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