~SEX~
written by Micheal Ryan
After
the Earth finally touches the sun, and the long explosion stops
suddenly like a heart run down the world might seem white and quiet to
something that watches it in the sky at night, so something might feel
small, and feel nearly human pain.
But
it won't happen again the long nights wasted alone, what's done in
doorways in the dark by the young, and what could have been for some.
Think of all the lovers and the friends! Who does not gather his
portion of them to himself at least in his mind?
Sex
eased through everyone, even when slipping into death as into a
beloveds skin, and prying out again to find the body slumped , muscles
slack and bones begun their turn to dust. Then no one minds when one
lover holds another, like an unloaded sack.
But
the truth enters at the end of life. It enters like oxygen into every
cell and the madness it feeds there in some is only a lucid metaphor
for something long burned to nothing like a star.
How
do you get under your desire? How do you peel away each desire like
ponderous clothes, one at a time, until what's underneath is known? We
knew genitals as small things and we were ashamed they led us around,
even if the hill where we'd lie down was the same hill the universe
unfolded upon all night as we watched the stars, when for once our
breathing seemed to blend.
Each
time from that sweet pressure of hands, or the great relief of the
mouth, a person can be led out of himself isn't it lonely in the body?
The myth says we ooze about as spirits until there's a body made to
take us, and only flesh is created by sex. That's why we enter sex so
relentlessly, toward the pleasure that comes when we push down far
enough to nudge the spirit to release and the pleasure is pleasure of
pure spirit, for a moment all together again. So sex returns us to
beginning and we moan.
Pure
sex becomes specific and concrete in a caress of breast or slope of
waist it flies through itself like light, it sails on nothing like a
wing, when someones there to be touched, when there's nothing wrong.
So
the actual is touched in sex, like a breast through cloth, the actual
rising plump and real, the mind darting about it like a tongue. This is
where I wanted to be all along up in the world, in touch with myself.
Sex,
invisible priestess of a good God, I think without you I might just
spin off. I know there's no keeping you close, as you flick by
underneath a sentence on a train, or transform the last thought of an
old nun, or withdraw for one moment alone. Who tells you what to do or
ties you down!
I'd
give up the rest to suck your dark lips. I'd give up the rest to fix
you exact in the universe at the wildest edge where there's no such
thing as shape.
What
a shame I am, if reaching the right person in a dim room, sex holds
itself apart from us like an angel in an afterlife, and with the ideas
no one has even dreamed, it waits its odd music for pure mind.
After
there's nothing, after the big blow-up of the whole shebang, what voice
from what throat on which I would have quietly set my lips will be
ripped like a cheap sleeve or blown apart like the stopped-up barrel of
a gun. What was inside them all the time I wanted always to rest my
mouth upon?
I
thought most everything stuck dart like in the half-dome of my brain,
and hung there like fake stars in a planetarium. It's true that things
there changed into names, that even the people I loved were a bunch of
signs, so I felt most often alone. This is a way to stay alive and
nothing to bemoan. We know the first time we extend an arm the body
reaches so far for so long We grow and love to grow, then stop, then
lie down.
I
wanted to bear inside me this tender outcome. I wanted to know if it
made sex happen, does it show up surely in touch and talk? Does it leak
from the mind, as heat from the skin? I wanted my touching intelligent,
like a beautiful song.
