Love Song for Mud

One time a girl fell in love with mud. She rubbed it
faceward, up the fat part of her belly and through the course
fuzz around her left nipple, lifted the tip of her finger

to the tip of her tongue and sucked tremendously. Mineral.

Maybe mud has a criminal past. Mud lasts and lasts
in the cracks behind her summer knees the way felons do
on the tollphone. On demand and utterly unreachable.
A love she would wear underwater, or inside out

should mud stick to her elbows; she wanted to share
a pH value, an acidity scale, a common taxonomy.
Biologically speaking, she envied willows and jacarandas.
She swallowed seeds spiritually hoping for roots. 

Whose Insides are Redder

The neighborhood bondage shop has a cage for sale in its display window. Four feet by three feet by three feet, cast iron, complete with velour dog bed the texture of a 90s Juicy track suit. Locking gate. The right size for a man if his ankles and wrists were tied behind him.

For days I dream of ropes. Of keys laced with silver cord, aluminum smell of the hardware store. I dream of dogs who dream of rabbits. Delicious green of summer yard. Like body after not feeling body, startled hungry.

My lover leaves the country. I sleep with myself for three weeks and think to devour my neighbor's henhouse. His husband calls it a "hobby farm" he tells me one morning, leaving tuna for the cats. That's love: Consenting degradation.

I think you should know I would shave your head in your sleep. Maybe your moles would bleed and bloom like food coloring inside your pillow. Whose insides are redder, I wonder sometimes. I get high and peer into myself using the backside of my lover's CD collection.

I spent an hour today watching women with eight-inch erections fuck each other on the Internet. Later, I walked around a flooded lake, put my face to the mud and inhaled that dead-worm odor. Rotting fish and water.

I know how something living smells after six months of winter let me tell you.

Who Says We Are Programmed To Love

This past month I've fucked at least five different people in some shape or form. The order is blurry, the contestants themselves of mixed categories. As an ex of mine says: man, woman, you choose. 

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And we do. 

*

In a way, it was true, 

There was a series of choices.  

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There was the straight guy who wanted me to blow him. He had a weird cut on his dick. 

"Too much masturbation," he explained. 

At one point he spit on me (is this a straight guy thing?), but was at least convivial when we discussed bipolar medication and family histories of schizophrenia. He read me some poetry in Russian. Puskin, of course. Very creative. We watched a Belle Knox clip he had downloaded off the internet together. He came on my chest and then I left. 

*

Apparently, I'm a pretty cool dude and we should hang out sometime for real.

*

But, seriously, none of this ever happened.

*

And that was that. 

*

Then there was Krista who orgasmed at least 8 times before I said I had to go to work. We got in the shower and I came on her leg causing a jarring moment when I asked her where the comb was. And she kept trying to look me deep in the eyes, so deep in the eyes, as if she was questioning if there was even for a second something there she missed during the initial inspection. 

*

A few weeks later she texted me saying she was a materialist, which was amusing, but things have moved past simply being over. 

*

I forgot to mention something. I didn't wear a condom.

*

More memorable was Ted. Ted with the 9-inch dick. Ted that I needed so desperately to fuck me that I sat through yet another board game (and I promised myself, never again) because it had just been a minute since I had been penetrated by something that mattered (size-wise at least). 

*

Worship my dick, he said, and sadly, for a moment, I was. 

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At least didn't think about sex until three days later.

*

This morning I woke up next to a 20-year-old I've been seeing consistently, a photographer from New York. I told him I was in a bad mood last night after talking a friend out of suicide and drinking too much all day (he knows me well enough not to be surprised by either). I didn't even want our tongues to touch, even though I could see it in his eyes, that he wanted it. I jerked us both off in less than 20 minutes (most of the time was spent on myself). The worst of it was noticing that he was watching me condition my hair after we got out of the shower, that he was waiting for me to look up at him, that he was seeking some kind of meaning in our interaction.

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Like he was framing a picture. 

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Let me tell you how weird it was, on our first occasion, to look down and see myself fucking him, and him thinking somewhere in the midst of being pounded that I actually cared about him, that somewhere behind all this automation was a thought being simultaneously registered. 

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"The obsessional, I said somewhere, I was reminded of it recently, is something of the order of a frog who wants to make himself as big as an ox. We know the effects from a fable. It is particularly difficult, as we know, to tear away the obsessional from the grip of his look." 

*

Or more petrifying, perhaps because of its relevance, "when it happens that he believes himself to be male because he has a little bit of a prick." 

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And somewhere between all of us is this fucking. Us fucking ourselves, us sharing each other's bodies, hoping to to maybe to feel something slightly more real.

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That is until the very second when we come. The too real moment. 

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It's actually kind of terrifying how expendable we are, how expendable some of us forget we are. Each day hearts are exchanged while the body is transmigrated. 

*

I broke my heart. I'd made the mistake of being awed by the perverse complexion in the color of his eye, the azure feeling. Looking at him sleep was like tracing my finger on a lynchpin, but still never the explosion. No masochistic burst, no oceanic feelings.  

*

Now I just want him to come and get his fucking bed so I can sleep without his smell. 

* 

Then the poems. 

"Frank knows a butterfly who wonders about all of her caterpillar friends"

"roseate skin on wrist emerging from blue blouse"

"like doing angel dust in the kale section at the start of the world" 

"Tu est ma destinée, sans toi je ne suis rien"

Always the fucking poems. 

* 

We didn't do a lot of fucking. Once, in a hotel room in downtown Chicago, smoking e-cigarettes and looking down on the city. It's actually kind of marvelous to think that was the last time he ever wanted to touch me. And knowing that, focusing on it, holding it there. It kind of makes sense now that I just stopped wearing his sweaters, that I learned to sleep a distance away from his body. 

* 

Most of it wasn't cheating, and even if it was, he had already left in his mind. Checked out, isn't that what they say. After all, love these days is an institution. There is a bureaucracy, credits are assigned, and we must all pay our dues. Love is a costly exercise in safety, especially when we know so well that safety comes in one form: temporary.    

* 

With Andrew it was funny being so drunk and watching the condom slip on, knowing how much danger that could be passed between us. I remember when he slid on top of me and moaned. I remember being in the car and not letting him kiss me. I still love him, I said. Or maybe it was because it felt weird. After all, he was positive. 

*

You only started calling yourself transgender because of me, he said. 

At the time I didn't really have words to describe fucking someone, having my dick being hard, pushing through them, and then always the same word appearing in my head: elsewhere. 

* 

She called me. She said she couldn't remember. Couldn't remember what, I asked. 

*

"Couldn't remember if we had sex." 

* 

But it was in the morning. We were sober.

* 

"friends separated by thousands of miles are thinking of each other simultaneously but they have no idea and we have no way to reach them" 

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There was the time he crossed his leg on top of mine when we were at dinner with his mother and then he noticed what he was doing. Then she smiled awkwardly at us. He pulled his leg back.

*

What's funny is that she doesn't even care. He does. 

* 

I wonder if he remembers napping in the hammock under the stars and I asked him, does it bother you that you're bigger than me, and he said, honestly, yes it does. But more importantly, does he remember my response? Sometimes I wish I was bigger and more masculine. 

*

What an amusing thought. Honesty.  

* 

If we could only be other people. 

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"Like a knife in a melon, Autumn slices summer.

It will be cold going back." 

* 

Except the lesson in love is this: there is no going back without the toll.

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And currency only delays the price we pay with the flesh. 
The flesh itself never remaining whole.