blood. Whenever I used the word ‘laceration’
I didn’t mean this.
I am not looking there, not there.
I am steeped, drowning in blood.
And when I wake,
drag myself up from the place I sank and rose
to be greeted by death
and then, mistaken (death was thwarted),
after drifting around an alcoholic nightmare,
I make contact.
A trauma. A lesion. An itch from which
I remove my hand, calmly. It is placid, this place,
it is still.
I have collapsed (his hand is on my socked foot).
I am contained; I am held.
I say: I should go.
I don’t go. My need
is becoming clear. It is revealed.
It is revealed to both. My need is revealed
to both of us; to me, to him – at this moment.
I am together with someone.
I am clothed.
I ask to be close, and I am rewarded
with closeness. Libidinous thrills – these are absent.
I wouldn’t have asked for that if I could.
I am filled up, overflowing, with orgasmic
waste. Excess. A fountain, a labyrinth, a thousand
(little) deaths.
I am
enamoured, admiring, humbled.
I have sunk my face into a stranger’s breast.
I have lost my inhibitions there.
I am present, living, focusing
on the hands that
move, with care,
in the space between the falling shoulder of my blouse
and the taught strap of my vest. That very
slice of flesh.
I relive this sensation. This gentlest of touches.
This being touched. I watch the hand I called
‘strangely elegant’, both in motion and stasis,
upon my hip. Casual, yet incisive.
Not loose, not promiscuous, but
doing, making (me).
Yes, there are eyes that see me and,
in turn, I see. There is the sludge of magnetism.
But I am no empty vessel.
I am no hole to be filled.
I needed strength and it came forth from
this unlikely, yet potential source, and
there is no reimbursement,
no expectation. This ‘man’
is making me into a ‘woman’.
I don’t need to drink from his cup.
I don’t struggle underneath his
frustrated desire
to possess, bodily or otherwise a ghost that
slips by unawares, out the door, and is
miles away. There is no struggle.
I have retreated from that.
This economy is as far-removed as I can imagine
from that.
And my centre shifts from nerve-endings
to the womb. Away from goal-oriented psycho-sexual games
to kindness and ‘free exchange of strengths
and weaknesses’. I know about this. I have
imagined it, in-between
violent sex: bodily harm that I still refuse
to name as such.
I know it exists. They speak often enough of it.
I watched it play out on my screen
This morning. A different kind of blood.
A witnessing. Intimacy
unbound.
This route
is the way
out
of
horror.
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