Coming Home: Day 28 -- when is it too late?

Today I want much more than my hands on myself, than the water between my legs, than some simple contractions. Today I want the soar of connection, of hands touching, of love in and through a body that didn't expect to do any more, ever, than just survive.

Today I am slippery in all the poems, I am drinking tea and not eating enough, the tears are all stain and open throat, the quiet is broken by the sad songs, the puppy I let myself love is curled into a small groaning ball. Today I am preparing for what has always been my vocation. Today I want to slip out from under the writer/watcher, the part that analyzes and is already crafting description of my every lived moment -- I want to breathe into an unwritten moment. I am writing now, will come later, and I will not tell you about it. Today's orgasm will be just for me. 

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Didn't we have to include this one during this month's ode to the love and struggle of masturbation?

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

ANNE SEXTON

The end of the affair is always death.   

She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   

out of the tribe of myself my breath   

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   

She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.   

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,   

that every single couple puts together   

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   

the abundant two on sponge and feather,   

kneeling and pushing, head to head.   

At night alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,   

an annoying miracle. Could I   

put the dream market on display?   

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,   

a piano at her fingertips, shame   

on her lips and a flute’s speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes   

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.   

Today’s paper says that you are wed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

What does it look like to let go of hyper-vigilance, to release the energy that has been focused for twenty years on looking back over all my inside shoulders? What does it look like to have all of this one self present in this one moment, no fragments floating off to keep watch for any interlopers, any threat? What could it possibly mean that I am beginning to imagine such an embodiment, that, in my moments of meditation, I can feel the tremendous relief in my muscles, that I weep (it feels that heavy) with the ability to let my shoulders fall into right here, right now? 

What does it mean to know that I will still get hurt, whether or not I am hyper vigilant, whether or not I was on the lookout for the next assault, whether or not I thought I was protecting myself? What does it mean to breathe into that assurance, let it be just true: not a tragedy, just a human fact?

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I'm all questions and huge hope today, and I think this isn't so hot -- last night I dreamed about the Masturbate-a-thon: I logged in to the site just in time to see a gorgeous friend of mine saying, calling to Carol, that she'd just come. She had her clothes mostly on, a red dress to offset her pale skin and blonde hair, she'd been on her back and had her hands under the dress, the dress was wrinkled where it'd been pushed up around her hips. But when I get to the video stream, she's already pulled the dress back down, her face red and grinning, already re-composing into her public-performance persona. Later in the dream, I got to the Center for Sex and Culture just after the event was over. The room was filled with the energy of the just released, a few stains on the floor (the room was carpeted and in some industrial building, nowhere that the CSC has ever actually been housed during the years I've known about it.) I was disappointed to have worked up the courage to come out for the event and then have missed it, was a little electrified. I helped Carol and Robert with the last of the cleaning up -- 

What can I say about this dream? This line was in a poem I wrote in response to this weekend: too late to find / comfort enough in such small daily moments -- and I wrote, over and over, is it too late for me? I'm forty years old -- is it too late for this embodiment, this understanding and acceptance, this joy, this still-mourning. Is it too late to expect that I will wake up happy tomorrow morning, that my dreams can come so true that I will finally need new ones? Is it too late to take hold of my own hands and bless them? Is it too late to wake up?

I know -- it's a ridiculous question. We can say, reflexively, that it's never too late.


 And yet -- to feel it. To feel it.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~


Come again tomorrow, ok? Only and always as you like it. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 25 - one more for the road

Who can get enough?
I've got one more for this hungry Friday...

A gorgeous poem posted today by my friend R_, in honor of National Masturbation Month ...

Listening to Your Hunger

 From the other side of the door
I hear your breath escape in deep
irregular bursts followed by
sharp instantaneous inhales
and the occasional moan.

I know you are trying to be quiet
and have Enigma in the headphones
with your eyes shut tight, imagining

(go go go read the rest)

How are you listening/honoring your hunger? Take it out for this long weekend (or for whatever moments you can spare, if you don't have a long break) and let it stretch its wings...

Come again soon...

Coming Home: Day 22 - a poem

not in a space today for blogging -- but poems, yes, always:

At a Window

by Carl Sandburg

Give me hunger,  

O you gods that sit and give  

The world its orders.  

Give me hunger, pain and want,  

Shut me out with shame and failure 

From your doors of gold and fame,  

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!  

  

But leave me a little love,  

A voice to speak to me in the day end,  

A hand to touch me in the dark room 

Breaking the long loneliness.  

In the dusk of day-shapes  

Blurring the sunset,  

One little wandering, western star  

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window,  

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk  

And wait and know the coming  

Of a little love. 

xo to you today. xo to this body. be easy, and come again tomorrow, ok? 

Coming Home: Day 16 - getting caught up

Ok-- back home, and I'm getting caught up. Two orgasms in five hours (just hush up if that sounds slow/easy for you -- it's a big deal for this girl here) -- one I got to go to sleep after, one complete with sobs.

This morning, now, I feel full and raw, wide open, stripped, visible, vulnerable -- and just right.

On legs like those of a newborn foal. You know that kind of wet and shaking, the newly borne thing just learning to bear its own weight? That's where I'm living these days.

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Found a wonderful anthology just the other day, called This Art: Poems About Poetry (Michael Wiegers, ed; Copper Canyon Press), which includes this:

By the Rivers

That spring he was fourteen,
sun on the walls, stale air
sweet in Bergen-Belsen for the first time,
he told me he thought of the nurse
who held him when he was small.
He found a corner
where they did not catch him:
rush of the brilliance and the heat
and no one there. He opened his clothes,
hunched over his wasted body,
and made it spill.

*

The poem wants to look forward, not
back, but out there as far as it can see
are ruins: body of Abel body of god body
of smoke. And no recognizable
child to mourn.

So it begins with longing.
Or with fear, that old dog
stinking beside it, scabby and blind.

And all the time the future
is pushing up uncalled for
under the cold ground, or gliding down
like the first snow, wet syllables
that melt and soak up the darkness.

The poem wants to get out of
where it is. But is instructed
to remember. In shameless daylight.
By the rivers of salt.

-Shirley Kaufman

I read this last night on an airplane, one that lifted off from the East Coast after 10pm and carried me forward through the night back toward home. Look at those lines: He opened his clothes, /hunched over his wasted body, / and made it spill. 

At Bergen-Belsen. Bergen-Belsen.

That's not radical self-care. That's something entirely beyond. Maybe just simply and perfectly human.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
This is what I wrote in my notebook, the day I found that book of poems:

I worried last night that I am too obsessed with sex, that I have made it my whole life, that trauma has inflected me this deeply. But then why is that a thing to worry about? People obsess over all kinds of things, whatever they love: why do we have to shove an interest in sex into a box called pathology? I worry what people will think: is this all disgusting? Am I saying too much?

(Too much again -- of course. Too much. What girl isn't too much? What longing? What desire?)


I'm stressed right now about the blog, about my writing and orgasms, feel strange and difficult in my body. Maybe because I'm not writing about everything, just this one thread of my life, the part where I'm trying to/wanting to come every day for a month and write about what that does for me, but not sharing all the other aspects of myself-ing to which this process is tethered and tugging. Still more bifurcation, still more distinctions between real life and pretend/fantasy -- here's maybe this cognitive dissonance: the bifurcations, the separations, don't really hold these days. It's not a fantasy me who wrote these things down and shared them with the world -- it's the real me. My exact real me. All my muscles are tense, something in me doesn't want to let go the armor that has protected me, these splits, these different selves: holding unreleased orgasm, holding the full on feel of release, holding spent screams, holding the possibility of really letting me have me. 


I want to learn new places, read the strange books, feed my words into the world, this promise, this oddity, this chemistry, this compromise, this practice. 

Did I say at the beginning I was getting caught up? That's exactly right -- when my head goes spinning, I get caught up in the panic, the worries, the explanations, the analysis, the I need to figure it all out. That, my friends, is from a lifetime with parents who want you to understand and describe your feelings (but don't always want you to have those feelings), then an adolescence with a man who wants to yank your feelings out by their roots and use them entirely against your emerging, just-budded body. It's easy for me to get locked --especially when I have only my fingers on myself (no other chemistry, no other technology, no loud distracting buzzing, no hot heavy thud of water)--into a cycle of panic: why is this taking so long? When will I ever work right?

This, then, is the practice (how many times will I write this exact phrase this month? Far fewer times than I'll repeat it to myself): come back come back come back to this body right now, and understand that you get to have everything that you want, body, and we get to be perfect in exactly our responses in this (any) moment. This is not a contradiction, even and especially when what I want is to come fast and what my body is doing is lingering for some long minutes in the pleasure of the plateau, the longing, the long slow burn and build.

Today I wept for that practice, for the release, for the wanting more and how I have to/get to keep learning that my body knows its infinite possibility -- and that when I quit trying to force it/us/myself to come/feel/respond in a particular way, so much more joy and release can open up in me. Contract, then release. Then release. Then release.

Thank you, body. Thanks, too, to your bodies, out there. Be easy, and come as you wish. See you tomorrow.

Coming Home: Day 5 - Unrepentant

Some days it's gonna be harder than others to get up and get to the blog -- that doesn't mean the coming isn't happening, though.

I don't want to be inside today, don't want to be at the computer -- I want to be outside, running, soaking up big sun into this thinned skin. 

That's not all I want to do.

Take this body to the beach, to the mountains, to the desert, to the high grasses around the cottonwoods along the Platte River. Take this body to the cornfields, to the dust of Route 66, take this body to a single lane road and a convertible with the top down, take this body to high cliffs over a pounding ocean. Take this body home. Let it / me / us understand how exactly home we have already come. 

This is about joy today, about all the different ways we can lift off and sing, about flying grounded and opening hot into the morning.

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1.28.12

I want to  write the story of my masturbation – or how I grew to ignore stranger’s stories and learned to love my fingers – how the release, when I can get there, opens my shoulders and hands, the back of my throat and how, when I’m just fucking myself, I’m not worried about what anyone else is thinking—if I’m doing it right, if they are, no—it’s just me and my vibrator or my other vibrator or my other vibrator or the showerhead or my own tender fingers luxuriating in all this body and too many unfulfilled fantasies. It’s just me loving the breasts that he was the first one to put his mouth on, the belly that he was the first one to touch, the ass that he first cupped in his hands during the backrubs  that he dissuaded my mother from worrying about. I want to tell you the long history of me and masturbation, how I never did it as a child except vague rockings, now and again, against tight underwear, seams of jeans or bedclothes. 

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

What was the shame that kept me from pressing my hands into the ions of myself, those nights I slept alone? Why, when I was exploring everything else in my world, didn't I explore this skin, that heat and pleasure between my legs?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Because almost there, that phrase, those words, rivet themselves from my lips every time I masturbate (every time I have any sort of sex at all), the poem below is playing for me. 

Today I think I lived in those words for a month: oh god, don't stop, I'm almost there, almost there, almost there.

After this morning, the count goes up by two, maybe more. Am I keeping count somewhere? Maybe we could track the different kinds of orgasms -- the laughing hard, the tearing up, the different eruptions that lift from my body. Those all count, don't they? Then there're the explosions -- those are the ones everyone can recognize. I'm learning to watch the other sorts of orgasms; like learning to listen to the quieter voices that live inside my fingers and belly.

Almost There Timothy Liu
Hard to imagine gettinganywhere near another semi-nude encounter down this concreteslab of interstate, the two of usall thumbs—
white-throated swifts mating mid-flightinstead of buckets ofcrispy wings thrown downhoi polloi—an army of mouths
eager to feedleft without any lasting sustenance.Best get down on all fours.Ease our noses pastrear-end collisions wrapped around
guardrails shaking loose their boltswhile unseen choirs jacked onairwaves go on preachingloud and clear to every last pair of unrepentant ears—

Unrepentant ears. That's all I am today. That, and unrepentant mouth, unrepentant fingers, unrepentant hunger. I'm taking all this shamelessness out into the world now. Maybe I'll see you out there.

Be easy with you and your body. Thanks for reading -- come again tomorrow!

Coming Home: Day 4 - particularly blessed

 A poem for today, to begin with.

(Thanks to my dear friend, the divine Miss M, who sent this one to me today just at the exact moment I was about to start hunting for it... :)







'This is for every man who licks'

This is for every man who licks
his shoulder during solitary sex,
rubs his beard against the stripey
deltoid muscle or bites himself hard.

This is for the woman who at the body's
buffet touches her breasts one at a
time then reaches for the place
she has made as clean as Mother's kitchen.

Masturbation should be as exciting as any
heavy date: have a drink first, lay out
some poppers, open that favorite book
to the most shameful passage because
without blessed shame nothing is
as much fun.

And please don't jump up afterwards
and rush for the washcloth like all
the relatives were on the porch
knocking, their hands hot from
casseroles and a cake with God's
name on it.

Rather lie there, catch your breath,
turn to yourself and kiss all the nimble
fingers, especially the one that has
been you-know-where, kiss the palms
with their mortal etchings and finally
kiss the backs of each hand as if
the Pope had just said that you are
particularly blessed. 

 - Ron Koertge

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Today, I did, in fact, jump up afterwards and rushed not for the washcloth but for the towel -- not out of shame but because I was about to be late to meet my friend for coffee. Could I explain to her about my shaking hands, the flush across my cheeks, the grin that lives in my belly these days? (Turns out I could, but that came later, after squatting down on BART to scrawl in my notebook, to write out a draft of this post, after rushing down Market St with the words (just the words, mind you) still staining my fingers.)

This morning flowed like most of my mornings have for the better part of this year: 

• wake before the light
• make tea and write my morning pages
• take Sophie out for her walk, then prepare both her breakfast and my meals for the day
• get in the shower for the daily ablutions (it's fun how anything can become a euphemism)
• dress and get out of the house as fast as possible so I can make it to work not too late.    

This morning I almost didn't even try. Coming has been hard and taken a long time recently--

(these words, these damn words -- hard, long time -- perfect in some erotic contexts but never right for woman's orgasm. Sometimes I hate how many times I read P. Califia's "Taste of Vanilla," how I've internalized that sense of being too much work, no matter the fact that none of my lovers have ever once complained. It's all about what lives inside. Guess who did complain that I took too long. Guess. Right -- and stepfather-rapists shouldn't get to complain that their stepchildren are taking too long to achieve orgasm during their sexual assaults, should they? Isn't that the epitome of adding insult to injury?

We're going to get to the language part. Promise.It's time for some rethinking/transformation there.)

--and it was already just about 7 when I got in the shower, and I was supposed to meet my friend at 8. In the city. Did it make sense even to drop down to the porcelain after my quick shampoo and wash, to taunt myself open, just to have to leave all throbby and unfinished? 

~~ ~~ ~~

Here's a fun tidbit I just found on the Men's Health site, from an article called 10 lessons about the female orgasm:

Oh, and studies show that it takes 15 to 40 minutes for the average woman to reach orgasm. Going somewhere? 

(Ok, yes, Men's Health. And, you're right, there's the dreaded "studies show" -- we would like to know which studies, wouldn't we? But still: 15-40 minutes for the average woman to reach orgasm -- and I've been feeling like a bizarre outlier in the world of girl bodies and coming? Why have I never thought to look up this detail before? Why didn't I pay more attention in SFSI training?)

So, then, what the hell is this 'too long' business about, anyway?

~~ ~~ ~~

This morning, I managed to be out the door by 7:30, throbby, yes, and having come -- having come, almost certainly, in under ten minutes. Something moved fast and together for me today, surprising me; something in me was ready. A reward, maybe, for having actually written what I needed to write (morning pages that were emotional, complicated, connected), who knows. 

The fantasy today was one of the under-pressure ones: we're in a bathroom at a club or a party or a closet or a classroom (I know) or some other situation where someone might walk in on us soon, or there's another appointment in a few minutes or someone's looking for you or someone else has to pee so we need to get out of the goddamn bathroom and you're not going to quit whatever it is you're doing to me until I come, so either I better come fast or else get ready to get watched by others while I do come. Sometimes I come fast, hard, laughing -- sometimes it takes a bit longer and I get to have those strangers watching. Either way it's hot -- and it worked.

~~ ~~ ~~

Yesterday I was sure I was only going to come slow this month (or, let's rephrase that, mid-average) -- around 30 minutes most days -- and then today I had that stretch of certainty that I wouldn't be able to come at all. 

So now I'm being invited to be less and less certain, and am feeling grateful for how my body works, for how it surprises me when I just ask for what I want -- even from my own self! How about that for some radical self care on a Friday morning?

What's your body story for today? What are the ways you are allowing yourself to be particularly blessed?

Be easy with you and your body. Thanks for reading -- come again tomorrow!