybe we cannot bring each other's dreams to life my fantasy of being his sicilia wife is the steam rising from my cup evanescent and never solid enough to take in my hand. But it's a true touch the pressing of his hand in mine something I can grasp through time and when he says buongiorno in the morning it's the yellow yoke of the sun cracking into my sky it's the light gleaming reflected in this man's eyes.
Lotus
Tiredness and confusion head sore in the sun wandering along narrow, mediterranean-yellow streets of my mind. At the dead end It's myself I find staring back. But then a movement reflected in a courtyard fountain and her voice echoes back. A hundred miles away on snowy mountain an avalanche crunches nevada sierra her rose-blood hair and medusa's eyes lined in kohl she's my sister at my side her whom I once did repugnate. She pours out a cup of sweet grapes and I sleep. I dream I'm distraught She comes behind me embraces me in her arms and it's like the earliest imgained memory of being held as a child. All the tears have been flooding the well down which she's trapped bailing out tears in a cup woven of her own anxiety and fear In a creative symbiosis we grow this healing friendship we learn through osmosis and slowly they open soft petals of lotus.
Reservoir of delusions
Feeling life within my limbs in cool water streaming and flowing placid, still, black or dramatic reflecting the sky like a switched-off phone's screen what's beneath stays unseen. Can such pure coolness wash me clean of memories of his warm body giving me human heat and embracing me in sweet delusions. Why can I no longer have the comfort of faith? Let him go, he's already cast himself away like skipping stones on this indifferent body of water He watched Nobody sink disappear beneath the surface I watched dreams disappear Vivid fantasy rippled asunder no more romance and wonder, the surface cracks there's nothing but black. But I'm still alive, maybe the whole time it was just my shadow by my side.
Félicette
Orange blossom aroma recalls toulousan train sliding through olive valley suspended dreaming sliding hands under and over lavendar insence stealing over our skin attraction that makes no sense. I find you bookmarked between the pages of forgotten novels. Won't you read between my lines? Can we translate your world to mine? Reach across the divide without pretense or tricks of the eye failing that, spark my senses to burning alive? You're an electrical tempest destined to whirl and destroy. Get out while you can, you say my eyes burn; I won't look away. And in brute force collision new forms come to be. But in the eye of that storm there's a most silent place from where everything else whirled and unfurled a vulvic pulsar at the beginning of time and there, in the orgasmic quiet there's only you and I. And the black space between us is the sensual obsidian fur of our kitten child. Like Félicette stretching galaxy-wide the first cat to leave the earth's bounds velvet paws that will nevermore land on the ground yet peace is the belly of a purring cat she purrs with no hope or desire beneath the indifferent stars. Must we really live and die alone? Can we find one thing that's ours?
Nineties babes
Even men I respect say, that you can't say anything these days. Gone are the times of flirty eyes at the bus stop or across the bar in this age of "me too". And I did think I enjoyed at the time old men giving my fifteen-year-old legs-for-miles the eye. But some of that culture is ready to be crucified and to die. Remember that age of pre-"me too"? when the most common porn search term on your dial-up internet was "teen" and that schoolgirl photo would take a titillatingly long time to load? It was that time before we were shamed if we did and shamed if we didn't what a time to navigate budding sexuality where expressing your own desires was called depravity. We grew up from polly-pocket princesses in those my little pony years nineties girls with scrunchie hair ties at ten we wanted to be Britney Spears. Don't give away too much innocence was so cherry pie sweet like Leeloo in The Fifth Element the perfect dumb sexy babe re-born half naked full of all the world's power. It seems cute. But then I recall visceral nostalgia that hum of the Acorn computers in the IT room with that pervy teacher the smell from the Home-Ec corridor permeating thoughts. How that loud girl the one who later was excluded for her lewdness retelling how she lost her virginity with shameless equanimity to some much older guy. There was a rate load of blood she said with yorkshire aplomb so he stuck her in't bath so she wouldn't stain the carpet Leeloo wouldn't do that such a vulgar screw No one rang social services That was how it was before "me too". I still think of Britney as the epitome of those days queen of the nineties babes but she was a girl interrupted coming of age under all those constraints be innocent be sexual submit to the gaze. Her eyes now on her Instagram tell of loss, tell of silence enforced. Still her father has the right to set her parameters on what she can say and who she can be. Let us nineties babes own our own destinies Let Britney be free.
Man Problem
I'm hearing recently from indignant men that it's not a question at all of perverted masculinity. Behold, the gaslighting giant stomping over the chalk-outline sketch of our map of shared experience Watch him, pour scorn on this flickering candle of feminine unity, but it refuses to be extinguished there's no killing sorority, solidarity like you can kill the female body. It's a question of bad human beings, he says. Individual people. Leave men out of it, you sexists, he says. But I recall, it wasn't a woman whose footsteps followed me home from the club the sweat rising from my body exultant after a night of dancing celebrating youth and sensuality under the stars. How dare I? Feel myself sexy, for me? He had to remind me how weak I should be. It wasn't a woman, who pushed me into that doorway and octopus arms, hairy arms, gorilla arms, that wanted to show me how subservient I should be- no, unfair to compare to those creatures who did me no harm It wasn't a woman's arms It was man's arms It was a man's strength that held me in place to punish me for daring to exist for myself for not doing as expected for his feeling rejected. And of course you're not all to blame, for when I was waiting for a midnight underground train. you're not all the guy who came up behind me, reached up my skirt while showing me his dick like a proud toddler with a new magic trick. I guess it was kind of funny, I tried to tell myself. But why then, did I cry in bed for hours like he'd taken all of my power And left me with shame? I wanted to rid myself of my body which other people, none of them women, had been trying to help themselves to since I was a child. So we've been adding these feelings to a tapestry of experience women weaving these words that the dead can no longer say, a tapestry of testimony is a heavy shroud to wear every day we know it happened to her, and it could happen to us. but they say, and the conviction rates show, that it's not a big deal and what we should consider is how this makes men feel.
Precipice
There's something triumphal In penetrating forbidden space Breaching the spiked metal barrier Urban warrior In this world where nothing comes free One day some rich man will try to sell us back the air we breathe But just for today feel free. The balmy, calming first spring's breath on the summit of this old quarry cliff my feet carelessly dangle I feel myself entangle with every rooftop the sunlight touches below.
Desire as fire.
In this city's ancient graveyard: "He died with the full assurance of hope" Hope, so tentative, like the moment the setting sun lights raindrops up gold what a fragile whimsy to be etched with such stony and grave permanence how can one be so sure? I know I am nothing but the surface area the oberfläche of my skin most sensitive and forgotten of the organs trembling, it takes in the nuanced tones of the breeze the whispers of distance between things keeping out the whole world. And yet skin, it's a barrier in more ways than one You remember: soft legs in short shorts in Parisian sun. He's there, I'm here nothing to fear. Yet the burning persistence of lustful desire the space you create the shapes you create combinations of endless legs that enthrall angles which triangulate desire. You remember: how he followed you off the metro Desired to beg, to buy, to steal entry to your innerfläche if that is indeed a word. Then I'm nothing, those eyes don't see me. Every cell becomes deconstructed and reconstructed as fantasy. But isn't that the shape of desire? Fluid and slipping through fingers It goes au delà des choses Like delicate fingers stretching to caress piano keys. This hybrid language is how words fall to me in spring rain but they say I'm a child of this northern town yet I've never felt the breath within the belly of this earth or metal bending to my whim This city shapes me damp seeps into my hips bending my hope flattening it beneath its anvil. And this love I crave. Can it not negate or corrupt my inner temple sanctum? Can it be women as goddesses chanting a mantra? Can it be something heated to extremes that I pour to fill up the surface area of my inner world Can we use the alchemy of our bodies to create fire without burning me up?
