Sweet Madness

Is it sweet madness, being single, or being brimful of desire and love that marks me out? I seem to have an effortless ability to make women smile at me. Their eyes shine. I do not know how I am doing it. Maybe I am like a late rose just coming into bloom before the winter shrivels it. My blood is singing. And although I am ravaged by care, and ravished by you, there must be some mark set upon me - some fruition is taking place, and plain to see by all.

And somehow you gave me that gift. A tree bent so far backwards to accommodate others, I was in danger of toppling. With just a few words, and some simple generous kisses, you straightened me, and somehow I am coming into bloom.

And then later, once we had drunk each other, when our electric senses had short-circuited each other, when your sweat was my sweat, and we hardly knew whose hand was whose, then a calm certainty began to grow in me, a kernel, a core of me in a boiling sea of stress and dizziness.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

DXXX

And as for yourself, what do you know?

That you stirred prehistory in your lover?

What passion was it welled from the long-dead

in him? What women were there who hated you?

What men of darkness did you rouse in young veins?

What dead children reached their arms to you?

O, gently, gently then! Let him watch you

at some steady, everyday task - lovingly, lead him

close up to the garden, give him whatever might

outweigh the nights...

Hold him back...

Rainer Maria Rilke, Elegy III - Duino Elegies

Response to previous comment - for want of a more amorous title.

I dare say things would feel better were you to be in my bed, our eye-beams twisted upon a double thread- (Ah ha! I can do poetry allusions too if I dig deep enough!) but I don’t think it would help the cause. 

What fucking cause?

I see spectres of the wronged and righteous bearing over dreams of you, fingers pointing, wagging, whittling their stakes. I hear chiding, chastening, vengeful voices in my head and the distant sounds of Furies unleashing their hell-hounds to find and follow my scent.

But Pah!

All that between remembering with a smile your skin against mine and how easy it was to be with you and simply enjoy.

Aaaargh! 

I don’t know your plans and neither it seems, do you. How can you? It’s just the one-day-at-a-time-one-foot-after-the-other stage and I salute you for bearing up thus far. 

You know there’s no pressure from over here. Whatever whims or wants I might have, I live mostly in my own sweet bubble upon whose filmy (& occasionally filthy) screen your delightful image flickers and shifts.

And as for your freedom, I wouldn’t have it otherwise. I’ve never been one for shackling.

But,  rebound - beware (I shall be). Take your time. Fanny about if you wish. I am not the only goddess in the pantheon nor the only heavenly body to strump about this universe.

I’m going to shut up now because you are talking at me from the wings, which is disconcerting (and also the reason why all the above is really rather crap).

Of course you’re welcome here but I am too loathe to be complicit in your bastardry to encourage it so. So - shrugs - just let me know.

Dear you,

You are very sweet. I’ve said that already.

Today I don’t deserve your words, your enthusiasm nor your love in any of its gentle or violent forms; words meant to arouse and caress wasted on my blunted mind and senses. Yet saved for another day

My body - the lithe, desirous body that intertwined with yours - is but a dead weight and a dull ache and my mind has recoiled and curled in upon itself. I’ve been coaxing then beating it with Virginia Woolf but every time I shut the page, it retreats again and clenches.

For some reason, my head was so wracked with senseless agony last night, I found myself retching painfully over the toilet bowl - something I don’t do lightly. Quite literally, I can’t stomach the bile.

Been here before. Can’t get away from it. Can only sit it out and wait for a brighter hour or a better day.  Head banging only makes bruises. 

The man from the services called at 10 to apologise for the late cancellation of my visit from the social worker who has been recently bereaved. I’m sorry someone had to die for this relief but  knowing I wasn’t to have a concerned and ‘helpful’ stranger intrude today made me the closest to glad I’ve come in the last 2 days.

I’m fighting the urge to shut out the pitiless sun and curl up in my unwashed bed since I’d only remember you there and I don’t want to embitter those pure and lovely hours with this slow dark ooze.

I wish I could say something nice. I wish I could embrace you and let you in. I am annoyed with myself for being so repellant but at least I have insight, tenacity and a degree of intolerance. I expect I will spank myself until the nerve ends wake-up and sting sooner or later. 

I will dig a hole and plant my tree. I’m trying my damndest not to bang my head

Considering what you are facing right now, all the above seems self-indulgent and pathetically pitying. No matter how true - it is.

So sorry for being the slow slug that slips off the petals of your pretty words and into the dirt. Tomorrow I might be a nectar-sipping butterfly.

Don’t let any of this trouble you. It’s certainly none of your doing. 

I miss you.

Every bit of you.

Most of all I miss your rapt face.

I can't wait to see you again.

I would write poetry, but it would be false because the feeling is too naked to be clothed in chosen words.

I miss your frowning glance.

And as for your moments when you melt, those I cherish.

And I miss your nipple rings, your body, your intoxicating smell, and your taste (in any order you care to choose), :-P

And your glad 'babble', as you call it. I could listen to it all day.

I'm sorry you've had a shit day. The telephone is so wrong. I wanted to tell you all those things, but just as walls have ears, in the country there is a saying: hedges and fields have eyes and ears. And it just felt wrong. We are too far away for speech.

If you wish it, I'll see you again soon. I will never pressure you unless you desire it.

I want to hold you, to kiss, to make love, to fuck. I want to be torn to shreds by you. I want to spend an age lying eye to eye and brow to brow - a splendiferous circular challenge of two like minds.

And there are practicalities to consider of course... how banal! Well, I'll roll up my sleeves and get on with it. But still, but still, but still... Can't wait to see you again.

Kisses everywhere, D xxxxxxxxx

I feel your pain

I didn't want to forewarn you about the ensuing days/weeks/months. You sounded so relieved and elated on the phone last night it seemed too cruel. And I know also that you are not stupid in this respect even if inexperience may leave you more vulnerable to some degree. No, fuck experience; you have 3 boys and, as a strident mother of one small polyp (it was easy for me back then), I can only begin to wonder at how impossible your situation must seem just now. I remember with shudders how it was for me; one day walking on air, the next, skewed to the spot with a stake of sheer hatred driven through my gut. Not my hatred I must add - the collective opprobrium  and vengeance of an entire tribe hunting me down and snaring me at every turn. It's fucking hell and I wish there was something I could do to relieve you if only for one moment but there isn't. 

Practicalities; I can't even begin to imagine how I would begin to negotiate those in your situation. Please don't go mad. 

I have the ex sleeping in the room below me. I couldn't refuse him after he'd driven the small one back from the South over 24 hours with barely a pause. He was tired and a few beers short of an even temper just now. He wanted 'advice' again on how to manage the schizophrenic brother, wanted to know why, if the state were paying him so much money to be mental, they weren't prepared to pacify and incarcerate him for the good of all. I tried to keep my head and I managed to do so for almost an hour as his rant amplified and expanded into the realms of totalitarianism and eugenics. 

Of course I knew he was trying to get my goat. That's always been the underlying motive no matter how abstract the debate. I left the room to put coffee on and heard him yelling through the corridor  -'Ooh - your mother says I shout but she's got a fuckin gob on her and she won't even fuckin admit it. Fuckin makes out she's all serene and rational but you should hear her fuckin gob, think she knows it all... etc etfuckincetera..' I'm used to this and it doesn't rile me for one moment. It's just a nuisance and a discourtesy these days.Then the small person appraoched and said, rather quietly 'Dad's the one who's shouting not you. He always blames it on someone else but he's the one who shouts and keeps on shouting'. 

He hates it when I don't bite the bait so he tries another tac. 

'Fancy a shag? You obviously haven't had one in years so (and I thought this was rather sweet and self-deprecating) ' you won't even notice how small and useless I am now' !

I almost threw the coffee at the wall above his head but checked myself just in time. Or rather, I realised that I was holding my favourite mug and so calmly walked up to him and tipped the contents over his head. 

Lovely, but now there is a puddle of brown liquid on the sofa my parent's bought us and I will have to deploy all manner of horrid stain removers to it before they come to visit again. They don't do passion or rage. They have never spoiled a carpet or a sofa through such. 

Anyway, why am I telling you about my trivial contretemps when you are going through the mincer?

Just that people are awful and horridly bad-mannered. All of them and all of us at one time or another. 

Again I can only offer the standared clichés: 'It well get worse before it gets better'..'if you're going through hell then ... etc etc. 

Save all your love for yourself right now, and have some of mine while you're at it. 

XX


P.S A sobering and frankly undeserved email from Kate just now. I should keep away from you both. I really should. 

Just Sheer Agony

Six hours of attempting to be strong and grown up and my head is mincemeat. It is worse than it ever was, all this. Still, I never expected it to be easy.

And on top of last night... God what a world!

But I take strength from the knowledge that I am free. Figuring out practicalities is dreadful. But I'll do it. The last few days have felt so good that I know I can do it.

Sending you love,

Dx

Lovely day Innit?

Sun is shining, the weather is sweet
Make you want to move your dancing feet
To the rescue, here i am
Want you to know, y'all, where I stand


Thus spake Bob.

It's fuckin' lovely here today. Skin, sweat, sweet scent of blossom on the soft breeze n all that. Apparently there was a fine gauze of volcanic dust over Waitrose carpark this morning (choosy dust hey!?). Child stranded in France because of. Earthquakes, volcanoes - whatever next? Pink bombs exploding the Cotswalds? Pah!

Hope you are feeling it too. X

Chun

Today's reading from the book of changes

Chun / Difficulty at the Beginning

Thunder from the Deep:
The Superior Person carefully weaves order out of confusion.
Supreme Success if you keep to your course.
Carefully consider the first move.
Seek help.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:

New ventures always pack along their inherent chaos.
Though this is an annoyance at best, and can even imperil or downright doom an endeavor, it is also the friction needed to polish your project to jewel brilliance.
Learn from these early obstacles.


The question? Go figure..

The butterfly

I wonder how things are with you, between you, amongst you all.

I shouldn't wonder.

And me? The fizzing euphoria of the past few days has flattened. I felt it drain from my spine and my fingertips as I sobbed into the bath water last night. No more the pixilated pavements rushing beneath my feet, no more the sky blazing and spinning above my head and no more the fire that was searing my belly and my heart.

Something else instead: a butterfly trapped inside the rib-cage. Soft iridescent wings beating tirelessly against the frets. It feels cruel to cage that nymph, but that's the way it is - has to be. Smothering out of  judgement and necessity. 

What it is to be human. No other creature has the resolve to deny life and joy as such. Not knowingly so and at such expense of self. 

To be honest, yesterday even the windfall didn't make me happy - in the true sense. Oh I stood in the shop a little delirious and sought out something extravagant to buy. Champagne? Chocolate? A new coat? I bought broccoli and potatoes and stuff for supper and left with change from a fiver. I may be a staunch realist but I know that money is no substitute for love. 

Am I in love? I trust my instinct far better these days but I'm still wise enough to know that time will tell. 

And that kiss? Did everything turn on that kiss? What stirring can of pupae would we have left unturned had it not been for that kiss?

I am a realist and I am an advice worker. I've numbered the options and I've considered the rights and responsibilities apropos each. As usual, there are three: the dutiful/compromise (moral, realistic, dull even), the hedonistic (exciting, dangerous, deceitful) and the true (fantastic, destructive, liberating, improbable).  While we both have rights, 98% of the responsibility is in your hands. I wish I could shoulder some of that, but I can't (my shoulder is a little buggered just now). There is nothing I can do and little I can offer bar cliché and distraction. I shall keep schtum. 

I will never forget the summer house and the bench, the night sky& the light from the kitchen door. The memory is saturated with something I can't or won't name. 

Oh for an hour in your arms. For the butterfly to rest its bruised wings and sit softly on the shoulder. 

I am sending you love - just gentle waves - to bolster your strength and your wits.

love K. X

Three Spikes

One through my stomach, one through my heart, and one through my pelvis.

This is suffocating here at home. I'm under 24 hour observation. Had to actually demand a breath of air and aloneness just now. That didn't go down well.

She can't take off her hate-mask. I can't take off my insouciance mask. It's getting very tense. It's not explosive like yesterday, but far more tense.

When I go into the garden I sit on the bench and try to clear my mind and recall loveliness. I know part of what is hurting me is missing you. But far worse is this ghastly stasis we're in at the moment. 'Amicable' doesn't seem to be in the vocabulary.

I wish I had the peace and was let alone even for five minutes to remember you.

Hell. I'm not going to allow her to make me ill.

I hope she was polite in her email. I expect she did a good job of being kind and normal. But one never knows. Verbally today she hates everything about you, including at least two things she used to love: 'pink' and 'lavender'. Oh yes, and 'brazen hussy' doesn't even begin to describe it, as far as she's concerned.

Pauses to smile at a gentle memory of something that would deserve burning at the stake.

Anyway enough of me. How are you? Don't let any of my crap colour happiness you might feel. It's a good feeling for me to know you're feeling good in full Nina-Stereo.

And I do too, when the bombardment stops. Maybe that is the reason for insomnia?

Oh give me a slap. I've just had a fucking shit day that's all. We 'had' to go to the Pitt-Rivers in Oxford. Followed two very long and tense car journeys interspersed with tense park-and-ride and wander around a museum, yet-a-fucking-gain. The boys enjoyed it, but I'd have preferred to have taken them around by myself.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Right I've drawn a line under the hell. Just tell me if you'd rather not know any of this stuff.

We have to go to Exeter on Thurs for 3 nights, maybe only 2 if it all goes explosive. Not looking forward to the prospect. Any assistance will involve co-opting my mother as help. But still, have good friends there too. Don't want to ruin the birthday party though.

Now listening to goldberg var 25 - gould again... tried finding Richter, but no joy.

What would I give to have you in my arms right now?

I'm wishing for unoppressed dreams.

Love, David. X

The dawn

You were there in my waking dreams at dawn; right beside me I felt the brush of your arm against mine. What a fortunate knack I have for keeping these things warm in slumber. I wanted to pull you close and press my face against your neck and find sweet accommodation there but to do so would have broken the trance. I lay there rapt and still, your arm against mine; your fingers almost within reach I dared not creep towards and softly intertwine my own lest I wake and find you gone. I listened out for the fall and swell of your chest. You – the tease of a hair’s breadth away - still warm and capable of touching each eager nerve to the quick.

An unchecked twitch, a shiver and you were gone. I reached across to grasp you but there was only the spineless pillow, creased in a smirk, idly mocking my bliss.

Damn this sweet longing, this exquisite itch that even sleep can’t rest or soothe.

We should not feel guilty about that kiss. We would have been doing the universe a disservice were we to have denied it.

Love goes towards love.

XXX

P.S. I hope all is well - or at least as well as can be expected. I am thinking of you and I know now is not the time for discussing these things, but you know you can call me anytime you need to (well of course I'll tell you politely if it's not convenient, but you know what I mean). X

And the scent still lingers..

When it comes to matters of the heart and groin, I know myself only too well. If these past 18 chaste months have taught me anything, it is precisely that. Oh, I’ve deceived myself a plenty in the past or confused the one with t’other. But this time, I acted from a pure combination of instinct and understanding. No planning required - even if proprieties had to be observed. I know I pushed the boundaries to the limits and maybe I overreached.. I tried my damndest to rein myself in.

I held you again in the summer-house because I wanted to feel you a second time without the impatient regard of the ticket-warden, for whom the cost of our affection was a mere pound for the slot. I like to think she went back to business thinking of us as two lovers reuniting. Perhaps in a scant moment her mind strayed towards what pent-up passions we would later spend before settling back on the next dashboard. I needed her out the way.

I wanted to see how close I could bring my lips to yours without us actually kissing; like standing beside an electric fence or holding the finger-tip to the flame. Or was I just seducing you – coaxing you towards that first dangerous move? Of course I know I was equally to blame, if blame must be mentioned – which I think it shouldn’t. Nip the rose in the bud and it blooms again with a mightier force. Prune it back too hard and it withholds its generosity from all. Spring cannot hold its joy (thank you for the poems by the way).

It was lovely to give you that gift, knowing as I did that you’d had so few when I have known so many. Perhaps too many. It matters not. I came to you clean.

Any words I have would understate the strength of passion you stirred. And even now, I struggle to keep my mind from wandering too closely towards it lest it sap it of any of its power, or lest it add to it that which was never there.

I behaved myself well I think. I was courteous and attentive to all. I even went primly to my bed fully clothed (to sleep naked, as I do, therein seemed somehow improper) I hid well the flame that burned all the warmer for being contained.

Arriving home after that dreadful journey, I found my hyacinths had bloomed while I’d been away. The house was filled with their sappy sweetness. So many things that once didn’t seem so now feel possible. I have been bonny and blithe these past two days. I smile at strangers and they all smile back. The boy with the brown skin and kind eyes winked at me in the shop. I ushered the old lady before me in the queue and she told me of how she’d recently become a vegetarian. We both agreed that a little fish from time to time was not a bad thing. I danced to the music that no one else could hear and the girl in the car with yellow curls grinned at me as she sat at the lights.

This morning I found a fragment of stem in my hair and chose to leave it there. I don’t want these things to fade, like the bruise on my thigh, the scent of your hair on my collar, the flesh-memory of the smell and the feel of your skin. These things I will hold tight to my heart. So long as I don’t want you too hard, I still have you complete, but not exclusively (we are too loving for that).

I write from outside in the first streaks of sun to warm these stones. My favourite black viola has offered so many flowers as defiance against all that winter. The light seeks out the violets and greens in the lower petals. The shadowed parts have the dull lustre of velvet-silk. Part butterfly, part moth; I’ve tried so many times to explain this flower – both in pigments and words – but every time it escapes me! I would like to send you one, or put it to your mind. I could go on and on and on describing but it would all get botanically tedious. Suffice to say;

- The largess of the spring -

I want you to enjoy it as much as me.

Take care my love and may peace rest upon you and your home.

K.xxx

P.S. I am certain I will have left a scented trace of myself on the pillow which I deliberately turned over to preserve. I shouldn't think laundry is likely to be a priority for you just now. (That was an enormous and mischievous hint ;-)

That First Embrace

And my heart was horrified at its delight. I cast that feeling aside, in a state of shock, thinking it was an anomaly, an expression of pleasure to see, smell, hear and feel. I told myself it could happen randomly, to any chance conjunction of bodies and eyes and smiles and words, and that I should pay it no heed. Then later, it gripped me again yet more viciously with its wonderful insistence.

I'm not naive. I'm not a romantic fool. I can dissect where lust and love start and stop. I never think the answer lies elsewhere, but within. But that embrace shook me, and those two days that followed have shown me happiness, and the days that are following have at least that light to lead me by.

I am taking myself apart and remaking myself stronger. This crisis at home I shall go through with an unclouded mind, and alone. And whatever happens, I shall always be grateful for that gift you have given me: a simplicity of action.

X

p.s. I don't know why I'm spouting semi-biblical-rubbish either. You were appallingly lovely from the first moment I held you. That first night when you held me in the summerhouse I wanted to pull back, because it was too good. I wanted to kiss you then, but wouldn't let myself. By the next night your lips were impossible to resist, and I can still feel their intelligence. I cannot/should not/must not let any of that desire from the last few days influence me. It would demean that attraction between us if I used it as an excuse. That's what I mean about a clear and clean mind. I need to swim through whatever is coming as if I was truly alone.

p.p.s. It has almost gone, but if I breathe in the scent of my lapels, I can still smell you, and god help me, that is a comfort.

p.p.p.s. I can gabble too, see? D XX

p.p.p.p.s. A final afterword: your letter is beautifully written, but I can't help feeling that I sound rather earnest and highfalutin on here, almost staid and stuffy and victorian, perish the thought, as if... What happened to the snap crackle and pop? (& I always take salt and pepper on my rice-krispies.) Dx

The unsent letter

Dear David,

By the time you read this, I will be gone. It is midnight, April 5 2010.

Something is about to change. I’m not sure of what since I’m not certain of what was, what is and what could ever be. I’m only sure of that which could never be. The change will already have happened now that you read. May it be gentle and may it be good. May it be for the good of all. The road that still seems limitless will fork three-pronged; this way or that way. The options are limited. A cross-road, a crisis; the crux of a sweet path, a wrong turn, a dead-end.

(No matter where I end up, I can always find my way home).

Perhaps things will cease in the old-vein; the spiral of textual-foreplay – going nowhere, chasing its own beautiful kinked tail. Might we return to the disembodied, safely-safe game of profound yet light hearted teasing and longing? Or will the coincidence of hearts and minds have shifted now that we meet, solidly, where every imagined gesture once unknown or guessed is fleshed? Will flesh come between us? Or has it? (I’m caught in the tension between these two tenses).

I was in both minds; the honest, moral one that needs to face the reality of your life and the other that still wants to hold-on to the invisible, the limitless unbounded space we had to ourselves these last few months. I go boldly towards the former.

It feels right and proper that we should meet at this time of year; the thrusting spring. It will be a pleasure to feel that same sappy force together.

Perhaps by now we will have happily un-fancied one another. Perhaps not. If there are to be tears, may they be of mirth.

I don’t want to shut the doors to our secret safe place but if that is how it must be, can we close them gently and tip-toe softly away?

All these ifs and buts and maybes…

Whatever their outcomes, I feel sure I will still love you none the less.

I look-forward to meeting you in the mundane.

(Sealed with blood, wax and a kiss)

Kate.X