Tag: Sex

When Life Continues to Give You Lemons

Let me take a moment to survey
all the Lemons from my Lemon Tree.
There they hang  – polished and gleaming
As though the buds produced them new.
The oldest is eighteen, that sunshiny globe
hides a bitter tang of unwanted seduction
and sits beside it the smaller lemon
that was my broken engagement to a silly young boy.
The largest lemon is static at ten;
borne from a union I should have kept hold
and above them sit the collection of citrus
that’s produced the most sour fruits of all:
there’s duplicity that still looks so full of promise
yet spits a taste that still makes me cry.
There’s the one for a sexual assault
that hides an embittered old flesh
and then there’s my most recent ‘friend’;
his is an acrid disappointment;
the most recently spiteful and sharp.

Let me take a moment to survey
all the Lemons from my Lemon Tree:
In darkest hour I pluck them one by one
and make them an embittered lemonade
and I’m sure with such a poison made
t’would be a fitting way – to make it all just go away.

Posted on by nelsonandemma 1

Hollow Love

You told me once that you’ve never loved;
not even the woman you chose as a wife.

Amusing then that when the artifice crumbled
your desperate first words to her were these:

‘I love you’.

Please.

Yet, fuck me, it worked
and back she came crawling.

She doesn’t love you.
She messaged me and said it.
But a life lived in fancy
is more pleasant than truth.

So neither of you really likes the other
but in friendless times I guess you have to make do.

There’ll be dates and there’ll be kisses and all the grand gestures;
and the sweat of the skin and the lick of the tongue.
So the scene you’re directing is another act to your play
but I’ll tell you what I suspect and I hope that I’m right:

That a part of your soul dies

each
time
that
you
fuck
her

Posted on by nelsonandemma 0

He Says

He’d say:
I know we’re just friends but I need you right now
as his fingers traced patterns across my bemused brow.
He’d say:
I know we’ll have sex and I know we’ll be good
as he lay by my side like I knew that he would.
He’d say:
Let me take you away for your soon to be birthday,
We’ll go to Dalat, – would that be okay?
He’d say:
You mean the world to me; I’m going to miss you when you go,
You don’t need to worry; there’s no need to feel low.
He’d say:
Come stay with me at my place in Limoges,
I want to see you once more; let’s just see how this goes.

But you see, there’s a problem with all this and the problem was this:

He’d say:
She’s just a friend, I help her out just a bit
as he’d dive out the door for five minutes or more.
He’d say:
Those souvenirs you saw in her flat all last night?
Just presents for her kid, you don’t need worry about that.
He’d say:
I don’t find her attractive, interesting, desirable at all
I’m with you right now, what’s your problem with that?
He’d say:
So you think I would cheat?
I can’t believe you’d think that.

Yet here we all are in our own private misery –
6000 miles lying between us.
It’s no longer his voice that I hear; just the tap of his keys
as he writes and he says:
‘I can’t face you again; I’m cutting contact from now.’
So I guess now it’s out
I’m not needed by him
because he’s got work now to do:
to say things in her ear like he’d say to me,
so he can coax her back in cos he’s feeling lonely.

You see, he said all of that
but as I lie here alone,
I find myself saying words I don’t think I could mean:
‘say something to me – I’m loathing this dream’.

Posted on by nelsonandemma 0

On Learning of Duplicity. An Open Letter to Myself.

Dear –

Now that you’ve read his panicked revelatory message and the other woman’s stories that have contradicted all he ever told you; accept that your photos, his gifts and messages have taken on a whole new meaning. Take time to adjust to this new reality and accept that he took all your love and in return gave you back a handful of dust.

Nobody died. Nobody was maimed. Nobody bled. The trembling will stop, the panic and anxiety will subside and the white noise of revelations will cease and this too will turn to calm.

Accept that this is a terrible thing to have happened but, crucially, forgive yourself for trusting because there is no point to love without trust: the two hold hands.

Don’t think back over events which now have skewed and alternative meanings; those times when he had you both in the same room; the times when he fluently lied; so eloquently, so painlessly and the times when he made you think you were mad for ever suspecting him of being less than the good person he claims he wants to be.You will never see him again. You will go on to do wonderful things without him in your life.

Those memories you are torturing yourself with are nothing but neurons and synapses; little beats of electricity that mean nothing. They are pictures from a film that has simply ended and in time their colours will turn to monochrome before fading away completely. In time, his importance to you will shatter and you will realise you picked him out of a small crowd and gave him more attention than he ever deserved.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay said, ‘I shall forget you presently, my dear…I shall forget you…I would indeed that love were longer-lived.’ You fell in love with a fiction and so remember if you must things in this way: remember being spun in the water under a starry sky, remember the anticipation of weekends away, the kisses and secrets shared, the carefully created tokens of affection you made and gave him. But realise now that all of that has perished so place the remnants in the grave and bury it with your sympathy, your patience, your concern, your counsel and your love.

And if in those cold, long hours of the night, the spectre of his body and all he once told you and made you believe won’t fade away into dreams, think of Carl Sagan who noted that we all live out our lives on a mere dot, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. All of this is just a blip in the timeline of all our lives and he deserves no more of your time and tears.

x

Posted on by nelsonandemma 0

Oubliette

I sometimes think you are every bit
as wicked as Germaine says you are.
From those first clawing aches
and heavy clots
that kissed farewell to childish thoughts

to immature scares in the early days
when it was easy to think
using you… was a foregone conclusion.

Was I right to block you out with
pills and latex and fervent prayers?

Gertrude was right when she said
I have more control over my writing
than I do over you.
Yet you are mine;
my flesh, my burden to bear,
I do feel your mystery heavy inside me;
I’ve never seen you and I never will.

Nizar Qabbani says man comes forth from the womb;
it’s nothing to do with ribs
so why do I feel this lack of control?
Of course the irony now is that
as I hurtle towards my middle age
I feel your urgency more than ever
and now, now I can’t answer you and the question,
the question that circulates in my mind
like a constant white noise
is that when I finally need you…
will you yield?

Posted on by nelsonandemma 0

The Airing Cupboard

mad bunny       It had been exactly fifteen minutes since Matthew Mattison had left the devastating note on his mother’s chest of drawers; next to the blackened used cotton wool and parked upright by a fading photo of a dog she had owned for a short period of time when she had been ten.

It had been an exhausting day. He had been forced to recover from at least two tantrums both of which were not taken as seriously as he would have liked. The first had erupted after he had been made to attend a gym class at 8.30am even though it was a Saturday and he had planned to create a lego house for his new toy car that he had demanded the week before. The second had come to fruition after attending said gym class his heartless mother had refused to buy him a milkshake to make up for the inconvenience of it all.

So that was it. He had written his missive.

He was quite proud of it actually. He had discreetly taken a page from his father’s writing pad in his bureau and borrowed not just a thick envelope that he didn’t have to lick to seal, it came with its own glue but his dad’s best pen – which coincidentally he had decided to keep on his person as a consolation for having to sit in the airing cupboard to make his point.

As Matthew Mattison sat next to the aging boiler that hissed and creaked he rested his head against the soothing warmth of the wall and imagined the best scenario that could come from his letter.

Upon reading it, his mother would throw her hands up and wail, beating her chest as her sobs racked her and brought in his father from garden where he was currently picking out weeds.  He would rush to her aid and tear it from her both reading and comforting her as the words made their inevitable impact upon him:

‘By the time you read this, I will be gone. It is clear you don’t love me and never will. Don’t come after me, you will never find me. Farewell mother and father and may we meet in Heaven someday. I hope you have a child that you truly love one day. M.M’

It was cramped in the cupboard. Matthew Mattison tried to stretch his tiny frame but all too soon met the edge of the airing cupboard where he had decided to hide. His plan was to hide out for as long as possible to shock his parents into realizing how much they loved and missed him and then dramatically turn up – maybe around suppertime, he was pretty sure Saturday night was lasagna night, his favourite –  and then he wouldn’t have to attend gym class ever again and he would get that milkshake because they would be so happy to see him.

Twenty minutes. Why was it so quiet? It was slightly irritating to him that he hadn’t been missed for twenty minutes – what were they doing? To amuse himself he tried to make shadows with his toes using the fractured light that was filtering weakly through the crack between the door and its frame.  That soon became dull and he decided to tap out a tune they had learned in Mr. Darwin’s music class the previous day.

Twenty-five minutes. Droplets of sweat were beginning to congregate at the nape of his neck and tickle his spine. Faint pangs of hunger were starting to cramp his belly and he was just about to wonder whether it was all worth it when he heard voices coming up the stairs. This was it!

Eagerly and with a smile broadening across his face he shifted closer to the door so he could hear their reaction.

‘David, are you finished in the garden yet?’ His mother was saying

‘I think so – my back is aching from all that weeding’ his gruff voice returned.

The door to their bedroom was opened and Matthew Mattison who was in the airing cupboard adjacent to their bedroom rolled to his right and placed his hot ear to the wall so he could hear the moment the letter was discovered.

Drawers were being opened and shut and he could hear his mother shutting the windows and closing the blinds.

The sound of the shower in the en-suite was next, its water pattering against the tiles like tropical rain.

Matthew Mattison sighed with annoyance. When were they going to see his letter?

More shuffling and then he heard the shower curtain being pulled back and forth.

Surely his mother would notice while his father took his shower?

Giggles.

This was unexpected. Matthew Mattison’s heart stopped. What? His parents hated him that much that they had read the letter and found it funny? Shocked and perturbed, Matthew Mattison crawled towards the back of the cupboard where it was dusty. His hands were filthy from the floorboards and as he wiped them on his shorts he was stopped short yet again by a groan. Maybe finally his parents had stopped laughing and realized it wasn’t a joke – their son had actually gone.

More groaning. This was more like it. Devastation.

With complacency he relaxed against the wall, happy and comforted that his plan was working. He had just closed his eyes awaiting a more in-depth conversation when he heard the en-suite door bang as though someone had opened it yet the shower was still running. And then, terrible sounds, horrible sounds. The banging of a headboard against the flock wallpaper, moaning and groaning that got louder and louder. Without really knowing what he was hearing, Matthew Mattison knew that this wasn’t the behavior of two terrified and shocked parents but two people…two people….

Horrified, Matthew Mattison scuttled back to the door of the airing cupboard and tried to open it but couldn’t. The noise from his parent’s bedroom was becoming excessive. They were actually enjoying what they were doing. He’d heard rumours of an act mummies and daddies were supposed to do but had never really equated that with his. His mum and dad were far too angry and annoyed all the time when he was around to do that.

Panicked now he pushed against the door.

The bed next door continued to push again the wallpaper

Again and again he leaned his whole body against the door. To escape, for it all to be over. He tried putting his fingers in his ears but it was no use. He banged against the door with one last almighty push…

His mother screamed just as the door gave way and Matthew Mattison fell out the airing cupboard wet and sweaty like a newborn baby.airing cupboard

Silence

And then…

‘Darling, what’s that on your bedside table?’

Rustling as the envelope was opened and read.

‘Oh so he’s gone has he? Well thank god for that. It means I can have you again my sweet…’

Muffled giggles soared through the door and into the hallway where Matthew Mattison lay still on the carpet his eyes open with shock, his mind replaying and replaying and replaying and replaying…..

Posted on by nelsonandemma 0