I’ve decided to create one page that is a collection of my favorite things-songs, words, posts, poems, essays, people, books and so on that, on this page, center on my latest adventure–sexuality/discovery. So, click on links, here the music, read the poems, check out the publications, share your thoughts, desires, comments.
“I wrote him letters my entire life, it seemed–kept closed and tight in the box I kept myself in. His words breathed something in to me through the lid, he is breath on sheets, and so I punched holes in the covers, searching for stars that had probably always been his eyes.”
ALSO, I just discovered this section of The Rumpus called “Kink”–and oh hell, it’s great.
I wrote him letters my entire life, it seemed–kept closed and tight in the box I kept myself in. His words breathed something in to me through the lid, he is breath on sheets, and so I punched holes in the covers, searching for stars that had probably always been his eyes.
Brilliant writing on anything sex, taboo, BDSM, literary–intelligent. You name it.
It’s kind of like …god I can’t believe I’m even typing the title….”Fifty Shades of Gray”…is a really cheap, poor airplane’s manual for “the modern woman’s guide to flying”…OK let me just make it clear–I have not nor will I read or watch that movie/book. Because I saw the mass reaction of women and I found the entire thing INCREDIBLY SAD, that these waves of women haven’t found their sexuality with their partners–what the fuck are you people doing married if Fifty Shades was a secret taboo you read alone and later mentioned it to your ….oh Christ. I can’t. It –it became so popular, this dreadfully written yet up-scaled romance from your typical romance novels of cowboys and whatever your mother read, it became so popular because women wanted to read it, to live it, and it spread like wild fire. Why? Well, there is sex. And then….there is SEX. The real shit. And I am beginning to realize only a few people find that one they share that amazing chemistry with. And it is amazing because it’s sexual, mental, psychological, and maybe emotional chemistry. A chemical drive.
Here is a LINK TO A POST OF MY FAVORITE SEXUAL MUSIC I GET LOST IN which includes Cigarettes After Sex, Son Lux “Easy”–so desirous and wow; Bon Iver, Damien Rice “Greatest Bastard”, Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder with “Ai Du,” Dermot Kennedy acoustic “AFter Rain,” Tracy Chapman’s completely secretly naughty “In the Dark”, James Vincent McMorrow’s “Wicked Game” and more. “Lift Me” by The Bengsons
This next song by Son Lux goes well with my latest post on my current sexual predicament, feel free to read it HERE: “A PLACE FROM HIDING”
I could go on and on with sex music. Because music is, how did Tolstoy say it–“Music is the secondhand of emotion.”
Music, something about that bass in a slow acoustic or heavy unraveling, the bass in certain songs are the bass/rhythm to the rhythm between two people-be it the rhythm in their conversations or anything.
Each person you meet plays a song with you.
I have an essay “Something Dark Like Jazz” getting published in I’m guessing August (it’s been accepted, still waiting on a date) at WORD RIOT.
Here’s a very small teaser:
“I want to turn his pages, I want to read the forbidden words he paints in red for me. A steady and heavy cello across absurd piano strokes crash into everything I’ve judged myself on, every law I am governed by and I am intoxicated by the strangeness, drunk on this existential, loveless affair, this music.”
–from A Place from Hiding post:
But I have become …I care very much for him, but I think a large part of this is selfish–I am doing this for myself. I want to be sated and to learn that there are others out there I can fit with. That challenge me mentally and surprise me constantly (I always felt people were predictable because I am a writer, I study the hell out of mannerisms), that know what my body wants before I even do because i am just learning to understand it. And he just…gets it.
I’m in fucking trouble.
I must go see. Just to see.
And whether it is everything I have been thinking it seems to be, and we either end up truly enjoying each other and whatever happens happens, OR, we do not, and we part ways. I still have learned what it is am seeking, that I need someone to stimulate every part of who I am, I will never settle, and that some people make you feel something so important, and to take it in stride with who you are, not them, and that feeling is to feel:
ALIVE
Thanks for reading and letting me write this out, because I talked myself into reason and out of what I thought was going to be the point of this post. I am not diving into anything. I am not in love. I am not searching. An amazing thing is happening and I shall enjoy the ride and learn from it.
…My confusion comes in when I find myself wanting to improve my life and he is a source of that, and the feelings that come with that are natural and good and new. And it comes when we talk about being proud of each other, and when he told me I am beautiful, we are vague and use a lot of word play-he is reason and logic and I am reason and emotion–I remind him there is a whole gray area and that everything is not black and white, and he brings me down a notch when my emotions take hold or old patterns come into play. And I get confused because…the way he makes me feel makes me dizzy. And I have no idea–no fucking idea–what that means.
We have this mutual dependency that is the source of our intimacy as The Rumpus “Kink” section words it best. –our sense of both possessing and being possessed. The more you allow yourself to come into the scene, the better the result. It’s a “paradox: disappear into the other, and find your voice there. The deeper you can go, the stronger the sense of satisfaction…the losing of yourself in….is ultimately a way to encounter your real self–A PLACE TO BE SILENT AND VOCAL SIMULTANEOUSLY”
It is in that last paragraph that I get dizzy–and my confusion comes into play mixed with lust and heat and contentment too, oddly–or no, an ease—a relaxation of my nature. -It is a mutual submissive/dominant sexual agreement–not agreement but understanding, which a lot of people don’t understand….and it is stitched together with confessions and trust and passion, understanding and relieving self and the other, with care and tenderness and aggression–it’s an acceptance of two opposing needs that, in its essence, are the same. It’s a bond…be it for psychological and mental relief and release, and/or physical need and lust.
And I have to say this type of sexual relationship is not something you “decide”–he and I speak this language, and it’s a real thing, it’s very real, not something you learn from crap 50 shades movies or even from literary sex essays and books like Nin, Miller, Addonizio–so many wonderful writers of it–you either are it or you are not.
I am on a very late-coming but well-worth-it BLOOM -full throttle blooming into my sexuality. It is very powerful and the motor of my drive for quite a while, my center myself, I am so well-so well. But this sexual awakening has been going on for around three years and as a woman who is old enough to actually understand and so to explore every aspect of it, it is by far the most interesting thing and exciting that has ever happened to me.
These books are mother fucking amazing, people. The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch (link goes 
to a NYT review) is the (a body memoir) memoir I always dreamed of writing. Ha ha, we’ll see, right?
And Furnace by Livia Llewellyn is a dark short stories collection of devious sex and I do believe surrealism–still waiting on mine in the mail.
If you haven’t seen Secretary, you can read the amazing submissive/dominant almost bdsm love story here in Mary Gaitskill’s story collection Bad Behavior. The movie has Maggie Gyllenhall and James Spader. I highly recommend. I also heard Hysteria the independent film (also I believe with Gyllenhall, yes) is a great take on women in maybe the early 1900s and their desires and sexuality being abused by the system/hospitals as “hysteria.” 
One of my favorites is probably Susan Minot’s Lust and Other Stories
and/or
Aimee Bender’s Girl in the Flammable Skirt.
Literary, tasteful, surreal, brilliant, sensual, intelligent, raw, in your face whether you like it or not–because you can’t put it down.
A poem of mine inspired by an exercise over at Real Toads, a poem I entitled “Paramour, My Lover”–and I have repeatedly privatized and un-privatized this one because it’s so personal, but now I say fuck it.
Here are parts/excerpts of one of my most private and most unedited poems, quite personal…
PARAMOUR, MY LOVER
It is like shedding light, and looking into the mirror
Naked and burning and unashamed in fever
Drop the platitudes you hide in like you
Dropped your panties onto the tiles.
Drop the cage you have lived in like you
Dropped your bustier.
Touch your curves not shyly but curiously
Looking at your body like he does. Look at it
The way you always should have, through your nature—
That wild forgotten forest.
The ever present burn he has shot you with-
an injection of a fine heroin
Heady and lost, but found in some
Kind of ache
An ache you’ve always had but silenced
And his mouth has opened yours
And his words that fall read like a promise
You are about to lose a virginity
You didn’t know you had…..
…Submit yourself like a fallen bird to something
So hungry—someone as alone and ravenous as
You are—both of you ripped open to your…
He assaults your limitations and spreads you like night,
…look into the mirror, your eyes two black
Solitaire spheres, lost …
Lost in thinking how your minds unravel each others,
How his certainty and control only gives you
Permission to let go ..
–release from all the mirrors you’ve held
…
And then his sweet …
And hunger grows like wildfire, you cannot get enough
Of this intoxicating strangeness…Hunger must be fed, wildfire spreads in that forest
He made you remember, forced you to look at…
complete poem post HERE
with pretty interesting comments…
You will notice that the excerpt from above in “A Place from Hiding” is an extension of Paramour my Lover, which was the first poem I had ever written about my real sexual experiences. As, well, I, unfold, the writing changes, or has been. This is the order these things were written.
NOT TO TOUCH THE EARTH (essay excerpt from years ago)
SEXUAL ABUSE, DREAMS AND TABOOS (post/essay/journaling/far too honest I swear to god–but the nature of what I feared my abuse was causing, into nightmares and therapy, into the taboo of sex and taboo of sexuality and desires for “people like me” blah blah blah–this is probably the beginning of me really writing about this all)
I AM AIR –poem
PARAMOUR, MY LOVER -poem
CONSTANT STATE OF FLUX -poem
THE GRAY AREAS (post/essay when I begin really looking into what I am opening up into)
AND YOUR FACE, IN THE MIRROR? (a rewrite of an old poem, comparing and contrast my “then” self with me now, inspired by Louise Gluck)
A PLACE FROM HIDING -latest post on sexuality and experience
HERE-“MUSIC I GET LOST IN”: a post with more sensual music
Here’s an excerpt from “The Gray Areas”:
We are in that grey area aren’t we, I am asking. In the beginning it was easy-applying the hard fact of you to a tender space in my toughened gut, not as a salve, but as if it had belonged, all along. And I question now if what had belonged all along is really only the part of me you brought out, and I hadn’t seen it. And to resemble what is in your eyes–that is something…
And the dance of words begins, every secret we tell is behind the letters–hidden in word placement in the sentence, in the alliteration and roots, in the tone of voice, in the cadence, in the best words not chosen so as not to reveal too much.
I cannot tell where these conversations stop and I start; I cannot tell if you worded my mind into collective adjectives or if I want to kiss you.
Eliot Moss, Slip
Led Zeppelin, You Shook Me
Difficult Degrees 