‘Look,
look, look, look, look, look’ – he takes his glasses off the nightstand and puts them on & looks at us in the mirror & it’s –
in 2010 I wanted oblivion
– it’s hot, real. It’s 2018 and I just want to be present
In the complexity of Silicon Valley to linger, eyes on another’s, without ego or expectation is always the eye of a hurricane
I danced with a girl some weeks ago – she was smart and delicate – rarely do I hold someone slighter than myself. She wore lace, smiled when she re-adjusted her slipping purse strap. I felt so responsible, holding her – jeans to her lace – cropped hair to her straight brown tresses.
My arms get bigger as I’m working out. The man who molested me had arms like sick alloy of iron and skin – sometimes I flex and want fleetingly to be stronger than him. Not to harm. Never to harm. Holding a slenderer woman, I can’t understand how anyone could use their strength for ill. It’s stayed with me – the sense of duty in strength. A good lesson.
Athena asked me moons ago whether there was a theme to my fetishes.* With some highway miles of deliberation I realized the commonality is focus. I generally am a handful of places at once; studying the light, your voice, hedonics, dynamics. Perhaps the high alert habit of a girl from a semi-broken home; perhaps it’s typical to be scattered. Though, I’m so much better when I’m focused.
I like how suspension forces perception to that of force and binds and air. How latex focuses form to monochromatic curves. How D/s focuses attention to another’s line of command, or their vulnerability.
Some things in kink are just fun. Some are transformative, connective, so on. I like practically any given action, in the right context. The moment and the other/s are what matter. But the common thread of what fetishes I like most? If pressed to find one, that thing is focus.
*Fetish as slang, not psychological definition. Athena as lady, not deity.
It’s true that poly means being greedy.
I want a partner who feels free. I want a partner who knows they’re safe sharing their love, attractions & momentary flashes of lust with me; as well as the ensuing intimacy of knowing them that much better.
I want the chance to grow and overcome my fears. I want the understanding born of honest, granular communication. I want not to be complacent.
I want those I love to have all the joy and affection they might desire, in the forms which suit them best. I would like any partner’s life to be rich, full and vivid. And I want to be a catalyst, not constraint.
I want: so I am greedy.
Be raised in a broken home, emotionally untended after age eleven. Have enough to eat and a warm place to sleep. Grow up through books and The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Know an anarchic liberty of thought. Turn inwards. Theorize and hunger in a vacuum.
Try marijuana and laugh. Try starving, cutting, lulling yourself into oblivion through trance music. Lack a context in which experience, harming none, can be deemed wrong. Try acid and lace the stars together. Discover the infinite varieties of gender, love and sex. Be overwhelmed by how a threesome is a difference of kind, not merely of degree, away from a couple. Dissolve the cultural norms surrounding love and monogamy. Grow.
Know thyself. Build a foundation of love, bravery and honesty. Throw up a scaffold of possibilities: how one may love, make love, be intimate. Mortar together with trusted friends. Trust yourself. Decide at last ‘the risk to remain tight in a bud…’ and that a partner you cannot be naked honest with is no kind of partner, no-one to get naked with. Strike out on your own.
Follow your heart. Allow your lusts. Know there is no shame among consenting adults. Take care of yourself.
Keep at it.
Return from Wonderland. Know now you’re part of the fabric of Wonderland, and can never return. Realize how impossibly fucking transgressive Wonderland is to most people, when to you it is just a broader language for connection.
Feel lonely, sometimes. Try and appreciate the irony. Perpetually try and find the words.
First you find the ends, then you find the center went one of my first rope lessons. This has proven of infinite utility.
I had the epiphany – the sort of clear, sharp epiphany I thought was left behind with teenage years – that for most of my life, I’ve sought sorts of self-destruction. This has been constant, reflexive and very deeply ingrained. They’ve been gentle, relatively safe forms like daydream and orgasm and the reflexive annihilation of thoughts and impulses. Sometimes the form has been: going away inside. At times it was a reversible alternative to suicide. Often it was a coping mechanism for the intense emotions and ideas I had no way to pursue.
Then December brought a stunningly beautiful cold spell and successful month at work, and every remaining self-destructive impulse flipped to generative. I hadn’t known how consistently I nixed myself, stopped my thoughts, held my hands down until I let these things flow. Propriety and morality kicked in and kept me from crossing inappropriate lines. I was whole and at peace. How incredible is that? Growing-up keeps surprising me with a wealth of joys that only come from experience and knowledge. No one ever tells you that – or ever told me that – when you are young. But so it is and I am happy.
Perhaps this creativity was an end, or perhaps it is the center between annihilation and feral joy. I don’t know and do not have to know yet. But there are other ends and other centers.
I found my end of the spectrum of sexual whim in San Francisco, playing with lovers who caught my eye. More precisely, I found and fetishized an extreme state of transience. I loved the glint of your eyes and the already-fading marks of suspension hemp, and didn’t care what came to-morrow. It was beautiful and I do not judge or regret it. For so many years I had experienced sexuality at the other end of the spectrum – as a victim, or a girl acquiescing to a relationship without nearly the self-awareness and confidence to seek her desires out. (This of course simplifies everything, and I experienced many moments in-between all along the way with good men/women.) But – having known both ends, I can see a center of what I want; a matrix of steady connection, always in flux, holding transient joys.
I’ve punched my fist numb in spun-up desire and held my palms to the earth grounding acknowledged want, and now I can look at my hands and see all the capability of restraint and love and labour. And I know my strength.
I’ve been the hurt girl in voluminous skirts, delicate in every way and calling for help with every non-verbal cue. I’ve been the tough boy in jeans moving through the factory. And now I can synthesize the whole damn woman, use my strengths and work through the challenges; come to the table zen and honest with something to offer and plenty of mistakes to make.
I’ve no real point except that I’ve inhabited a lot of ends, oscillated and fucked up and pondered and feel a great deal more whole and balanced; ready to get things done.
Mute hands, sensitized by the rarity of touch. Palms turned down they complete a smitten circuit to earth ground, frosted and strewn with redwood needles. Orion arcs overhead. This place is a comic example of the persistence of memory. In my heart it was a fireplace, cavernous as focus turns things, and light and shadows playing in pools of bone. In my heart it was a staircase to the snow, a lone house in the wild woods, some narrow road to pagan peace.
In reality, like Dali’s clocks un-melted, it was a cabin with rooms of standard size among a row of like buildings. There was a strip of parking. The fireplace was smaller. Memory has its own poetic honesty.
Mute hands, numb with midwinter cold. Once I wrote of being a conduit. Everything flows over me and through me, into the ground, yet is recreated continually. I suppose then I am a source, not merely wires. Here in the forest I join a complete circuit; cold, crying, calling for an ancestral spirit.
He comes and walks me back inside.
I dreamt the wings came in, ice-blue. I dreamed of meat and milk and kisses, and the softness of air stirred by two walking abreast.
My forefathers were named for light; likely makers of candles in Eastern Europe.
When someone who has lived in your home passes away, they leave an absence of illumination. My father threw geometries of light on the stairwell at breakfast-time, from kitchen lights: a simple thing until it wasn’t any more. That shape where light ought to have been is burned behind my eyelids. It was what meant he was gone.
This 1st night of Chanukah, I wondered why light the menorah in an empty house. But some patterns of illumination are meant to prevail longer than any of us, and be cast in any circumstances. All men must die, but in tradition we join the infinite.
Something I appreciate about polyamory is the grace (which can be) inherent in its practice. There are moments in a poly relationship where one is stung, or fearful. Especially so in a society which values monogamy and writes that into its songs and films, where the message that love is exclusivity is so prevalent it comes unbidden into our hearts and thoughts. Polyamorous folk are not, always, immune to jealousy and fear. The moment where you are struck by a painful emotion and elect not to let it drive you is I think a sort of grace, a bowing to the longer trajectory of joy or love or liberty.
Grace and the inner struggle to do it right, in the service of a greater thing, is deeply admirable in my eyes. The aesthetic and pragmatic converge in this trait: a set jaw, tomorrow’s lights lit.
Lilac Wine :: a warzone towards haiku 