Poetry [Mattress Flying]

Hola mi Gente,

As one of my FB contacts put it, you don’t have to be a supporter to see that the press is doing a number on Bernie Sanders. 

Just thought I’d leave a little something before heading out. Y’all have a great day, ya hear? 

* * *

Sonnet from the Groin

Crazed with spring all I want to do is fuck, free
these thighs from their denim prison, let the rich
scent floating around my neck take a look see
into the under things of a man. (Which
man is a trivial spec.) Oh! To be flying
above a mattress, screaming not with hate
but with throaty mating only trying
for the peak and pinnacle of frolic. Fate
and I have made a bargain: to compel
the most virile to lay me down, discipline
the demon out of my body. Possible
friction, find me I’m not hiding, will become
an electric pink rubber band on command. Womb
you have nothing to do with this! Time to bloom.

-- Maggie Wells (1977 - )

* * *

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The TGIF Sex Blog [The Kiss]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m dealing with an emergency that had me up early this AM traveling to LI. I wrote this last night and I’m unleashing it via my mobile...

* * *

-=[ The Kiss ]=-

She kissed me, and my mouth wrote a poem of welcome to her lips.
-- Ward Elliot Hour

Have I ever told you how much I love to kiss? My favorite part of the kiss is the moment just before. I can kiss for hours, it seems. I like all kinds of kisses, but the kisses I love most are those savored slowly... I would like to think I am a good kisser and I believe some women would agree. Whatever the case, I can honestly say my kisses never lacked for passion.

You should be passionate about your kisses, wherever, however, or with whomever...

Strange as it may seem to us, the contact of the lips in a kiss is a cultural, if inspired, development of the Western world. The kiss was unknown in many parts of the world until colonizers, explorers, travelers, and missionaries carried the custom to the remote parts of our planet. Even today it is not the preferred form of intimate expression of love or affectionate greeting among most peoples of Asia, Africa, the Eskimo domains, Polynesia and other distant lands where traditional customs still hold.

Science tells us that the impulse to kiss is not natural to humankind; that it developed gradually in relation to the erotic. Anthropologists believed that the love-kiss developed from the primitive maternal kiss and from the nursing of the infant at the mother’s breast, which are customary even in cultures where the erotic kiss is unknown. Out of these maternal caresses grew the kiss of love and affection, of devotion and reverence, that we know today.

As in many other cultural idiosyncrasies, the development of the kiss demonstrates a curious contradiction in the pattern of human actions. Kissing as a demonstration of affection is believed to have been a rather late development. There is no trace of it as a form of affection in ancient times. For example, I am told that there is no word for “kiss” in the Celtic tongues. The custom of kissing appears to have been acquired by the Celts long after it became a habit among most other Europeans. Homer scarcely knew of it, and the Greek poets, avid chroniclers of the customs of their time, seldom mentioned it.

Curiously, actions resembling the kiss are found among many animals. Birds use their bills as a form of caress. Even snails and certain insects caress. The dog who licks his master is physically expressing something close to a kiss. Dogs also lick one another as a form greeting. Our closest relations in the animal world, the apes, are apparently addicted to kissing.

Anatomically, the kiss is an ideal mode of expression of love and affection, as the lips are an extremely sensitive erogenous zone, especially vulnerable to erotic stimulation. I once knew a woman who claimed she could climax from kissing alone. Of course, in order for a kiss to be an effective incentive for love it must possess fire and strength of fervor. As Byron, no stranger to the erotic arts himself, once wrote:

A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth and love,
And beauty, all concentrating like rays
Into one focus kindled from above;
Such kisses as belong to early days,
Where heart and soul and sense in concert move,
And the blood's lava, and the pulse ablaze,
Each kiss is a heart-quake -- for kiss's strength,
I think it must be reckoned by its length.

There is strong evidence that the kiss as we know it in the West has ancient Hebraic origins, where the kiss of love held some influence, as expressed in the Song of Songs: “Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth.” The kiss has special significance as a pledge of love -- a seal if you will. It has also been defined as a symbol of the union of souls. In the Eastern world, the kiss was associated with the sacred, accounting for its absence in the erotic sphere. The ancient Arabians, for example, made their devotions to the gods by a kiss.

Likewise, in ancient times the kiss indicated reverence and respect rather than love. The Romans, for whom the kiss had a sacramental meaning, influenced the early Christians. The kiss retains some of this meaning as evidenced by the practice of kissing the relics of saints, the foot of the Pope, and the hands of bishops. Kissing the hand or foot has been a mark of respect dating back from the earliest of times.

It is impossible to think of tender, consummate lovemaking without the rapture of the kiss. The kiss sets off the electrifying spark of sensation that reverberates to the innermost parts of our being. It is an essential part of love-play often leading to a sexual peak experience. However innocent a lover’s kiss, it is never truly without a sexual connotation and signifies the stage between desire and possession.

Surfaced by a tissue of full-blooded, sensitive membranes, moistened by dewy sweetness, shaped into a curvature that has been compared to Cupid’s bow, the lips appear to have been especially created by nature for their role as the gateway to labyrinths of love.

The kiss -- the incitement of the fruits of your lips -- is the most direct prelude to sexual fulfillment. It is for this reason (and many more) that I would caution restraint, for the real meaning and importance of the kiss is the sacredness of love’s passion. Its force may lure you unawares as a fly to a trap sticky-sweet with dew.

Love,

Eddie

The Drunkards

¡Hola! Everybody...
Today I offer you “Drunkards,” a lively invocation to “lovers, singing from the garden, the ones with/ brilliant eyes,” by the great thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi.

* * *

-=[ The Drunkards ]=-

by Rumi


The drunkards are rolling in slowly, those who hold to wine
are approaching.
The lovers come, singing, from the garden, the ones with
brilliant eyes.
The I-don't-want-to-lives- are leaving, and the I-want-tolives
are arriving.
They have gold sewn into their clothes, sewn for those who
have known.

Those with ribs showing who have been grazing in the old
pasture of love
are turning up fat and frisky.

The souls of pure teachers are arriving like rays of sunlight
from so far up to the ground-huggers.

How marvelous is that garden, where apples and pears, both
for the sake of two Mary's,
are arriving even in winter.

Those apples grow from the Gift, and sink back into the Gift.
It must be that they are coming from the garden to the garden.

An Ode to Fellatio

¡Hola! Everybody...
I was reading the following and thought it was such a great tribute to such a great act... LOL

* * *

-=[ Fellatio ]=-

John Updike

It is beautiful to think
that each of these clean secretaries
at night, to please her lover, takes
a fountain into her mouth
and lets her insides, drenched in seed,
flower into landscapes:
meadows sprinkled with baby's breath,
hoarse twiggy woods, birds dipping, a multitude
of skies containing clouds, plowed earth stinking
of its upturned humus, and small farms each
with a silver silo.

(1964)

The TGIF Sex Blog [Pornography and Erotica]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I just heard our president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here’s his response:

“I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize... That is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21^st century.”

I see the online responses, the gnashing of teeth, and the tearing of clothes, and the neocons going into their feces-flinging act, and I have to shake my head in wonder. Let me put it this way: we went from a president who suffered the indignity of having shoes thrown at him (an expression of extreme disrespect) to a president being awarded a prestigious, internationally recognized award. Deal with it... I will be gone all day.

Today is Friday and it’s all about S-E-X!

* * *

-=[ Erotica & Pornography ]=-

See today’s blog art? Pornography or art? Why? (It’s a rhetorical question! LOL).

The boundary between pornography and “artistic” erotica varies from individual to individual, and is conditioned by religious and socially defined moral beliefs, upbringing, and personal experience as to what is art and culture. It is for this reason that a society’s perception and definition of pornography is a good measure of the spirit of the times.

The publication in 1948 and 1953 of Alfred Kinsey’s massive sociological study on human sexual behavior, for example, resulted in an openness about sex, leading tot the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and early 70s. During this time, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, generally seen as the beginning of the women’s liberation movement. In 1965, the US Supreme Court legalized the sale of contraceptives and in 1969 Denmark became the first Western country to drop all laws against the publication or sale of pornography.

At the time, many forward-thinking individuals saw pornography as a vehicle of free speech and a force against authority. The social critic Susan Sontag, writing in 1967, compared the pornographic and religious imaginations as two all-inclusive ways of describing the world (imagine someone proposing that idea today!). For Sontag, the pornographic universe is a “total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it,” and turn them into a reasoned form of dialogue around the need for erotic exchange -- just as religion turns them all into the hunger for God.

This is why pornographers such as the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Pauline Réage (author of the Story of O) create a world in which there are no sexual taboos. They make no distinctions between the sexes, or between humans and animals or humans and objects. They are essentially multiplying the possibilities of exchange Bataille was especially clear about eroticism. For him, eroticism, like poetry, violence, and religious sacrifice, leads to the “blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity; it leads us to death, and through death continuity.”

Whew! LOL

Of course, not all pornography has such a profound effect: oftentimes it is a vehicle for fantasy and escape. Still, some of the most extreme forms of modern Western pornography are, in Sontag’s analysis, among the vocabulary that answer the human need for personal transcendence since religion has, for the most part, failed in that role.

Love,

Eddie

Impressions (Erotica)

¡Hola! Everybody...
It’s been a very busy week for me, with more work piling up in the foreseeable future. Some of it deals with some next steps career-wise. It’s mostly all very exciting. All this work leaves me with less time for writing... BTW, can someone explain to me how Obama’s advocating for the Olympics can be spun as a political setback? C’mon now!

The following shouldn’t be read by minors or people easily insulted by frank, open, sexual talk...

* * *

-=[ Impressions ]=-

My attention was focused on her, and I noticed a new, more controlled energy, one whose borders kept withdrawing from my own.

“Yes,” she said faintly. And that one word expressed everything she was feeling: fear, love, lust, want, desire -- all rolled into one syllable and it incited me.

“I love you,” I said, my hand inching higher. “And you love me.”

My thumb nudged the swell of her breast, rubbed slowly back and forth, a sleepy rhythm. Her head drooped to one side as if her attention had been attracted by a faint sound on the other side of the room, and I kissed the juncture where her neck and shoulder joined. The cool blue taste of peppermint soap and the warmth of her skin mixed on my tongue.

I looked deeply into her eyes as I undid her blouse. She started to say something, but it became only a sound that died in the back of her throat. I spread the halves of her blouse, bent to her breasts, nuzzled them, and kissed their tips, teasing the nipples hard. When I took one in my mouth, worked it gently with my teeth, she shuddered, and put her hands on the back of my head, guiding me.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait.”

But I was through waiting and drew her down on the edge of the bed, my hand moving to the swell of her belly, lower, feeling the softness beneath her clothes, knowing she was open, ready.

“Wait!” This time sharp, so I stopped thinking I had hurt her or had inadvertently trespassed some forbidden zone.

“Let me take this off,” and with that she discarded her panties, pulled off the covers of the bed and with a kiss invited me in with her. There under the covers of the blankets, in the half dark with air as still as held breath, I felt more connected to her, more alive. Her body was aglow with dampness, her eyes were gleams. I kneeled between her legs, bent lower and tasted her. Tasted her, exploring the folds of her cunt, lapping at her, imagining honey smearing my mouth. She began to move and I could tell how much she wanted this, how gloried it made her feel.

Her hips bucked, her legs clamped my head. Breath knocked out of her in hoarse gasps. The muscles of her stomach bunched, and she wrapped her hands in my hair, holding me immobile, as if I were to take my mouth away, or do anything more, she would break into pieces.

In her mind, there was a flurrying as of a million fish responding to a danger sign, scattering, their space filled by a cool current, a refreshing, tingling wash.

* * *

“Yes… ” she said.

The submissive demureness in her voice aroused me and I entered her. Obeying an impulse, I pushed into her mind as well, establishing a blazing mental circuit. Not knowing what I was doing, I pushed at it with all my strength. At the moment of contact I had an impression of two streams of crackling energy knitting together, entwining, tightening, forming a kind of liquid knot that grew increasingly complex, twisting in and of itself, and my focus became more limited to completing that knot, to finding its ultimate expression, until even that intent was swallowed into a blaze of sexuality.

Like a man clutching at a live wire, my thoughts sparking, conscious only of the voltage coursing through me.

My body was electrified, my movements seemingly following the twists and turns of the electric knot we were weaving inside each other’s heads, and from that point on, swearing to myself, I was aware of what was happening only in the lapses of that connection.

I would find myself battering her from behind, or pinning her wrists above her head, or that she had mounted me and was raking across my chest with her nails. On and on into the night…

Brutal, sweaty, animal sex.

* * *

Eddie

The Membrane that Keeps us Shut in Our Own Skins...

¡Hola! Everybody...
I am working today... yup! I’m at the plantation... I hope the rest of you are enjoying the little leisure time our corporatist environment allows us.

* * *

-=[ Lucia ]=-

by Ravi Shankar (1975 -)

My hair, voluminous from sleeping in
six different positions, redolent with your scent,
helps me recall that last night was indeed real,

that it's possible for a bedspread to spawn
a watershed in the membrane that keeps us
shut in our own skins, mute with pleasure,

that I didn't just dream you into being.
You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,
give my hands their one true purpose,

find in my shoulder a groove for your head.
In a clinch, you're clenched and I'm pinched,
we're spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched

in a chestnut by a mob of our own making,
only to be resurrected to stage several revivals
that arise from slightest touch to thwart

deep sleep with necessities I never knew
I knew until meeting you a few days
or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.

(2005)

* * *

Love,

Eddie

The Friday Sex Blog (Deep Throat)

¡Hola! Everybody...
Today’s sex blog features a guest writer, the [in]famous Al Goldstein, who has fallen on hard times. If you can, check out his story (click here), it’s totally fascinating...

* * *

-=[ Review of Deep Throat ]=-

Al Goldstein/ from Screw, March, 1972

[Note: As I wrote last week, Pornography is a complicated phenomenon. There is the reality that pornography in the US cannot be separated from the political and legal battles for free speech and the First Amendment, and at the same time, it also and perhaps has always been a profitable businesss. Say what you want, Goldstein bucked the system and actually won a couple of battles for free speech. He also thumbed his nose at the synthetic air-brushed feminine representations of Penthouse and Playboy, bringing sex over to it’s grittier and (some might say) more realistic side Deep Throat was the first hard-core porn movie to be shown in mainstream movie theaters and to be seen by large numbers of women. It was enthusiastically reviewed by Screw magazine-at the time widely distributed on street corners in many large American cities-which gave Deep Throat its highest rating: three erect penises.]

Deep Throat is everything you could possibly imagine it to be. Tis a tale with a happy ending of a girl who, after discovering that she is a sexual freak with a clitoris in her throat instead of between her legs, sucks her way to happiness and bliss. The technical and artistic work of the film is excellent. The photography is sharp and clear, and the color is beautiful. The soundtrack is perfect, the acting well done and the fucking and sucking supreme. The storyline traces the life of a fair young damsel who can’t have an orgasm from routine balling and blowing. She tries a gangbang scene with enough hard pricks around to get 12 normal women off. When the promiscuous ploy fails, she consults a psychiatrist who makes the discovery that her clit has somehow managed to lodge itself in the deep dark recesses of her throat. He recommends that she try some sword-swallowing and gets her started on his own ample weapon. Such a display of cock consumption has never before been recorded on the porno movie screen. The heroine engulfs stiff dicks right down to the balls. They simply disappear into her mouth and seemingly penetrate into the depths of her bowels. The girl becomes a physio-therapist for the shrink's sexually maladjusted patients and fucks them and sucks them while gratifying her own special orgasmic needs. She falls in love with a patient and he with her... and the movie ends with a fantastic blowjob to spurt-spurt and a smile on her face that lets the audience know just how much she digs eating cock. The film features a couple of ass fucking sequences and three come shots, two in that wonderful mouth. There is also a scene where the heroine gets a glass test tube stuffed up her snatch. It gets filled with Coca-Cola and drunk through a siphon-straw to the tune of the Coke jingle revised to say -- I’d like to teach you all to screw in perfect harmony.”

Playing at the Mature World, 49th St. off 7th Ave. (CI 7-5747). Admission $5.

Ode to Breasts

¡Hola! Everybody...
The greatest compliment a reader ever offered was to testify that if I had been born in earlier times, I would have been at the very least excommunicated and most likely burned at the stake. I suffer from a conceit that likes to think this is true. In the interest of maintaining my unparalleled reputation as an unapologetic and sacrilegious lecher, I offer the following image and poetry... both borrowed in the spirit of morally subversive thought.

* * *

-=[ Breasts ]=-

Charles Simic (1938 -)

I love breasts, hard
Full breasts, guarded
By a button.

They come in the night.
The bestiaries of the ancients
Which include the unicorn
Have kept them out

Pearly, like the east
An hour before sunrise,
Two ovens of the only
Philosopher's stone
Worth bothering about.

They bring on their nipples
Beads of inaudible sighs,
Vowels of delicious clarity
For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.

Elsewhere, solitude
Makes another gloomy entry
In its ledger, misery
Borrows another cup of rice.

They draw nearer: Animal
Presence. In the barn
The milk shivers in the pail.

I like to come up to them
From underneath, like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach a jar of forbidden jam.

Gently, with my lips,
Loosen the button.
Have them slip into my hands
Like two freshly poured beer mugs.

I spit on fools who fail to include
Breasts in their metaphysics,
Star-gazers who have not enumerated them
Among the moons of the earth...

They give each finger
Its true shape, lts joy:
Virgin soap, foam
On which our hands are cleansed.

And how the tongue honors
These two sour buns,
For the tongue is a feather
Dipped in egg-yolk.

I insist that a girl
Stripped to the waist
Is the first and last miracle,

That the the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.

O my sweet yes, my sweet no,
Look, everyone is asleep on the earth.

Now, in the absolute immobility
Of time, drawing the waist
Of the one I love to mine,

I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the hive
Of my drowsy mouth.

Desire

¡Hola! Everybody...
Last night I laughed so hard and long that my face hurts to day...

* * *

-=[ Desire ]=-

Stephen Dobyns (1941-)

A woman in my class wrote that she is sick
of men wanting her body and when she reads
her poem out loud the other women all nod
and even some of the men lower their eyes

and look abashed as if ready to unscrew
their cocks and pound down their own dumb heads
with these innocent sausages of flesh, and none
would think of confessing his hunger

or admit how desire can ring like a constant
low note in the brain or grant how the sight
of a beautiful woman can make him groan
on those first spring days when the parkas

have been packed away and the bodies are staring
at the bodies and the eyes stare at the ground;
and there was a man I knew who even at ninety
swore that his desire had never diminished.

Is this simply the wish to procreate, the world
telling the cock to eat faster, while the cock
yearns for that moment when it forgets its loneliness
and the world flares up in an explosion of light?

Why have men been taught to feel ashamed
of their desire, as if each were a criminal
out on parole, a desperado with a long record
of muggings, rapes, such conduct as excludes

each one from all but the worst company,
and never to be trusted, no never to be trusted?
Why must men pretend to be indifferent as if each
were a happy eunuch engaged in spiritual thoughts?

But it's the glances that I like, the quick ones,
the unguarded ones, like a hand snatching a pie
from a window ledge and the feet pounding away;
eyes fastening on a leg, a breast, the curve

of a buttock, as the pulse takes an extra thunk
and the cock, that toothless worm, stirs in its sleep,
and fat possibility swaggers into the world
like a big spender entering a bar. And sometimes

the woman glances back. Oh, to disappear
in a tangle of fabric and flesh as the cock
sniffs out its little cave, and the body hungers
for closure, for the completion of the circle,

as if each of us were born only half a body
and we spend our lives searching for the rest.
What good does it do to deny desire, to chain
the cock to the leg and scrawl a black X

across its bald head, to hold out a hand
for each passing woman to slap? Better
to be bad and unrepentant, better to celebrate
each difference, not to be cruel or gluttonous

or overbearing, but full of hope and self-forgiving.
The flesh yearns to converse with other flesh.
Each pore loves to linger over its particular story.
Let these sounds not be full of recrimination

and apology. What is desire but the wish for some
relief from the self, the prisoner let out
into a small square of sunlight with a single
red flower and a bird crossing the sky, to lean back

against the bricks with the legs outstretched,
to feel the sun warming the brow, before returning
to one's mortal cage, steel doors slamming
in the cell block, steel bolts sliding shut?

[1991]

* * *

Love,

Eddie

The Sex Blog (Impressions)

¡Hola! Everybody...

I woke up late and feeling tired. Sometimes running a workshop can be psychologically draining.

BTW, everybody see where the Republicans are gonna embrace rap? LOL!

Call them the Notorious G.O.P.! Be on the look out fore their new video (exclusive to BET) featuring the famous NY Post cartoon. It will feature video ho’s (the Hip Hop Republicans) and Grand Massa Steele with DJ Moose!

And as an exclusive to this blog only, my friend Cody, gave me a peek to some of the lyrics:

I'm Grand Masta Steele and I can not lie
Republicans are hip and the GOP's fly!!
Axis to the evil and a evil to the axis
You know them crazy Dems are gonna raise yo taxes!!

Palin in da house! 2012 ya'll !!

I wasn’t able to write anything new for today’s sex blog, so I’ve reposted something from the past. Have a great weekend everybody!

* * *

-=[ Impressions ]=-

My attention was focused on her, and I noticed a new, more controlled energy, one whose borders kept withdrawing from my own.

“Yes,” she said faintly. And in that one word was contained everything she was feeling: fear, love, lust, want, desire -- all rolled into one syllable and it incited me.

“I love you,” I said, my hand inching higher. “And you love me.”

My thumb nudged the swell of her breast, rubbed slowly back and forth, a sleepy rhythm. Her head drooped to one side as if her attention had been attracted by a faint sound on the other side of the room, and I kissed the angle where her neck and shoulder joined. The cool blue taste of peppermint soap and the warmth of her skin mixed on my tongue.

I looked deeply into her eyes as I undid her blouse. She started to say something, but it became only a sound that died in the back of her throat. I spread the halves of her blouse, bent to her breasts, nuzzled them, and kissed their tips, teasing the nipples hard. When I took one in my mouth, worked it gently with my teeth, she shuddered, and put her hands on the back of my head, guiding me.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait.”

But I was through waiting and drew her down on the edge of the bed, my hand moving to the swell of her belly, lower, feeling the softness beneath her clothes, knowing she was open, ready.

“Wait!” This time more insistently, so I stopped thinking I had hurt her.

“Let me take this off,” and with that she discarded her panties, pulled off the covers of the bed and with a kiss invited me in with her. There under the covers of the blankets, in the half dark with air as still as held breath, I felt more connected to her, more alive. Her body was aglow with dampness, her eyes were gleams. I knelt between her legs, bent lower and tasted her. Tasted her, exploring the folds of her cunt, lapping at her, imagining honey smearing my mouth. She began to move and I could tell how much she wanted this, how gloried it made her feel.

Her hips bucked, her legs clamped my head. Breath knocked out of her in hoarse gasps. The muscles of her stomach bunched, and she wrapped her hands in my hair, holding me immobile, as if I were to take my mouth away, or do anything more, she would break into pieces.

In her mind there was a flurrying as of a million fish responding to a danger sign, scattering, their space filled by a cool current, a refreshing, tingling wash.

* * *

Love,

Eddie

The Tiny Cabaret...

¡Hola! Everybody...
I was supposed to go to Boston, but really, she’s insane. She’s beautiful, seductive, a willing lover, but she’s a fuckin’ psycho. and I can’t really do psychos right now. So, I called all my single friends, and we’re all going out en masse. Fuck the committed sheeple! Singlehood rules!

The point being is that you shouldn’t buy into the bullshit. The most important relationship in your life, is the one you cultivate with your [higher] self.

::smooches::

I’ve added a surprise for the ladies: please note my boi Stiffy and myself. As Stiffy would say: “We Hawt!” Girls?!! Bring your own condoms! LOL

* * *

-=[ Nows (no. 28) ]=-

I will be your main man
if you will be my leading lady.

The curtain will part,
to reveal a shower,
rehearsal for the opening
for our tiny cabaret.

I will be a Pirate,
a Thief,
a Rogue,
wearing only my sword,
and a blue bandana
around my neck.

You'll enter exploding.
Sexing your way
into my makeshift tent
wearing only your black beret
and those fuckin' bad-assed boots.

Never a game.
This is not a fantasy.
This is true.

We will act out
who we truly are.
And reach back in time
to what we must
have once been.
-- Edward-Yemíl Rosario

Love,
Eddie

Gnawing at the Barrier...

¡Hola! Everybody... Brrrr... I need a woman to come home and keep me warm!

* * *

-=[ December 11^th ]=-

By Anne Sexton

Then I think of you in bed,
your tongue half chocolate, half ocean,
of the houses that you swing into,
of the steel wool hair on your head,
of your persistent hands and then
how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two.

How you come and take my blood cup
and link me together and take my brine.
We are bare. We are stripped to the bone
and we swim in tandem and go up and up
the river, the identical river called Mine
and we enter together. No one's alone.

(1967)

The Friday Sex Blog [Erotica vs. Pornography]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I had a pleasant day yesterday spent with the woman I identified as “the Lush.” No, she’s not a lush, and she was quite embarrassed, but I assured she had nothing to be embarrassed about. Getting drunk on New Year’s Eve? Yeah! Wow! She’s a strange one!

Well, what she was really embarrassed about was her sexual advances toward me, and I teased her mercilessly about it. LOL! We have mutual friends and apparently, the New Year’s party host had assured her I would be there, so she’s had designs on me. Women! Humph!

Yes, she remembered everything and was cognizant of the fact that we could’ve had sex if I had pushed the envelope, but she was thankful I didn’t because, like me, she wants to be alert when it happens...

* * *

-=[ Erotica vs. Pornography ]=-

“The difference between pornography and erotica is packaging.”

-- John Preston

Since this is the first sex blog of the year, I should start off with the raison de etre for its existence. I realize there are new readers who may not know me and I know there are countless lurkers I have no clue about -- there are people who read me that I don’t know. Therefore, a little explanation regarding my reasons for writing about sex should be in order. However, I don’t such a blog ready this day, so you’ll just have to guess my intentions and motivation and pick up clues here and there. Suffice it to say that I believe Americans are some of the most sexually naïve and repressed people on the planet. This blog (posted only on Fridays) is an attempt, of sorts, to set the record straight.

Today’s post might get me deleted from The ‘Ply/ y360...

Language is probably the only human instinct and as such is one of our most powerful tools. How we use language to describe sex is both telling a self-fulfilling prophesy. Take today’s photo by the well-known photographer Helmut Newton. His work is often featured in mainstream publications (he was, after all, a great fashion photographer), and some would call this “erotica” as opposed to “pornography.”

Bullshit!

The whole question regarding the difference between erotica and pornography is a bullshit debate. For me, it’s a non-question. In actuality, it’s an anxious plea for approval rather than real dive into dialog.

This debate is a consequence of the repression of sexual speech. If we thought of sex as a matter of taste and individuality, as we do with the foods we eat, we wouldn’t ask stupid questions like, “Is it erotic food or is it pornographic food?” “Is it the kind of food for men or the kind of food for women?” “Should it be eaten in public or hidden away?” No, we would most likely say, “Eat! This is what keeps you alive.” (And please! for the muthafuckas who can’t read, this isn’t a discussion on the legal definition of obscenity!)

This is a tiring and tired argument. My intention is to squelch any further discussion on this sorry excuse of an argument because attempting to answer it with any authority is undo any progress we have made regarding sexual expression. The argument itself is reactionary, and it needs to be stripped naked -- its pious garments ripped off.

Now, I want to you to look at the following. I consider it art -- and I could care less whether it’s called erotica or pornography. Many of you will call it child pornography and posting it will probably get me kicked off The ‘Ply/ y360:

This is tangential to my discussion, but I think it’s necessary. Sturges has been attacked as a child pornographer, his studio raided and his equipment confiscated (the case was later thrown out of court). His work is core to my post today, however, because it hits at the very essence of how we arbitrarily exclude what’s sexual and what isn’t sexual, what’s accepted and what’s not. And believe me, this whole question is really about the acceptance (or rejection) of sexuality.

Some critics have condemned his work as thinly disguised underage pornography hiding behind the veil of fine art. Sturges and his defenders point to the “innocence” of his pictures of nude adolescents. More logically, Sturges criticizes the random division of people and their bodies into sexualized adults (over 18) and supposedly asexual children (under 18). The question really is: Should tasteful, non-exploitative erotic photography of adolescents be allowed? Is such a thing even possible? The photography of Jock Sturges presents a powerful case for the affirmative.

I would add that subjecting children to fear and teaching to be ashamed of their sexuality (erotophobia) is the cruelest abuse.

Here’s what people really want to hear when they attempt to make the distinction between erotica and porn: “Yes, based on conventions, society has decided that my fantasies and my sexual identity are valid, beautiful, and a turn-on to boot... but that person over there, sitting in the corner, their sexual expression is totally evil.”

Then, depending on whether you prefer the insinuation of erotica or the label of porn, you pin the preferred label on yourself and the creepy, icky label on the other person. Mission accomplished!

What’s truly creepy is creating such a dishonest discrimination to begin with. The truth of the matter is that your sexual speech is no better, more attractive, healthier, or morally superior than anyone else’s. The most intelligent thing to say to yourself when you encounter a style of sexuality unknown to you -- which can often be offensive, frightening, or unimaginable -- is to remind yourself of a variation on a Golden Rule: “Let them who are without desire cast the first stone.”

There are readers who are deeply appalled by the idea of sexual sadomasochism, which is often identified as pornographic. This form of sexual aversion is often accompanied by the rationalization that the only explanation for it would be an abusive and unloving childhood. The simple idea that it could be a matter of erotic taste seems unbelievable and even callous to them.

I would like to remind people that this kind of judgment -- the pathologizing of sexual behavior -- has been used with other forms of sexual preferences over the years, most notoriously with homosexuality. The kindest thing that was ever said about being queer, before the 1970s, was that homosexuals had endured tragic abuse and neglect in their families and that it twisted them for life. It was impossible to believe that such sexual desire could be either healthy or genuine.

But the real danger about such debates is that they are often settled by ignorance on what alarmists think people on the other side are doing. People who cringe at the idea of pornography have an inflamed concept and dangerous idea of it than the actual article can ever live up to. Generally, pornography is associated with the masculine and is supposed to be cruder -- something you buy at some sleazy place. Erotica is so respectful, you’ll find it in mainstream magazines (indeed, some of the best pornographic artists are fashion photographers). Think of Sister Wendy, who hosted a popular show where she critiqued the Great Masters on public television, lavishing praise on Renaissance portraits that display pubic hair.

I guess the point of all this is that the only thing being degraded is the notion that erotic expression deserves a place in public life -- a place entirely apart from banal commercialism and the dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. The prudes seem to have no problem with using sex to sell cars, or the violent explosion of imagery on Saturday morning cartoons, but squawk to high heaven if they see a Jock Sturges or David Hamilton.

We’re fearful of our own faces in erotic bliss, in the throes of desire. Perhaps it’s time we finally grew up and embrace our sexuality while throwing away the shame that binds us.

In Lust,

Eddie