Saturday 28 June 2008

Snake Charming (A, B & E 11)

Sexology in the open university. And they said I didn’t have the stamina for a phD ! Student didn’t exactly instruct teacher, but the lesson was determinedly reinforced for me once again. Since the candid date ticked all the same multiple-choice boxes as his peers before him. This notion occuring to me, as I lay on the floor, while he thrust in my mouth like he was mounting a pre-dawn police raid. The scaley scrotal sack looming large in my vision, like a buffeted punchbag as it lurched and weaved. I just couldn’t help myself. I had to derive something out of this trip to the well. So I appended my fingertips to the hide and palpated it, as if it were the gourd of a snake charmer’s flute and I was blowing through his shaft. Made him dance alright. However, since serpents lack ears, they are swaying in reflexively defensive response, to the sinuous motion of the pipe player, rather than any sweet music emanating from his lips. Same went for this boy, albeit with his eyes throttled shut.


It’s the way they look at you. On the rare occasions they have their snake eyes exposed. And that’s only if they deign to have you facing them. Most of them like to sit or lie comfortably and have me riding them like a Nautilus rowing machine. That’s why on the limited face to face clinches I’m permitted, I like to manipulate them. To make them lose control and for their orbs to roll back into the sockets, so that I can clearly discern the whites. Then I know I’ve made them respond to me, even if briefly. Nothing gives me grimmer pleasure, than, well fucking with them. If they quicken the rhythm, I like to slow it back down again, to assert my ascendancy. If they are proceeding at a languid pace, I might well speed things up a tad. Make them toil for a change. It’s sheer bloody mindedness I know, but hey ho, that’s how I get my pabulum morsels these days.


Anyway, as I said, it’s how they gaze on you. And I choose my words carefully. They are not reflecting back any sensible response to my deep and meaningfuls. They are using my eyes specularly. For regarding themselves in. There is nothing two-way about this looking glass. Witness too the rictus grin when he espies my hollowed cheeks, sucking in scanty breath while containing his displacing hypertrophy. Oh how they love to take us from behind, or from the side, or our leg up over the shoulder, in order that they can ogle our jiggling pelvis and distending abdomen beneath their thrusts. Conveying to him, that the member lost to sight inside, is giving active demonstration of its still vigorous progress. Burrowing and stretching us visibly. Like some inside out version of the snake expanding its girth, to accomodate the contours of the prey passing through its tract. Even as I dumbly sway from side to side, in time-lagged antiphon to metronomic penile periodicity, I am returned to the world of myth and archetype, here in this land of myth and archetype. “For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents” (Exodus 7:12). Snakes routinely lid their eyes when they lunge to strike their prey.


The fleshy, glistening gateway back to paradise, that gives admittance into the female, also launches into the darkness and unseen grottos of the interior. Wherein might lay a monster, (a snake, a mongoose ?) waiting to strike. Yet surely the sinewy, elongated member that glides inside my orifice, is the one that is truly ophidian ? Does not the penis still emerge, like the man, all of a piece ? Intact. ‘No’, they protest, since it can no longer be seen and, as it is indeed as fragile and vulnerable as a serpent’s body, there are very apparent dreads that once disappeared from sight, it will be horribly mutilated. Why is it that actual teeth, never seem to present an obstacle to their demands to be deep throated, swallowed whole by our tracheas, which cannot disarticulate like a snake’s skeleton ? Moreover, how can they be armed with an image of incisored vaginas, when they hardly ever see our real teeth since they prohibit us from opening our mouths to speak and express our love ? Peradventure they are indeed correct. Maybe the redundant dentistry of the mouth has turned its back on enforced perpetual hibernation and gone south for the summer. At best, his proud flagstaff enters stiff (though not necessarily straight) backed, only to emerge flaccidly macerated. Victim of unseemly dark distaff arts within, that has greedily sapped the essence and life-giving spirit.


Yet I recall the febrilely pounding penii, far from fighting for their longevity (bad word), er endurance (worse, but you know what I mean), actually pursuing a different sort of integrity. Another type of salvation. Acting freely of its own accord. For it batters away as if it was a pneumatic jackhammer, or drilling for deep sea oil. This is not the patient, incremental body-walking consumption as practised by the colubrid devouring its prey. As embraced by our tender organs, maintaining his intactness for him as well as our own. Swelling to meet its bulk. The tell-tale bulge of our abdomens, (cellulite in actuality to both of our shames), until our essential juices complete their seething action and he boils over and rolls over too. Nourished ? Sated ? Whence they play possum prick. All flabby and lifeless, like the snake that feigns death. You toe it, roll it over, flick at it. Nothing. However, worry away at it long enough and it revives and uncoils itself miraculously. The snake that never dies. Uroborus is ready to go again.


What we actually confront here, is an ironic inversion. An imposture. A masquerade of male terror before some ridiculously fabricated female threat. Convulsively mocking us from behind this veil of disguised male cocksureity. This prophylactic against disclosing their true selves. Their true male nature. This is actually penis dentata. With its beady, unblinking eye. Steadfast pathfinder, ushering in offerings to its appetite, relentlessly scouring for sustenance. Bearing a hollow fang for shooting venom, innoculating us against what, I don’t know ? Our being ? Children immunise us from sharing any clout and knowledge in the world. The cock attempts to assert its rise and shine calendar over our lunar one. I give you also, the engorged hood of the cobra, some of which even spit venom like ejaculate. I mean they even have the gall to make it explicit in the name they confer upon one of the the snakes in the New World; ‘fer-de-lance’ - the spearhead. An iron-headed lance that cleaves out our very matter. In the mounted jousts of the bedroom, the lance keeps man at a distance, while he tries to master woman and upend her. A definite reach advantage, before engaging in close quarter combat.


Tracheas and windpipes are not the sole orifices they are forever seeking to seal. They are after consigning us to our own tenebrous depths. Immured in an abyss of inaccessibility. Walled up behind his monolithic custodian. His cyclopean overseer, lolling louchely over its twin smaller boulders, the blinking grin of one smug in the knowledge of his captive treats. And incidentally, with each plunge occluding and reopening the omphalos peephole from which we spun him. He can’t bear to set eyes on what he deems his demeaning origins. Since all he really aspires, is to have restored to him that which they mythically lent out to woman. That which initiated the primal, organic conjoining of male and female. That oh so costly, costal viniculum that binds us each ineluctably together. “Bone of my bone”. So each time he seeks to engage temporary union, he is additionally going excavating. Rummaging for that lost, forsaken shard of himself, offered up as the price of ending his loneliness. To meet his desire. Yet he is to avoid the all-consuming nature of her love and attachement. The internal landscape that engulfed and swallowed up a piece of his quiddity. An occult generation woven from his own very fibre. He desires her, me, she, but he surpassingly desires to snap the ineffable bind to all of us. He penetrates with the intention of turning us inside out. Entering me whole, calculating that he will be too swollen to be swallowed up permanently. To force me to regurgitate his indigestible essence. His indispensible ‘spare’ rib, to retrieve his attenuated substance. This is the only congruity he roots around for. In each and every commerce with his rebirth mother. He will only ever offer up a single sliver of himself and he even wants that back. Never to cede his whole self, to become a single, integrated flesh. But always to reassert disjunction and the preservation of his own solidity.


Okay then, so I have to press on from here. To garner some mastery. Some miss-tery. To salvage a space in which I can sequestrate what I demand from this interaction. It takes a certain leap of the imagination, but is pretty unerring. What I don’t need are the temporality of words butting into the proceedings. I don’t require them to mediate for either of us. “Thanks for the tour love”, or “Sorry darling, I’ve to be up early for the Booze Cruise tomorrow”. To assign and shackle the experience just past and the emotion of wherever we have emerged. The other side of the threshold we careered through, by blindly hurling our bodies together over it. Now I just want us to open our eyes. And move beyond played out carnal passion. I desire to inhabit this appulse. Coeternal for as long as humanly possible.


Yet it is a most precarious state. Balanced upon a hair’s breadth. It can easily veer off in either of two directions. And both represent a selfish involvement with only his own subject. After a brief lull, once he has regained the sense of his own boundaries, either he’ll likely crave more of our fleshy discourse. Or, an abstracted corporeality, that dozy, sated state of one who has both exhausted himself in the hunt and yet also feels both nourished and replete from the feast. I’m after a different sort of abstraction. A shared one. A palpable dislocation from all that we know. A perpetuation of synaesthesia, without the writhing of somatic mass. A genuine disconnection from everything extrinsic and quotidian, leaving pure connection with my partner of the moment. A sweep where together, we can create anything we like. Anything we can imagine. A pre-Fall Garden of Eden, when singularly man and woman existed for each other’s adoration. The Eden when Adam howlingly begged for a mate to end his gaping solitariness. That moment just prior to when the sibilant serpent introduced me to Damon.


For all the (relatively) involuntary sighs, grunts and groans, deep rent from our overloaded and therefore unmediated beings, the flesh cannot transcend its own circumscription.The gravity-laden physical bourn. The anatomical injunctions. Where flesh slops against flesh, with a gulp where the air is expelled between the suction of the twin heaving surfaces. I want, desire, to repose in a realm that is without edges. I yearn to be boundless. I want us to be borne aloft on that vacated air squeezed out, emitted from between us with our commingled stamp on it. In our horizons, we are to be the only two people extant. Without any dis-attractions to sunder us. For tonight at least.


Simon his name was. One of the few pre-coital words tossed beathlessly in my direction. Now, no longer one flesh, our torsos cloven apart. Our legs however were still intertwined. He, head slumped against my shoulder, legs splayed out at the diagonal. Me, stiff backed against the headboard, my left leg threaded under his right and over his left. My right leg bent at the knee, arching over his ankles. Hand propped on it, fingers buttressing a lit cigarette overhanging the sheet beyond my foot. I’ve no intention of bringing it to my lips. It measures out time for him, embers in place of grains of sand. The span of two such kindlings will determine whether he is reignited, or rolls over to sleep. I have found this chronometry unfailingly meters the male metabolism.


I glance over towards him, unable to determine whether the look in his eye expresses confusion as to why I am not putting it to my mouth, or suppressed concern as to the impulse of the hot ash. The modern day version of barefoot and blindfold. He tilts his torpid head as a prelude to inquiry, but I nimbly raise the index finger of my right hand and gently transect his lips. Uh-uh, if we no longer are able to retain the disarticulations of earlier, the reflexively unreflected babble, the sonorous squalls coitally quarried from our deepest seams of self, then better we are held together under silence’s shroud. It is paramount that we become alalial allies. It is the very heart of the matter. I shake my head for added emphasis and already I detect his purpose is lost in the undulations of my tresses against his exposed cheek.


Suffused in my ruminations, I was unaware that my murmuring Medusa’s locks had ceased their stroke. He was unconsciously rubbing his delicately flayed cheek and I ventured some sort of vocalisation would follow. Again I placed my finger across his lips and spiked their unsheathing. Tentatively he edged the tip of his tongue out against my tapered digit and hastily withdrew it again. He had tasted my resolve. Through the conduit of his lips, I felt his whole body flinch as he gathered himself up towards defiance of my circumvention of speech. I unfurled my middle finger and laid it with great deliberation next to her sister, across the crevice of his mouth. The muscles at the corners of his lips, measuredly retracted their charges into a crooked grin. My two fingers now like twin colonnades, bracing open his stupid wide aperture. I lent forward and mutely kissed the extended knuckles of my own fingers. That threw him somewhat. For as his startled lips were about to clamp down reflexively on them, I withdrew my fingers but maintained their sentinel trajectory. He was seemingly transfixed by the sight of two caryatids rigidly posted just beyond his orifice. He was beyond coherence right now. Veritably speechless. He jutted his chin forward and slithered out his tongue to reel my goading digits into his teeming maw. They waggled out of range. He extended further forward. My fingers spun away. He was shaping to cast again, when my left foot snakes across and presses him back down across his chest. He is about to protest verbally, when my twin fingers reassert their superintendence across his portals of locution. His body sags and crumples back to the mattress, though I can tell his mind has been wracked by a bolt of delicious tautness.


After a circumspect period, I detach both my leg and my fingers. He does not stir. I light my second cigarette and resume my vaulting of him. Leadenly, he rolls on to his side and scrabbles for something on the floor. He resurfaces with a burgundy towelling robe, (brought with him from home, since this is not the class of hotel which runs to provisioning them for guests, though the guests would be of the class happily to snaffle them), before reclining back towards the headboard. Half self-pinioned, awkwardly he shrugs himself into the robe. He gropes around his back for something, with clumsy, sightless digits. I surmise that he seeks the belt of the robe, but it is not there. He submits and his head slowly sinks back down the surface of the headboard. His long locks pincered by his crown, momentarily maintain their station like creeping ivy, before they descend to unseam his now less than immaculate coiffure. I fix him there, framed unflatteringly by the knobbly towelling. At the angle he lies, his glorious sixpack is almost completely submerged by the flesh collected under gravity. There is even the hint of a rucking of flabby skin just above his hips. Why on earth has he donned this garment and broken the spell ? I deflect my gaze and peer through the rising cigarette smoke as if for augury. I must have sensed something in the corner of my eye and snapped my focus back, to intercept him about to tumble words into the air. This time it’s my cigarette-cradling fingers that drape themselves over his mouth. His eyes start to water, from the proximity of the smoke, or from more internal fusillades I cannot be sure. I know the prosaic reason for the robe of course. The poor lamb’s cold. His lips are quivering. He manoeuvres them to siphon some superficial heat from my cigarette, his irises scuttling to their extreme margins scanning for any repercussion. Good boy, maybe we’re getting somewhere after all. I cant my face away so that my jagged smokey laughter does not exhale over him.


The sheen of sweat from our earlier endeavours, (which so sublimely varnished his sixpack all throughout) still sits atop his skin. But it has fulfilled its function and cooled him down, to the extent where his follicles currently stood to attention in an attempt to reinsulate him. They no longer glistened like the limbs of an insect dappled with pollen. Now such droplets threaten his tonicity. Indolent, mutinous beads with no sustained interdependence. They subvert him. He trusts to the robe to absorb and dismiss them. To tamp him back down and regather. My perspiration went west long ago. Evaporated, since my temperature’s still rising with the afterglow. I take pity on him and place my two unburdened fingers on his lips again. He is surprised, since he was not attempting to challenge me. But this time they do not crest the vertex, but bow in supplication at the lower ridge. They wait a while, before he hesitantly lifts the labium and gently skims the pads of my fingers. Emboldened, he grazes them with his gums, before eventually, he throws off his shackles and engulfs them. He laps at them with bulbous slurps and satisfied tiny suction pops. So I flick his teeth with one of them as scourge. He responds obediently and laps at them regularly, up and down in a spiral. First one, then his tongue nudges them apart so he can acquire the second. Like he’s chamoising minature mullions. Sure enough, he soon slots into a mechanical, albeit arrhythmic, insipid servicing. His thoughts off elsewhere, because he’s too blunted to assert what he wants. Wordlessly that is.


His problem, like so many of his kind, is he will not just live in the timeless moment. He’s all sweaty, He’s cold. He’s lying in a viscous, cloying pool (of his own making and one in which I am happy to cleave to me, to adhere me to the sheet. To anoint us together). And, he wants to prate about it. Ask asinine questions towards self-aggrandizement. Or to record and log proceedings. To minute them. To compare with the past and to carry forward amendments into the future. Where he has already projected himself. It was as if he was narrating the entire event. The circumstance. An episode. He is keen to march me back into the mundane and I am not at that double quick pace. He wants to return us to the formally structured relations, of speaker and listener. Addresser and addressee. Subject and object. Chatterer up and chatted up. The one inside and the one outside, of intent. He cannot wait for the sperm pellicle to mark out time by receding to a light, dried crust. There’s premature ejaculation and then there’s premature post-ejaculation. Cos intimacy ought not have departed with consummation. Our bodies had spoken, but they were still communing with one another in mute elation. Interwoven, flesh blended with flesh. Who knew or cared where you ended and I began ? So what of your slight edge on me in hirsuiteness, or my darker pigmentation ? It was all awash in the sensual maelstrom, the perceptual overload. Our fallible vessels, cause of so much anxiety in the workaday consciousness, had been temporarily uplifted, so we could quaff of mutual veneration and adoration. And we should seek to prolong those feelings for as long as possible. For eternity. To remain conjoined, even in stillness. Indeterminate and undifferentiated. Equals.


Until that is, you clad yourself in your burgundy fleece. Now our separateness is clear. Our demarcation evident against the hues of the sheet pointing up our contrast. A chasm between us, yawning in your case, yearning in mine. Me beached on dry land, you still shivering in the shallows. Conspicuously other. Another species almost. A reimposition of the way of things. You satisfied. Content. And me ? Trying to hold the moment. The feeling. But now solely dependent on my own creative resources. And yet far too aware of this reliance, so it slips from my grasp all the while. In closing the aperture of his reporting mouth, I have sealed the portal of our connection as if rolling a huge dolmen across the exposed fissure of his self. Occluded any and all light of disclosure from emanating from his hollow being. God damnit ! A role reversal yields the same futile outcome. My eyes hold all the unstinting power that Damon’s held, yet it prospers me in no wany, shape or form.


My cigarette had burned away to nothing. On the stroke of its expunction, he rolled over on to his side and curled into himself slightly. Somehow, his unsecured robe, his vinculum to life, had managed to adhere to him throughout his quarter revolution, his waning crescent, and still mantled his immodesty. I was now fully excised from his being, tossed into his moat of oblivion as the drawbridge of sleep was raised. I took a pinch of the robe between my fingers and lightly peeled it from his skin. I had a clear view of his ribs gently rising and falling with his quieted breath. The upswing seemed to take an eternity, as they manfully bore aloft their own weight against gravity. The downswing seemed to presage a relieving collapse, but each time caught itself from shuddering and instead coursed down in modulated repose. How does he sleep so easily ? I bent down to softly kiss them in salute. My lips left a glistening imprint upon them, which I watched undulate for a couple of cycles. Insufficient moisture to model a tidal effect with his zephyr breath. Then I leant over and smashed my balled fist into the centre of my mark and was rewarded with a satisfying crack. I took my reappropriated rib back from him...

Saturday 21 June 2008

Tit Bits - A,B & E 10

So that was it. Bottom line, he had the most delicious neck. Well worth putting my own on the chopping block for. You see, for all the reflection, calculation and contemplation, the feelings of hollowness, of being tethered, it all came down to the exquisite mysteries, the delirium engendered by that special neck. I am somewhat of a connoisseur. Don’t tell me you still don’t get it about the neck ? Well Terry’s, for example, is thin and prehensile. Like a vulture’s, crooking his head forward of his ramrod straight shoulders. As he fixes you with his beady eye, disconcertingly staring up into you from below. Or perennially half-turned in the front seat of the car, cleaving me and Damon apart in the back (and craftily scoping Lawrence peripherally). A vulture’s neck is devoid of feathers, since it is habitually projected deep into the bloodied carrion and the bird would be unable to preen itself clean. Being far too rapaciously acquisitive to co-operate with others of its species, thus bare stays the neck. See, I told you the neck was a sound diagnostic resource to the inner workings. Everything passes along it between the brain and the central nervous system. You’d have no beautiful musical strings, were the neck not between the tuning pegs and the body for you to finger. Oh and Damon’s ? Damon’s was like a tree stump, (how had I overlooked that at the outset ?) and ultimately, I was not a hugger of trees. Terry was though. He always cupped his hand round a man’s pycnic neck, rather than round the shoulders. Ever poised to wring it if required.


It's not merely that the neck is the decorative stem of the egg cup that cradles our brains. The end of the trunk road that signposts north to all facial expressway emotions. The neck is a picturesque landscape worth navigating in its own right. Damon’s neck however, was monotonous. Relentlessly undifferentiated. Invulnerable. A stout oaken beam. Without the gnarled cortex of bark. No salient of any Adam’s Apple, as if he’d swallowed apple, serpent and all, and smoothly adsorbed them into his plasma. Yet, he made the adam’s apples of other, lesser men, dance up and down as if he were a fairground try your strength stall owner, but no one ever got close to ringing his bell. Nor did he display evidence of tension- loaded carotid arteries to the side, again uniformly plastered into the all-over integument. Nothing and everything to get hold of. My hands would feed themselves up the broad holds without pause. Merely to grasp his face for kissing, or as he hoisted me up, in order to fold me appropriately to his elevation.


The scraggy scruffs of the youths here also fail to inspire, or ignite me as they ought. No matter what the physique, their fuzzy necks appear scrawny. The boney protuberance at the crest of their spine, seemingly hitching up their precocious bodies to their outsized predatory crowns. Neck as clothes hanger, in a permanent coat-check awaiting collection by matching ticket. They all cast their eyes down, rather than look you in the eye. It’s as if their stalks can’t bear the contemptuous weight. Back home either they cup their heads in a hood, or prop up their stance by ramming hands into trouser pockets as ballast. Here on the beach, bedecked only in shorts and trunks, they are all at sea. The skin only scrubbed by the clumps of downy hair, that breaks up any possible diaphanous vista stretching across their matchstick vertebrae. The ski runs are too brittle for me to trial an excursion. There is nothing giddily vertiginous to elicit my ruttishness. The only black runs present, are perspiration trails.


Homegrown foreplay on these foreign shores bypasses the neck entirely. Not for the want of trying. I turn my back on the youth du jour and run my hands into my hair, gathering it up for them. An open signpost to the top of my spine, but they presume it’s an invitation to reach around for my breasts. It’s so dispiriting. The neck is a de-erogenised zone. An off-the-beaten-track sort of site, bereft of interest or benefit. Outmoded by the one-stop-shopping at the cornucopia of the abdomen’s CBD. Crested by tit and fanny one-stop shops. The boys make straight for these pick and mix romper rooms. In regressive infantland, the neck is supplanted by the breast. A multi-faceted, one-way transaction. Actually, forget the multi-faceted aspect. I list for you below the entire panoply of mammary manouevrings at the cavalier hands of my young corsairs out here. I won’t include those tongue, face and penile impressions, for they are just far too chronic to dismal.

Nipple Clamping:
1) The nipple played as if strumming a guitar. Isn’t it all synthesizers and samplers these days ?

2) The nipple plucked as if plying rosary beads. ‘Forgive me Father for I know not what I’m doing’. Or counting on an abacus, an additional twenty-three more sweeps and he can move on to the next magnitude of landmark flesh

3) The nipple kneaded as though crumbling a lump of hash, rolling it and licking it sealed. All that’s misssing is lighting it up and passing it round.

4) The nipple tweaked as if tuning a radio. Both rapidly becoming a relic. The transistor and the wireless nipple that is. Is that a better reception now ? Usually a precursor to the breast being wielded like that other dinosaur, the manual gearstick

Single Breastwork:
5) Working away at the breast like it’s a scratchcard. You lose again you mug !

6) The pinch and twist, like trying to open a recalcitrant bottletop. I implore you, don’t try and use your teeth !

7) Flicking the breast like you were slicing through a rack of suits. That’s the problem with darned metrosexuals from London !

8) Shooting craps, or at least shaking the dice, eternally. Did he just blow on them for good luck ? Gambler's fallacy. Just roll the damn things already !

9) The executive gripmaster, for the man too busy to work out. Multi-tasking, his other hand is probably doing miniature starbursts on the labia

10) Pint in a straight glass please. He’ll cup it around the rim with reverence, but he won’t sup at it

Double-D Clutch:
11) The mountaineer. Clambering up the abdomen with his tongue, outstretched hands feeling for the next secure hold. He finds them and grips like clampons. Like he’s clinging on for dear life. Eventually he scales the twin peaks and hoves his head over the pinnacle with a stupid, self-satisfied grin. Alternatively is the East/West Face ascent, whereby each hand is a mountaineer coming at either peak from the side and meeting at the top of their respective summits (and waving idiotically at each other into the bargain)

12) The push-me, pull me. As if they’re playing the church organ, like some old spinster

13) The handlebars, as they ride me like a bike. Oops, bit of a dip there, careful, some camber coming up. Have you passed your proficiency test ?

14) The cymbals. Why do boys do this with such glee ? They don’t make much of a noise. Still, marginally preferable to those trying to drive them up into my jawline, like a radical new botox treatment. Cheek by jowl indeed

15) Putting the hands on each cup and just holding them there, like they’re warming up by a fire. Prelude to rubbing them vigorously together like emery paper. Still, this is one up on the hand as shamois leather, working over a particularly ingrained smear perceived somewhere on the breast

16) Punch and Judy without the puppets. That’s definitely not the way to do it

17) You knead me like dough. I need you like a hole in the head. If I knew you were coming, I’d’ve baked you a cake


You get none of this palaver with the nape of the neck I can tell you ... How many was that, sweet seventeen ? Presumably for my own double-page spread in a redtop, I would be required to produce a round score ? Tit Bits - the twenty boob jobs of sex ! Oh, is that a fact ? You may come over all hoity-toity, but bottom line, this is one field where we’re all hewn from the same rock. You can dress it up any whichway. Okay then, we'll tailor it for a Broadsheet. Instead of an Agony Auntie, I'll present myself as a sexologist. I do have a degree you know ! Well no, but I’ve been privy to enough fumbling and bumbling out here to counsel our misguided and lost generations. Try this for size if it's arch theorizing you're after. Between the sheets, I can adapt to any style you may care to solicit.


Adolescent sexual adventuring. Mapping of the other, that terra incognita of the opposite gender. Maiden voyaging towards imagined corporeal landscapes. Setting sail provisioned only with rumours, speculation and riddled nuggets, stitched together into a phantasmagorical, idealised mappamundis. Bearing unknown continents with suspiciously scalloped coastlines. Giving on to unscaled hinterlands, of nooks and crannies, crevices and valleys, grottos and cataracts, all indeterminately disproportionate. The conjectured rivers, crudely resembling biological drawings of the sexual plumbing. The unknown interiority, replaced in the cartography of afflatus, with the grotesques and the monsters of delirium. And their seaborne cousins, the behemoths and hydras, the gogs and magogs of the deep. The watery oceans themselves, framed with gargoyles exhaling the trade winds and jet streams of natural impulse and cherubic trumpeted peer pressure. Hazardously determining negotiation of choppy currents, tempests and swells, as the sexual wayfarers seek to plot their course.


And on to the Odyssey itself. More buckled and less swash. For the coves, the epic hazards of sirens and harpies, the blushing scarlet of female equivocation. On the distaff side, the monomaniacal one-eyed giants, with their cyclopean periscope on the main prize. Then there are the tides treacherously running you aground. Or stilling you in the Doldrums, snagging you with fibrous sargassum. Can you steer your circumnavigator-cum-surveyor to fill in the contours ? With your sextant and compass, can you cincture the whole ? The azimuth and the altitude. The hidden depth of the third dimension. To produce a more realistic lie of the terrain ? To populate the great unknown antipode, dismissively tagged ‘Frigida Inhabitabilis’ ? What chance, when casting off from crude sketches of your own unexplored interior ?


See, they come here, the ignorant, the rudimentary, to a long-established sea-faring nation, much like our own. Additionally, one that has extensively charted both the mental map and the physical geography, with its philosophy, its cosmology, its science and statuary. Yet these greenhorns, these horny toads, these brigands and opportunists, depart these shores with a scurvied treatment of sex and a reedy, featureless atlas for the future. Oh and in all likelihood, also a STD. Judging by the number of prescriptions I’ve had to seek.

Sunday 15 June 2008

Chauffeur Driven - A,B & E 9

Sex is a mental thing and that’s way beyond the province of youth. A bit arse over tit maybe, but with me it’s nearly always the seduction and its delicious sense of anticipation that sets me off, rather than the act itself. What did Lawrence and I have over Damon ? The conspiracy of illicit lovers. That shared secret, that somehow we may have held out lording it over the overlord himself, only by definition, he must never know or realise. Infuriatingly, a withheld secret proffers no mastery over the unaware. And of course, when he did discover our glimmer of autonomy, he effortlessly garotted it into lifelessness. But what about the spice of stealing from the arch robber baron himself ? The prince of thieves ? That ought to foment some exquisite heat. Albeit immediately doused by the coolant that is the terror of discovery. Even then there is rank inequality. Lawrence’s booty was the crime boss’s wife, whereas my ill gotten gain was merely one of the hired hands. The chauffeur with a peaked cap. So no, it wasn’t about any empowerment.


Who am I kidding ? There never was any power to be had. For power is indivisible. Damon vitiates everyone he comes across. Like a King Midas, he petrifies everything he contacts. The car was our designated arena. It was foreseen and logged by the panopticon, that Lawrence and I would be coexisting in that shared space, for the mensurable duration of an excursion. Neither of us dared to flout those parameters, since no such stopover had been pencilled in the itinerary and we both superstitiously, (such is Damon’s abstruse omnipotence), felt that to challenge the phasing would irrevocably tilt our tiny portion of the cosmos from its orbit. Whereby astronomical Damon, or a keen-eyed black-holer like Terry, would surely rein us in with their telescopic reach. So we never got out and did it in a field, or a park, or some occluded public space. The car was our canopy and mantle. Restraint-abandon, abandon-restraint. I don’t know that you can usefully conjoin these two contrary impulses. There was just a single exception. We cavorted on the bonnet on a single happenstance. And do you know what informed this particular expedient ? Lawrence bequeathed it, on the day he knew he was responsible for ensuring that the car was washed and waxed. So the smear of our mutual trespass could be instantly wiped clean. Whither spontaneity ? Whither unprompted passion ? So there’s the epitome of Damon’s clout. How he could contaminate our fantasies and infect them with the coccus of nightmare.


From the first time I clapped eyes on Lawrence, I actually thought him faintly ridiculous donned out in the livery of a chauffeur. Grey was not Lawrence’s colour (is it anyone’s ?). His sturdy fibrousness obviously itched for some more cutting edge action, (sadly for him, Damon never did need the recourse of a ‘getaway’), since it bulged and surged against the fabric in unexpected little places. Offering its own remonstrance that it could not be contained therewith. The trouble was, the overall effect just made him appear crinkled. Like a tyre tread. A skidmark.


So, it is fair to say the attraction, that animal lure, was not eye-poppingly immediate. For some six years, Lawrence had been transporting me on my woman of leisure’s diurnal pilgrimage; shopping congresses, beautician assignations and restaurant rendezvous. All undertaken, without paying the slightest heed of him sat ahead of me. At best, if on the return journey home I ever flitted out of my limbering reverie, or my swooning expenditure, what sight befell me ? An insignificant fleshy mullion, foregrounding my view out on to the world. A dainty isthmus of neck, corrugated between sharp borders of grey jacket rimming white shirt collars and the tight furrow of close cropped hair. If the ventral display was all disorderly, thewy subversion, the dorsal, that view presented to me, was faultlessly bashful. That was intriguing. What could Damon make of this Janus-faced employee ? What could I ?


Gradually on each day’s sojourn, my advertence deserted internal recitation of liturgies from catalogue, brochure, menu and glossy primer. Instead I consecrated a new tierce, as idle distraction fanned into fervent obeisance. Sat re-upholstered at my rear-seated station, my devotion was an engrossed fascination. For across the week, I traced the serial derangement of his jacket collar into atony, until starchy reconditioning from a presumed trip to the dry cleaners of a weekend. I followed the similar, more rapid enervation of each crisp shirt collar, further tracking the advancing tide mark as the day waxed and waned. I stalked the creeping infraction of the descending hairline into the dermal savanna of his endangered neck. I monitored the patches of gauzy down succumbing one by one to the dark, septentrional colonisation. And then I witnessed the monthly incendiary clearing, of both scrub and thicket. How the scarified skin was arrayed with beacon red horripilation. Livid nodes of denudation protesting the lunar cull. Nonetheless, in the night, stratification had been reimposed, stark frontiers redrawn. A flirtation with unkempt chaos, redeemed by asperous ministrations. Daily I was witness to Damon’s grooming and yet it’s familiarity did not engender such goggle-eyed interest. But in one of his minions, the shadowplay of natural louche inclination, contending with regimented ambition, afforded me a squint into what the High Priest demanded of his votaries. With myself as one such. A cult of the contrary. Of partial inversion. Hard men feminised in the catamenial rhythms of their off-duty oscillations. Petticoat me, invigorated when I clocked on of an evening peregrined on Damon's arm. Here was an opportunity advanced to discover who I really had become. Tergiversation was complete. I was no longer a lady who lunched.


Now these recurring transitions across Lawrence’s skin, microscopic changes ranging beyond the quotidian, conceded a glimpse of other dramas being played out. Might this be what it would be like to rear a child ? My erstwhile experience of remote godmothering, (unsurprisingly, Damon was much in demand for covenanting to safeguard many children both within the official Church and the church of Satan), meant I got to see a lot of infants intermittently. “Oh, do you think ?” was the constant refrain of mothers, whose bloodshot wakes burrowing through scleras entrenched deep within orbital skin, still managed to disseminate a weak distress flare against the pallor of the rest of their face. Seemingly, being so close and proximate to your baby, connotes that is very hard to discern minute variations and incremental growth. My immersion in the mutable scruff of Lawrence gainsays this. The devil is in the detail. Desire’s deal-making circuit breaker. A mercurial trip switch.


Growth. Development. Progression. Expansion ... So having dedicated carriaged hours to musing, now it was ordained that I should venture beyond the narrow straits. No longer was it to be a restricted view. The partition glass had coalesced into a new identification suite for me. For his part, Lawrence had always been the consummate orderly. Never looking over his shoulder to engage with me. Our conversation light and borne on the air, as he addressed the windscreen in front of him with full transparency. Yet every occasion of him opening the door for me, or watching my form recede from the car, accomodated him plenty scope to appraise me if he so desired. A rear-view reciprocation. And came the day, that incipient instant of inroaded irruption, when I espied a gash in his freshly threshed stubble. The censure of a cutthroat razor. Nevertheless from its extraneous locus on the back of his neck, an innocent enough imprint. And yet, perhaps not. For here was evidence, that in his private time, his intimate, non-fraternal space, while being shaved (who shaved him, surely no woman would employ a cutthroat ?), he had indeed turned his head to converse with someone and incurred the blade’s scathing. The clock was ticking, the clouds blunting the sun and effacing the sundial. In my mind’s eye, I leaned forward in my seat and through the providential fissure in the partition screen, whispily blew the pappus on his neck. Trying to incise a clearing, to keep any strands of hair from draggling across the riven flesh and flaying it further. I did this day after day, healing without laying on of hands, until the volcanic relief of scar tissue resubmerged from sight. And I knew it was time. I had parted the waves. There was no more balefire red, of whatever source, warning me off.


And maybe Lawrence had also felt me perennially boring through his occiput, leaning lasciviously against the foramen arcades, impressing upon the grey matter within. Until its arrogation finally overrode any friction of fear and imparted him with misconceived momentum of his own. The resistable driving force, meeting the resolutely sedentary object. Convergence. Only there never was really.


That steers us back to the sex then. Well, spacious as the back of a limo is, it is still somewhat confining. We only ever partly undressed, not through impetuous passion, but due to restrictive turning circles given the low ceiling. I tended to plump for the reveal lying beneath bra and chemise, whereas he went for the sloughing of trousers and boxers. Complementary. It might have presaged how well we fitted together. In actuality it pointed up we were both off the meter. The required increased stretch for our limo, would have been widthways more than length. The seats weren’t the right height to access someone on the floor and though they were of a harder consistency than a bed, whoever was installed on them kept sinking further down into their concavity. In the end, we hit upon Lawrence having to stoop, while I squatted precariously on the flip up flunky seats, with every thrust threatening to upend me from my perch. Accordingly, the sex was simultaneously both stilted and vertiginous. My face was pressed up against the glass partition, seeing faint, indistinct impressions of myself veering up and slicing through my head. Half the time, if Lawrence torqued too firmly, or I relaxed my own braced tautness, I ended up kissing these riven me’s. There was enough slurped DNA across the partition, to clone me whole. Which Lawrence had already achieved single-handed. For all the sinewy aches of being bent, folded and manipulated, the sex was lordotic. Untrammelled access to my neck obliged this. But to me, post-coital admission was even better.


Since I could fold my head into a perfect nuchal cradle. My bated breath, barely ruffling the upstanding follicles which palisaded my face with resolute attention. Holding me together, when I smouldered and felt I was going to shrivel up. That feeling of being held, just like a baby in a mother’s arms. A feeling we’re are forever yearning to recapture, but the adult geometry always seems awry. It almost makes you wish to have been born into those cultures, whose matrons employ a papoose. Whereby the newborn unable to bear up its head, can naturally collapse forward to nestle in the curve of the mother’s nape. I always insisted on spooning him.


Lying there I could see the carotid cables pulse and whip with the exhalation of a long-resisted breath. Sinewy snakes, ever alert, sentinels on guard for the both of us while I duck out and dare shield my eyes from the world. As I press my whole ambit into his neck, the cords hoist me like elevator cables to a place of untouchability. It is a smooth ascension, without palpitation or tremor. It is the ultimate limo drive. It is the only pillow I could truly sleep on, without being pummelled and jabbed at by guilty dreams. The post-coital cocktail of hormonal somnolence probably helped, but if your crib fails to lend itself to repose -(sex out here not only effaces nothing of my surroundings, but rather amplifies shameful hotel decor, the mind-boggling clutteredness of transient tourists and their off-putting slovenliness). Lying there with Lawrence, I couldn’t help but fantasise cutting those cords and the two of us plummeting down towards an Icarian fusion. But this pyretic image was ever an improvement on my lonely vigil here, sat staring at the enticing veins in my wrists. Wrists and neck. Locii where I used to spray perfume. When I was formerly a woman, concerned with her feminine allure, not her female buffness.


Then, waxed and waned, the gathering comedown. Keys in the ignition and a turning of the engine. Lights on. At least one us us was itinerised to be someplace. One particular occasion I’d determined to wear lipstick. To spraypaint my manumission on the parted partition’s hoarding. Lawrence was appalled and wiped the crimson smile roughly from my lips with his hand. Oh he claimed that it was because it made me look tarty. But I knew the real reason was forensic. In the same way that the carapace of the car had to remain untainted by evidence, so the interior had to appear sterile too. Our love was doomed. On a road to nowhere.


The back of the neck. Like the arse, a region of the self you cannot catch. More so really, since a strategic looking glass will assist in your posterior viewing. But not the neck. You need two reflecting surfaces working in tandem to project that. And though the libidinous crackle was concentrated in his nape, really I was solely after a peek at my own. To regard what crested my spine. How my central nervous system was capped. What exactly tamped my passions back down among the Stygian darkness of my viscera. A simple neck rub might have sufficed, if I could have watched him operating on me in a mirror. But of course the house stakes were too high to return just a humble massage, so we went for broke. The whole body interaction. All over kneading. Genital focus as raising agent. And though I did arch the bow of my back and fire off fulgurant arrows, (in a manner I scarce did with Damon’s cock feather), I was really straining to ponder my own cervical curve. Lawrence’s lap a gantry, his neck a harness for my arms, as my skeleton tried to pivot so as to round on itself. But no matter how much he cranked his shaft, I was never able to attain full integration of course. I remained refluxed. Earthbound. Or carbound. The eternal pasenger. Passively driven along. Like a coffin on the treadmill that heaves its sedate progress to the crematorial flames.


Our relationship had feet of clay. Which was unfortunate, once we washed up shoeless, together on this sandy beach. With the tide rushing in. Pretty soon we were at each other’s throats, antipodal to the draw of each other’s pretty necks that had soldered us together. What sex there was, was desperate, rough and reproachful. Everything we did was braised in denaturing alcohol. And one stewed row too many, I launched a fusillade of insults, capped off with the leaden shot that “You’re showing your roots”. To which he rejoindered “Yeah, well so are you”. “I’ve never hidden where I’m from”. “No and it’s bleedin’ obvious where you’re heading to an’ all”, patting his head and rubbing his stomach at the same time, before transferring from the head, to mime knocking back shots, or maybe fellatio. It wasn’t exactly clear which. Then the parting depth charge as he stormed off down the beach, “For somebody supposedly brainy, you’ve fucked things up right royally” ringing in my cauliflowered ears. Has to be said, that for a boy with little formal education, he was remarkably prescient. Damon must have mentored him well to read people. For the disenchanted furrow he ploughed through the sand and right off the island, wasn’t too wide of my beaten track. My hair had been bleached to straw and any highlights were long gone. The sun had set on our relationship and left me with no end of split ends. A girl’s gotta eat somehow hasn’t she ?

Friday 6 June 2008

Free Sheets To The Wind

I'm on my fag break. Exiled from the kingdom of pub. I’m suspended over the rail. Not quite reckless teetering as it might sound. After all, my feet are still in contact with the ground. My sternum is braced across the metal tubing, a handrail by the ramp for wheelchair users to propel themselves into the saloon bar like a low slung gunslinger. What the nanny state takes with one hand it bestows with the other – enabling me to pivot the top half of my torso over the bar. My hands are clasped together on the small of my back, removed from the balancing equation.


My gaze is levered down the street. If this were a boozer in Soho, it would be pimps pandering their white slaves. If it were Leicester Square, it might be scantily clad girls on roller blades importuning you to dance the night away. Pressing flyers into your pockets, subsequently to lie crumpled all over the Square. Oxford Street, and some sloganed sweat-shirted youth tries to wheedle money from you for a worthy cause. Bearing nowt but a manic grin, as if they are in a cult. Which I suppose they are. Far worse, is when a gaggle of them spread out across the breadth of the pavement like old fashioned British Bulldog, armed with clipboard questionnaires, stock blandishments and recruitment targets. And a barrel-load of guilt they are all too happy to try and ladle out smilingly. But here, apart from the odd artist trying to peddle postcard examples of his garreted wares, in the main it’s dicky bowed waiters, beseeching passersby to come dine with them. Quite endearing really. Food rating higher than sex.


As I perch perilously, both the London flimsy free newssheets spill from my outer pocket. I'd claimed them earlier in the afternoon from sellers (?) chartreuse clad or violaceously caparisoned, roving from their stacked stalls, though presumably tethered by an invisible chain so as not to stray into a rival’s terrain. Commission is all, after all and what all are after. With myriad copies perched like a multi-limbed Hindu deity, the vendors strike like fanged vipers, snapping a copy at your exposed flesh. The City’s commuters meekly accept them to unfurl against not rain, but further dealers down the road, til they reach the sanctuary of the Tube interior where their manteaus are cast off. Yet despite these throwaways paving London’s streets, not with gold but tissue paper and unfixed ink, these paper piles never seem to diminish at source, Like a promethean liver, they are self-regenerating inside their metal trolleys. What proof of free sales can these poor saps offer ? There must be some method, otherwise they could just duck out of sight, dump the pile, then return at the appointed time having seemingly sold (?) out their stock. What's the difference between dumping them en masse, or getting their customers to dump them by proxy one at a time ?



It was in this vein that I witnessed only the other day, a striking highlighting of the economic principles at play here. Some denizen of our fine metropolis, took it upon himself to conduct a spot of impromptu industrial sabotage. I’m conjecturing here, but I don’t think his outrage was either ecologically nor aesthetically motivated. Incensed at any deluging of London, beneath cheap newsprint and scuzzier merchandising offers. I think he was plain and simple bigoted and keen to seize the opportunity to pounce upon a recent migrant to our shores. For initially he passed a stall, in somewhat of an belligerent manner, batting through the wedding arch of papers canopying his path, before intentionally wheeling around, returning to the unguarded dispensary and ducking down beneath the meniscus of its perky parasol. The vendor, with seeming sunny disposition gave him a brief backward glance, before chalking him up to a self-server and returning to his marks. I suspect the aggressor was emptying lighter fluid on to the stack, for the next thing we know, a serpentine coil of flame dances upon the top of the stack and the edges of the parasol start drooping. With a whoop the arsonist darts backwards out of range of the licks of fire, his horribly contorted visage lit up to cameo his malevolence. Prometheus’ liver burned to cinders. A man’s labours gone up in smoke. Where there should have been a sold-out void, instead would rest ashes, once they had come to earth. Hot press, cold clinker.



The Unread Sea might have parted that day, but the mechanism is self-righting. I can see them back in their usual force. Their habitual numbers. Manning ziggurats of undigested editions. Identical copy layered on top of one another. Truly a press of words, but one that can’t hold a candle to the swathe cut through by the internet. For I ask myself, what need of newsprint and pulping trees, when you can just go online and track down the same words archived on the ether ? Single strata and yet simultaneously accessible to a boundless number of readers. Instantly translatable into any language of the world too. One set of words, not innumerable mimeographed hard copies. It’s a strange allocation of resources, creating a need for lightweight newspaper chain mail suits and inverted keel paper hats, purely in order to head off those selfsame people handing out the newspapers in the first place. The snake that eats it’s own tail.


But I’m dissembling. I know why a proper need for newspapers still exists. And I don’t mean these catalogues full of advertorial. My old man used to discourse with his daily. Well why not, if a Columnist can editorialise and opine, then does not my father in the putative audience not have a right of reply ? For indubitably they had built up a relationship, albeit at one remove. Over all the years and no matter the change of personnel at the paper, the two had yoked themselves together, though the harness was a tad lopsided, as the journalist always led and my father unfailingly took the bait. But it had to be said, my father knew each columnist’s views like the back of his own hands that were holding them up to daily scrutiny. Everyday I would scan them signalling how the land lay. For it always started with a ripple of non-verbal broadcast. The inhalations and exhalations of abridged passing comment. Appreciative whistling, stupefied insufflation, or censurious clucking. The emotional bulletins weren’t so much worn on his sleeves, but radiated down them to resonate the leaves of the gazette itself. A Richter scale of seismic stirring, from rustling with tremulous dismay, all the way through to a cracking detonation along the faultline of the fold in utter disbelief. But among all these reverberating reports, would also be an outpouring of words. When the tissue of the paper was no longer sufficient to contain the discharge. He actually conversed with it. To be sure, expostulating to no one in particular, other than the monochromal flat plane in front of him. He literally aired his views, perhaps so as to smell refreshed to himself. Did he ever write in to the letters page ? I don’t think so, the imbibing of the paper was a private realm, a domestic tipple. Though the arguments might later be decanted down the pub or over a dinner party, it was never discussed with others at home during the day. Though we were at liberty to pick it up and read it ourselves, subsequent to Dad finishing with it. Once he had dismounted from his moral high horse. Once his blinkered gallops were over for the morning.


Having occluded your face, the paper forms an extension of yourself at the end of your arms. That windblown tablet of wood pulp, no more substantial than a reedy reflection in a mirror. A membrane imprinted with social dialogue. Seeing as you might engage it in debate, or at least be provoked into response by its contents, it represents another torso. One you might entreat with, as if grabbing the correspondent’s forearms, or even his shoulders and giving them a good shake. Grappling with the issues, the very size of the broadsheet making you have to work for your nuggets of enlightenment. Of course, with the recent trend towards tabloids, this aspect has been somewhat denuded. However, all this is to say, you can’t possibly recreate this with via a computer screen. A desktop monitor remains resolutely detached from the rest of you. Even a laptop is perched no more intimately than a cat who deigns to sit on your lap and let you run your hand through its fur. Yes your fingers might palpate the keyboard, but only the steady tips, the farthest margins of your being, get to express any contact. The rest of you remains haughtily upright and perpendicular. There is a dearth of interaction at the nexus of a computer monitor. It remains steadfastly an altar upon which we leave our offerings and hope to be rewarded with oracular wisdom. We do not converse with it, but only through it, like a walky-talky. Scrolling down does not render it parchment. The computer remains little more than a swifter, cheaper form of telecommunication. A slightly more updated version of the penpal. Other than its one boon. Its sole opportunity for interface directly on to the screen. Being the free sheet edition of what the Soho pimps offer at extortionate cost. I'd like to say more, but my dog end has counted me out. I leave the freesheets to the wind as I recrudesce back inside the drinking establishment.