borderline fashion gesture: whimsical/suggestive

'

>>>

desire lines are retraceable.

this part is inspired by a few things. this post, that is. one is red wine, which I am drinking now; this will become quite obvious. others: real conversations with real people. everyone who shares their honest thoughts with me is inspiration. 

1999. 

"Alethea and Her Cousin"

On a warm spring day eight years ago…almost…the sixteen-year-old virgin Alethea enters the bedroom of her cousin.

Alethea is a Catholic and a devout one at that. She attends mass twice weekly and remains vulnerable to the anachronistic orthodoxies of the institution.

"The church updates itself every four-hundred years or so to only be only a hundred years or so behind the present," Alethea's cousin tells her.

Alethea is also vulnerable to her cousin. He is a year older than her and obviously not Catholic.  Alethea is often startled at the accidental profundity of his thoughts and injures herself at night in maniacal attempts to persuade her hands away from her clitoris. Their bedrooms face each other from across the street. Currently his is dark. Currently Alethea's hands are burnt-up with the remedying effects of boiling water.

"What is this?" Alethea asks herself, holding her raw and shaking hands up to the mirror. 

Of all his parts, Alethea likes her cousin's eyes the most. They are the same blue as the Virgin's shroud. Alethea's eyes are brown like shit so she refuses to meet his gaze, fearful a prolonged connection will soil her immaculate soul. 

"Whose soul?" he cousin asks. "Why do you never look me in the eye, Alethea?"

"I don't know."

"It's me. You know me. It won't hurt you to look at me."

Alethea repeats Matthew 5:28 to herself as she lifts her gaze to meet his. The verse goes something like, "you might as well give up trying, because even just thinking about something bad is enough to damn you." The verse's resonance corresponds inversely to the ever-intensifying blueness of her cousin's eyes. The longer Alethea stares the bluer they get. 

"Oh!" Alethea says laughing. "This is easy!"

Her cousin sighs deeply and shakes his head. He puts his hand behind her head to feel her scalp. He pulls a few of her hairs. Out. "Come back to my house Alethea," he says.

She takes his hand, worn unevenly from the constant plucking of guitar strings, she takes it and finds it fits very evenly into hers, hers still burned from the night before. 

Alethea discovers that sex is like the cigarettes she smokes, the poetry she reads. She never knew she needed it until she had it, and now she cannot exist long without it.

Her cousin requests she takes off her shirt but she removes her panties. He puts his hand on top of her skin and she puts it under. He offers her a kiss; she multiples them, over and over, everywhere. She becomes positively helpless when he compliments her breasts and she hears the Holy Mother screaming in agonizing bliss when he discovers her clitoris. 

"I've never done this before," they say to each other, not knowing exactly what they mean.

* * *

Lena pauses in drafting her story, suddenly unhappy with how happy these teenagers are in this small and, in the whole grand narrative of things, relatively meaningless encounter. She arises from her desk and pours herself a glass of red wine. 

Lena is alone in her house, spare a cat, spare the aquarium of fish it taunts every dawn and dusk. 

"I am so devastatingly lonely," Lena says to herself. She calls her friend Jane only to repeat the sentence. "I'm so devastatingly lonely..." Lena catches a fish from the aquarium and tosses it to her eager tabby. The cat pins the fish between the rug and its paw, waiting for its struggle to subside. Before the fish dies, Lena shoos the cat away and returns the fish the aquarium. It is still alive.

"Come over," Lena says to Jane, who has been telling Lena all about something forgettable for the past several minutes.

"Lena, no."

"It will be quick. You can just lay there. You won't even have to move."

"No, Lena."

"Why not?"

"...I'm not like that."

Lena grips the telephone very tightly, and holds it very thoughtfully, before flinging it across the room. "Neither am I you bitch," she screams. The telephone hits a print of Madame Butterfly Lena has framed and shatters its protective glass. Lena rushes to pour another glass of wine. She pours the next glass of wine on her manuscript.

"Are you happier now, Alethea, you hedonistic bitch."

And Lena, frenzied with envy over a piece of her imagination, grabs the now-red notebook and crams it into her purse. She leaves her house and begins walking towards a tower. A bell tower.

"I'll exorcize you Alethea. You're going to change. You can't have all the fun now. I won't have to live vicariously through you, for your life will become dull and mine so very interesting. I'll have Jane. I'll have my cousin. I'll have my father, real Electra-style. And when I'm not with someone forbidden I'll throw myself on the various inanimate phallic objects that reside in my house. I'll have a fucking banana. Then have a drunken baby with the better end of a wine bottle. You'll be nothing, Alethea, just a child crossing the threshold of a single taboo, a single taboo to my dozens upon dozens."

"You'll be nothing," Lena lies to herself, applying lipstick, readjusting her stockings, putting on a face to face herself less fearfully. 

The gates to the church are locked, however, and Lena is forced to delay her exorcism for twelve horrible fucking hours.

The Next Chapter of Lena: Confession

aren't you getting tired of seeing no updates? yet you return, day after day.


depression feels like desperation, and I refuse to submit a dishonest post.


Lena: Return.






Lena walks back to a place she has been before. A scaled-down Babel pierced the sky. A sound came out of the rip - bells. A woman in an ugly hat walked out. The church.


Entering the confessional, Lena walks back again to a place she has been before. 


"When was the date of your last confession?" the virgin asks her.


"Age fourteen. A requirement before Confirmation."


"And how many years do you have now?"


"Twenty-Four. So ten. Ten years since my last confession."


The virgin says nothing. Lena decides this silence is the least offensive prompt of all possible prompts which are directed as instigating one's admission of vulnerabilities.


"My first sin is that, when I was younger and forced to participate in this sacrament, I made up sins," Lena says. "I never felt as if I had done anything wrong."


"And now, you feel you have done wrong?"


"No, not really."


The virgin says nothing, and then says, "Why don't we continue anyway?"


"Why not I suppose. My second sin is not believing in God."


The virgin automatically responds, "Mother Theresa was plagued with doubt until the day she died. She wrote of it every night in her journals."


"I guess I don't see what that has to do with me, because I don't give a fuck if God exists or not. I write about interesting things in my journal."


The virgin clears his virginal throat. He reswallows the virginal mucus he has just worked so hard to dislodge, virginally. "Perhaps confession is not the right step for you at this moment."


"Jesus man. I'm getting there. I'm just fucking around right now."


"So you do have something to confess which burdens your soul?"


"No, but one of my characters does. Do you mind if I read a part of her confession to you?"


"I'm not sure I understand." Virgin clears his dumb virgin throat again. 


Lena clears her own de-virginized throat. "Her name is Aletea. She is conflicted right now because she is having an affair with her cousin. They played the 'show me' game when they were young, and now, their paths have mysteriously intersected again many years later. Their attraction is magnetic and natural and mutual. Yet of course it is wrong."


"Is this you? Are you talking about you?"


"No, Father. This is Aletea. She is one of my characters. From my journals."


"Ah - I think - "


"Anyway Father, may I please read you her confession? She is quite a devoted Catholic and I need to know what penance you would give her. For contextual accuracy."


"Er, alright then."


Lena opens her purse and removes a small red notebook from one of its compartments. She turns to page 17 and begins reading. Slowly.


"When he finally touched me it was how I remembered touch felt. It was bare sex, elementary sex. Everything else has since him, a footnote. Like I tapped into the center of a system. Its maxims. Its gears. At one point I said, as he was cautiously reacquainting himself with me, I said, in a last attempt to salvage my ethical self, to squander his carnal appetite, I said, 'Don't do this to yourself.' He said, 'But I'm doing it to you.' And god. I just fucking let him."


"Is that it?" the virgin asks after a few moments of dead air.


"Yes. What are the damages?"


The virgin merely swallows. "15 each Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary."


"Is that really it?"


"And a tremendous effort to change."


Lena frowns. "But if she changes the plot will be ruined. I have many more pages after 17."


"Well, then I guess she's not really sorry."


Lena ponders this a moment. 


"I guess you're right."

fantasticwhore

>>>


or, "The Opposite is Equally True: Lena the 5th"



Lena is not invited to the wedding of her old friend, the virgin bride.

"Why not?" she wonders. She telephones a mutual friend.

"The bride considers your presence a moral detriment, given your past of prostitution and whoredom."

"That answers that," Lena says. She hangs up and takes out a piece of paper. She begins to write the virgin bride a letter. Lena finishes the letter and reads over it before sealing it in an envelope the same pink shade as her cunt.


My lovers and I wait seven hours to sleep together and two years to say "I love you." 


Will you still love him, virgin bride, even after you've had two years to satisfy your deepest perversions of hedonism? The "love" you felt in reality is your bubbling repression of carnal desire. My retroactive advice to you, careless tosser of sacrosanct words, is to not inhibit your desire. Do not let a ubiquitous appetite determine the rarest phenomena of human existence. In popular culture the two are often confused, so I do not blame your for your common misunderstanding of Love.   


Do not practice abstitence. At all costs, do not practice abstinence. 


Lena is satisfied with the letter. She licks the edges of the envelope and presses its folds together. She walks to the mailbox and fills it with her letter. She returns inside to an empty bed.

>>>

upon headphones & vacant cushion

5 new poems.


Pop Song.

N'other round of chorus
like some kinda hook-weaving florist
3 minutes is the average
time for rocking
several verses, and our bed.





60s girl group.

cute n creepy. unmastered
electric fuzz, the same
wires that stand when I
stripe your skin with nails
coated in bargain-aisle red.





60s girldance.

handclaps assessed with
synchronized hip-sass.
A graze on the thigh, a
slap on the ass.





electronic jazz

crafted, it works, it
tells a story without
words, or few words, a
trick you'd learn if
you only had one-worded
language like me.





punk after punk

post-coitus prose
writers - one goes for
carnal, the other a
lotus. animal or
vegetable, screams the
audience.

this blog is getting too dark.

therefore.

Lena 3: in which Lena Sucks the Life out of Herself

Lena had made no conscious decision to quit her dozens of lovers, but inevitably it happened. She had been enjoying the company of two men (one Irish, one Scottish, she could hardly tell them apart) when a man from the deep deep south was unexpectedly introduced to her. She found him interesting only because everyone else seemed to find him interesting.

Lena was used to leaving men and in fact a man had never left her before. Thus she expected the same to happen, for her to see this man from the deep deep south for several days or weeks and then leave him. But everytime Lena thought she would leave him he left her.

"I know we will say goodbye to each other many more times," she said at the first time she said goodbye to him. She was right and she still is right.

Lena forgot about other men because she wondered about this one. Instead of growing duller he grew more fascinating. He smelled better to her each day. He had a favorite flower. They agreed on fetishes. He had the perfect width of cock.

But as I said before he was always leaving her. He went back to the deep deep south and also went to the arms of other women. Some women were real and some women Lena imagined were real. Lena imagined many women and somehow this made the man even more attractive to her.

Lena lost weight and cut off her hair. She felt her skin go rough so she cut into it with razors. She felt her eyes dry and tough and wanted to cut them with razors too. The less Lena cared about other men the more they flocked to her. The less Lena cared about her body the more men flocked to her.

A flock of silly birds shitting and squawking all around her.

The more she loved him the more she hated herself. "I hate myself because I am no longer myself," she thought.

Her thoughts went faster and less complete. Faster and less complete. Fast and less. She became less and less. She didn't even want to read this story anymore.

Lena was at her least when she met a woman whose named sounded like Advice.

gentleLena pt.II: the autobiography

gentleLena pt. I

* * *

Have I ever loved one? Lena thought once. She counted her lovers on  fingers and toes (a few times over.)

Her first lover she most certainly had loved. He was from down the street, not across the ocean.

Yes, I must have loved him I thought. Lena thought this too. I prefer dark hair and he had dark hair. This must be because of his inital influence on my sexual appetite. Such a realization inspired Lena to graph a multi-variable analysis of her lovers.

I must include all of the most important characteristics, I thought. Lena thought this also. She could deduce her true love from statistical pattern. This all made perfect sense to Lena and to me as well.

Lena wrote all of the most important and favorite features of her lovers. Here is her list.

1. agreeable fetishes

(some of Lena's fetishes narcissism and voyerism. She could only feel pleasure by witnessing pleasure. This is why she would do anything to catch a man touching himself.)

2. ability to make her cum

(Lena only came for a partner when it was deserved. Many men do not deserve to see a woman in such an ecstatic state; many women are fools for revealing themselves too soon. By principle Lena had never fabricated an orgasm.)

3. the width of their cock 

(Lena had realized long ago that length mattered little in comparison with this vital feature of the male sex organ. Coincidentally, she learned from a Chilean lover that a woman could, with startling accuracy, estimate the abilities of this organ by the shape of its owners' nose.)

4. a favorite flower

(Her mother had been a florist. A man with an eye for beautiful things could never be faithful but always be trusted.)

5. time spent thinking about them after, during, and before.

(This was difficult, but because Lena lived in her mind as well as her body she had to think about it. Some lovers, she hardly recalled how they felt but she enjoyed to fantasize about them, imposing her own version of the reality that occurred. Others were fantastic but at once forgettable. Lena was looking for a holistic mind-dweller.)

Documentation took much longer than Lena anticipated. She delayed the final result by composing many silly schoolgirl side-competitions, such as softest-to-hardest and fattest-to-thinnest. Finally she tallied the results.

By god, this cannot be, Lena thought. I am in love with Umberto Eco.

another gentleLena

There once was a woman who traveled the world.

However, her adventures abroad afforded her neither sightsee nor souvineer; the mementos of her journeys were all in her mind and her skin.

As a child the woman traveled in books. Away from the sometimes seasons of her rural surroundings she escaped to and from the Occident. She was alone, the omniscient puppeteer to her self-built planet.

Thus, in spite of her solitude, or perhaps because of it, her life was exceedingly full.

As the child grew (her name was Lena), she grew tall and also away from books and into sound. She had read the world and now wanted to hear it. She knew what all of the cities sounded like. She knew what music the people who lived in them made love to.

Lena wanted to make love to the world now. She longed to experience the musical cities but was afraid to leave her own. She felt alone.

Thus, in spite of her solitude, or perhaps because of it, her life was exceedingly dull.

Lena decided to make love to the world then. She made herself beautiful. She looked exotic even though she wasn't. Finding lovers was easy for her. She knew them all already.

Her lovers were from all different places but always artists. She did not want to be an artist. She wanted to love an artist. She took a job at a gallery where she could always be displayed, a living work of art in striped dresses and heeled boots.

One lover was from Italy. He sent her a bouquet of roses every month. She let them die but let him come to her. He liked knee socks. Lena let him put them on her only to take them off.

"Lena," he said. "I want you to marry me."

But Lena hadn't traveled enough.

Another lover was from Russia. Lena pined for him like she had pined for no other. Thinking of his blue eyes made her wet. She got the chills. They followed him from Moscow, he said. The cold called. She never saw him again.

Lena took her Swede lover for a swim in a lake. He dared her to take off her underwear. She held them in her hand above the water and he grabbed them from her. He lost them and she was lost to him and she had to walk back to her house with no panties on under her skirt. He teased her about that. He put his hand under her skirt as they walked and they had to stop walking.

Lena loved each new lover differently. They were all special to her. She became a woman well-traveled. By her mid-20s she had gotten to all of the continents except one, and most continents more than once. She had a frenchman with beautiful hands and an Egyptian who offered to do her taxes. She invited a German to her bed and a Greek into the bathroom at a bar.

Lena's friends learned about the world from airplanes and eating. Lena learned only with her sex. Because she experienced the world so intimately she took the most intimate secrets of the world into her body. Her body showed that. Every day a new man asked her where she was from.

"Are you French?" the cashier said.

"Are you Polish?" the friend-of-a-friend said.

"Where are you from?" they all asked.

Nowhere she replied.

After seven years of this Lena started to confuse Beijing and Budapest. The scents of her lovers became one odiferous mess. She longed to belong to one place for she was Nowhere. Where is my home? she thought. I will make one of these lovers my home. I will settle into one of them.

Lena tried to settle into one but she could never stay in place. Some glacier or the ocean in floated on always called her away. She tried to ignore their calls but that only made everyone more passionate for the gentle Lena.

She stopped sleeping and only ate things that grew on trees. She disappeared into headphones and masturbated indefinitely to a perfect body composed of all her lovers.

She longed to stay even though she had really always stayed. Like a stray dog Lena wandered the globe underneath her bedsheets, which when touched revealed the perpetual wet of the world.