We walk in the rain. The sky, the whole world is breaking.

If there is any constant to life it is this, it breaks.

The rain pummels the beach. Water extends from shore to horizon and I feel in an odd way like crying. As the rain picks up speed, this division becomes less and less real. Eventually the whole world becomes one line. That line is black and boundless.

The beach is a real beach, but it is also one of my private fantasies. As financial towers glow in cubes of crystal-light further off, wrapped around space like a sourceless mouth, a mouth we've been left with and so whose words we must falsify daily, I am overwhelmed by a feeling that here is the only nature left, the only spontaneity, the only activity outside our control. And more tellingly it is entirely unnatural. A brief field of non-indigenous weeds, a thin line of trees reduced to bone, a secluded beach littered in washed up trash.

I get overwhelmed easily. This is as much solitude as is left for our world.

– Take your shirt off, he tells me, his voice low.

He is wearing a bandana and has a small triangle for a goatee. We are sitting on the rocks watching the gulls go crazy.

The rain tingles, burns my skin. I feel nervous. I would rather suck him off straight away but he wants to do me first. And I come on as a sub, as a bottom. I play the part, do it sexy that way. And it gives me a lot of pleasure to please my man first. To smell his balls. The worst thing you can do in life is be disappointing.

I think about this a lot, being disappointing.

Because I am a poet men often buy me diamonds. Lucidity shared his joint laced with coke or something (possibly mescaline) with me back at the bar. One of those skank places lost in the size and neglect of the city around it. One of those places you can just spark up a joint un harassed. I tittered and giggled. I am turned on by the sound of me doing that. Later I was reading:

After we die, the angels will bring us groceries
downtown
If you buy me dinner, the waiter will smile
And you will stroke my knee under the table

No one will hunger
Yet you will know no one hungrier
than me
Our apartment will be warm with bright colours
& dance music

Those buildings of the oppressor
will be a wash of yellows and browns
one heavenly day
my man

And you can fuck me
Inside and out
And you can fuck me
like the ripe pit of a mango
You can pick the seed
from my softness
And the only screams on this earth will be
From our fucking

Lucidity tells me I am deep. I don't know what he means but the word has been breaking me ever since. I hate the feeling of being just high enough that meaning detaches from the words, but nothing better comes in to fill the space. Lucidity is taken by the outward sign of poetry, the surface gesture of it. There is no poetry anymore of course but I hang on to the word.

Fuck, tell me beautiful things, tell me we are ashes for civilian planes.

I imagine a young girl, the girl I want to be, with explosives wired to her. Her breasts propelled off her body like blackened comments for one absolute moment, as she burns, laughing, or perhaps weeping, or perhaps nothing at all, consumed in the immolating flames of her absolute and unyielding justice. I want poetry. Even more, I want to wear this cherry bombshell wig. Mostly I want to dissolve under the touch of a man.

The absence of poetry in our world haunts me.

So I strip for him. I strip for him like this is the most glamorous day of his life. I wear a little strapless top, gold sequin, and a short hot hot miniskirt. I am still abnormally thin but at an age where my face is only beginning to crack, you can only begin to tell that beneath I am not a chick and not that young.

He knew too, back at the bar. I saw it in his eyes, that look. That I've done this with guys before look.

Without poetry the whole world is exteriority, and that's all. I am nothing but my bra now, my cock bedded to one side on my carefully trimmed pubes, kneeling for my man, and I am having these thoughts. I wish my mind would shut up because it is hard to get hard with all these fucking deep thoughts crowding in on me.

Without poetry I should be a brain and that's all. Neural twitches moving between pain and pleasure centre. I take a deep breath. I try to think of my cock. That's all I want to think with. I know what the world is like and I don't want to be disappointing.

His hand on me is furtive at first, but then he is queer as a fucking scout leader. He retrains my wrists behind my back with his one hand, he is bondage. It is all in the gesture, the outside act, no matter what his straight boy pretensions might bring him, no matter how many girls he's been with. My arms are restrained, the rain is hurting me, and now he is beginning to get me hard with his other hand. He's close to my ear asking — Is this all right?

I kiss him like other men punch.

He is tender when he is stroking me. I go hard for him, it's my pleasure to. The rain washes away my smell, perfume, deodorant. And secretly I am glad, for still I wish to keep hidden from the infinite. The infinite, those points of light still visible beyond the smog.

One day children may awake and not think of us.

Not thinking of how wet and dirty I am getting, I put my back to him and slide my skirt and panties off. I am conscious of his prick as his pants drop, pressed flat and crunched up against his public mound. I am conscious of how swelling, sweaty, and uncomfortable it must be. How, on penetration, it will cut to the back of my throat, and in a vague way, connect us.

While he lathers the small button tip of my asshole, I give my rear totally over to him, and think of the breasts of a girl, barely nineteen, propelled from her like flaming black comets into the cosmos. I think of the hatred that must be there to sacrifice a perfectly good pair of breasts. My own nipples go pert like syringes as the hook of his cock first punctures. My ass cheeks clench. He moans, snorts. I think — he's treating me so good. I try to hold in all the farts, all the bowel movements in the universe. Everything feels a horrible exteriority but he rides me like a pilot, tender as a surveillance sweep, thoroughly like an interior strip search.

I wish I was a porn movie on an airplane. Passengers jilling themselves, moving hands lightly above pants, locked together in a metal vehicle, which at any moment become a ballistic missile. I cry and his hands grab my chest.

No one can be too deep inside me. As his gizz leaks out in first little confused spurts, and then one long log of white cream, confirming him to my body, I buck up, grabbing his hands closer to my chest.

He wants to nuzzle with me afterwards, cuddle, in rain and wet sand, but it is filthy here and I feel dirty. I squat and with a finger remove some of his fluid from my ass. Wipe it off with my panties which I will not put on again. Put on my skirt.

Walk with cock hidden between my naked upper things, which is tricky.

Because it is all exteriority when in drag I am chick. I let him wrap his arm around my shoulder, rest his hand against my ass. Because it is all exteriority, when I say this it is real.

Because I am a poet men often buy me diamonds. I am going home one night to my bubble bath high in the sky, my absolute and untainted reconciliation with this world.

– Know what, he says.

He pushes my face down to his crotch. Pulls his pants down. He doesn't smell good. I am sucking him, my fucking legs getting dirty.

– I'm still horny, he says.

He is grunting but all I perceive is the outside solid shape of the sound.

I am a poet. Men often buy me diamonds.

 

©2004 Ryan Kamstra - Contributor's Bio