Remittance Girl's Blog, page 12

reSade / T-Shit (4)

[image error]I’m going to fuck you, naked but for this artfully ruined t-shirt made in Bangladesh, holed and torn by an exhausted, bony, dead-eyed worker in a Chinese megafactory who is following the pattern of destruction to the millimeter; each hole specified by a smug cunt in a leather chair and designerly geek-glasses in a minimalist studio in Canary Wharf.

As I fuck you, I’m going to tell you its price tag, and how deliciously absurd it is that I paid the equivalent of that worker’s yearly salary for it, that the vast majority of peons out there are making jokes about how they could make one themselves at half the price and are just too poor to get the joke.

As I fuck you, I’ll tell you it hardly matters that you’re there -  just any wet, stupid cunt. What I’m enthusiastically thrusting my pharma-assisted dick into is the deliberately callous conflation of marketing ideas that went into producing this sublime piece of consumer porn. I can feel the grinding boredom, the flagrant waste of human intellect woven into every thread. I can smell the absent tears of the nameless migrant worker whose job it was to bleach away the grubby fingermarks and sew in the designer’s label by hand.  The squelch of your lubricated meat is just a soundtrack to the purity of its abomination.

Only after I come and you giggle will I stop and appreciate the fine, fine work they’ve done on your unnecessarily refurbished tits and the breathtaking obscenity of the fact that you’d let me do this to you.

You should feel privileged, baby. I usually have someone to do my fucking for me.

Love,

The REAL Christian Grey

 

 

 

Enough

[image error]He wants it to be easy. He wants it to be quick and quiet and to feel nothing but the urges of his body following their predestined path. He wants simplicity – a bit of friendly fun. Perhaps a reenactment of some two-minute video he used for last week’s wank.

Why can’t it be that way? Why do women always need to complicate everything? Why can’t she be thrilled at the dexterity of his fingers or the self-less task to which he’s willingly applied his tongue? She’s going to get her orgasm. What more does she need? He’s measured his cock. It’s almost seven inches long.

He’s told her she’s hot. Isn’t that enough? But no, she wants more – they always want more.  No matter how he’s laboured over her. No matter that he’s sweat-drenched and has held off coming three times already and his balls are taut and stinging with tension, her face is a passive plane of disappointment, of boredom, of a longing to be somewhere else, with someone else.

He’s bought her things. Nice underwear and jewelry and that ridiculously expensive little vibrator he thought they could have fun with together. But she never takes it out around him.

She waits until she thinks he’s asleep – like now.

He cracks his eyes open in the gloom of the room. At first there’s only her silhouette on the bed, and the soft buzz of the device. But, as his eyes adjust, he can see hers are screwed shut, as if the tighter she closes them the closer she’ll get to whatever it is behind her lids that means so much to her.

Held, tightly.

[image error]

Rosamund Queen of the Lombards, woodcut by F. Sandys (1866)

“You’re like a widow.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“I’m not. That’s exactly what you’re like. Not a Catholic one, though – the Catholic ones are insatiable.”

“Why do I think you’re speaking from great experience?” I joked. “Look, I’ve never given you a reason to believe I’d succumb to your charms.”

“No, true enough.  I keep hoping you’ll change your mind, or snap out of it. You live in a fantasy. You’re a middle-aged woman waiting for your knight in shining armour to come home from the wars.” He leaned his elbows on the table and his chin on his fisted hands. “Stop waiting. He’s not going to come. And I’m here.”

“I’m not waiting.”

“You can work out all that distraught grief on me.”

“I’m not distraught.”

“Whatever it is you’re feeling, then. I think you should repurpose it.” The sun left spider-legged shadows under his eyelashes.  He gave me his best boyish smile. “I really do. You’re not getting any younger. You’re going to end up alone and bitter.”

There it was – just the thinnest edge of cruelty – the sharp-finned worm that turns in men who get rebuffed.  I shook my head and smiled back at him. “Why would you even want that? To be someone’s second choice?”

“Second, ay? Second’s not bad. I thought I’d be your fourth or fifth, at least.”

“Don’t you get enough pussy in Dublin?” But I already knew the answer. He was too charming, too good with words. Beautiful in that wrecked, weathered way that draws women. Not too handsome – that put a lot of women past their twenties off – but exactly the sort of forty-something women fell for. Fit and a little worn, sexy but comfortable. I knew he got as much pussy as he wanted.

“A man needs a challenge.”

“So it’s a conquest you’re after? You’ve set your sights on storming my bastion?”

“It’s not a bad bastion. Plus, I’ve a little time on my hands.”

“I’m a project?”

He shrugged. “Everyone needs one.”

I laughed.  “It occurs to me that if I’d jumped into bed with you the first time we met, you’d have lost interest years ago.”

“But you didn’t, and I haven’t.”

“I’m not going to fuck you. I’m never going to fuck you. You get that, right?”

He shrugged again. “Well, we could get creative. Why don’t we just pretend we’ve done all that already and now we’re an old married couple who’re bored to death with each other and have had to resort to unspeakable perversions to keep the flame alive?”

“Oh, you’re good. You’re really good.”

He beamed. “I’ve got a very plush hotel room. Want to see it?”

“You don’t really think I’d give it up for a swish hotel room, do you?”

“Well, I knew a box full of diamonds and pearls wouldn’t do the trick, but I did think I might tempt you with good architecture and impressive interior design.”

“Clever. Cunning, even.”

“That’s me.”

I leveled my eyes at him. “Listen. Don’t come back. You’re a nice man. I’m not sure what you want,  but I’m sure I can’t give it to you.”

He let the impatience show in his eyes. “It’s what you want that I can’t fathom. You’re like some pitiful virgin saving herself for an imaginary lover who doesn’t exist.” There was anger there, building up steam. “Whoever he is, he’s not worth it, darlin’. He’s not real. You’ve built him out of projected desires. It’s an awful trap you’ve constructed for yourself. But I’m real and here. In the flesh.”

“Has it occurred to you that that’s exactly what I don’t want?”

He exhaled and sat back, his eyes drifted towards the stream of pedestrians on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. “You, woman, need a psychiatrist.”

“And how convenient that you happen to be one.”

“I’d never treat someone I was involved with. I’m just saying – I can see what’s going on with you. It’s not healthy.”

And corruption, right there. Ironically, it was the only thing that gave me a flutter of desire. I smiled blandly. “Thank you for your diagnosis.  Good to know that your idea of healthy entails me sleeping with you.”

For just a moment, he looked stricken, but he covered it over fast. “That’s not what I meant.”

But now he was wounded meat, and I couldn’t help myself. I leaned in, smelling his unease. “Now that you’ve dissected my psyche, it’s my turn. Ever since we met at that conference, you’ve been coming to see me, knowing I’d turn you down.  Once I’d get. Twice, even, is understandable, but four times, five times? Heal thyself, physician. You’ve constructed just as many fantasies – of you rescuing some Rapunzel from her tower of dreams. Of bringing her down to earth and leading her into the real world of the flesh. And once you’d done that, it would be over for you. The object of desire achieved, you’d dust off your palms and move on to the next one.”

He didn’t shift in his seat, but I could see from his muscles that he desperately wanted to. He had control in spades.  “Maybe. Maybe. You’re smart for a lunatic.”

I settled back in my chair. “So, let us agree that we’re each suffering from different but complementary delusions and be polite about it. You come here to drink at the well of the impossible and so do I. Okay?”

The muscles by his jawline twitched. He was chewing at the inside of his cheek. “Okay,” he said, thoughtfully. “Okay. But I’d like to know one thing.”

“Shoot.”

“If I come here with fantasies of rescuing Rapunzel, why do you come? Why do you keep agreeing to meet me?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, catching the waitresses eye and motioning for the bill. “I come to find out if I can resist you. I come to see if I can still be faithful or if I’m simply lacking the opportunity to betray him.”

The bill arrived. I slid a twenty onto the saucer, then shouldered my purse.

“Just… wait. What is it that you think you’re being faithful to?”

I stood up, looking down at him with as much warmth as I could muster. “You disappoint me. ‘What’ is the wrong question.”

On Transgression: A discussion with Harper Eliot and Molly Moore

[image error]I recently participated in a delightful and meaty conversation on the topic of transgression – with a focus on erotic transgression and fictional depictions of it -  with Harper Eliot and Molly Moore, who produce the bi-monthly IGRD (It Girl Rag Doll) podcast.

You can listen to the podcast on the web here or listen to it through iTunes here

Time stops at 4:35 (3)

[image error]On a morning like this, a bruised dawn, fat with rain and murmurs of far off thunder, the air is dense with spent showers. In a garden at the far end of a forty-year lane with sand instead of grass and soft white seastones marking the lines between walking paths and growing places. Snails, their shiny brown shells almost too much for them to bear, slide across rocks, inching up stems and over leaves, pushing away the plump droplets of night. The breeze is sharp with the scent of salt, of soaked charcoal, and of dust smothered by the downpour. Its scent trapped in my dark hair.

The clouds whipped to land, streaked blue, black and grey, like your hair, curled like your fingers in sleep, arching towards the blistered palm of the shore.

The mind gathers disparate things and there is no memory; only then, now, in the purple dawn before you were born, before sleep, before day. I’ve brought you here, to this place, before sunrise, to watch the snails move slower than the hands of a clock, to nestle beneath the broad, thick leaves, before the sun bleaches the day white with its awful stare.

I love you.

Light Eater (2)

[image error]He stands on the old clawfoot bathtub’s rim, towering above her. His camera lens aimed into the soup of her.  Strands of her hair undulate in the water; her face and breasts breach the surface. She’s a mermaid with almond eyes that sparkle through the vapour.  Droplets flare on her skin. Her obscene lips parted as if in invitation. But she won’t take off the damn bathing suit. The gulf between the acquiescence of her gaze and her obstinate modesty is unreasonable and unfathomable. He makes myths there because he must, because the camera will not cooperate without them.

Her eyes are stained the colour of olive groves. He reads discomfort in them. Flotsam caught in the grating, gyring, slowing the flow. Until he sees that it is the detritus of her hesitation is the only picture worth taking.

It is her hesitation that saves him from the fall, that keep him on the leash. Had she been a different woman he would have drowned in the shame of what he could not refuse.

This is how he learned to consume with his eyes: to devour without touching, to own and to master without permission. Taker of likenesses. Eater of the specular. Drinker of light and shadow, of colour and texture.

He has captured her soul in a box and her skin on paper. What more could a man want?

A Good Woman (1)

[image error]He is dangerous. I can smell the push-me-pull-you chaos rising off him like curls of steam. He invites you in with his sharp, white teeth and all the time you’re falling, you know it’s going to hurt when you hit the bottom and wake up to find you’re lying face first in the polluted soil of some abandoned misery factory.

Men like him are bred like this: wide-striding, open-handed, casual heart slaughterers. They all have stories – of course they do. But telling their stories only makes it worse. Only makes you love them more. Each has his own sweet, compelling narrative that serves the dual purpose of luring you in and being the excuse for the blood-spatter he leaves behind.

Walk away, girl. Walk away. That’s what I tell myself and what I’m telling you now. But it is as if we’re hard-wired lambs to the feast. We just can’t help ourselves.

What is the rent, the tear, the unstitched flaw in us that makes men like him so irresistible? Look inside. Not out. They’re only the outward manifestations of some interior wound we’ve failed to attend to properly.

He is speaking. He’s using that breathy, low confidential voice, wrapping it around you like a warm cloak of exclusive inclusiveness. He’s saying something pithy and indicative of an above-average IQ. Sipping his cocktail and tilting his head in that pseudo-vulnerable way. It says: See? I’m not so hard, See? I could be whole if only you would open the petals of your feelings. See? All I need is the love of a good woman.  Like the dangling lure on one of those hideous, bottom-feeding fish, their their nightlight and a mouthful of needle teeth.

No, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter what he is; you’re not that kind of a good woman. Walk away.

Jude – 2

[image error]It’s not that hard to spot a six-foot tall black woman in the centre of Saigon. I kept an eye out for her everywhere I went. I even went so far as to ask one of the ladies who sold fruit at the Ben Thanh market.  I had convinced myself that I had fallen in love at first sight. Not that I believed in that sort of thing, but the thought of her was so compelling, as the days went by, she became larger and larger in my mind. More and more beautiful. And, awkwardly, more and more unobtainable.

So there was some irony in the fact that I did not manage to find her. She found me. She walked up to my table at a Foreign Ladies of Vietnam luncheon, sat down in the chair next to mine, and draped her long, lithe arm around the back of my seat.

“These women are out of their minds,” she said. “Are you?”

“Most definitely.”

“Do you have an obsessional fear of losing  your husband to his Vietnamese secretary?”

“I don’t have a husband.”

“Thank god,” she said and waved the waiter over. “I’ll have a very, very big martini. And this lady will have…” She eyed me expectantly.

“I’ll have a vodka. No ice, no lemon, no nothing.”

She had a smile like a solar flare. Not just her plump lacquered lips, or her wicked laugh lines, but her dark, olive eyes. It all lit up like something radioactive. “I like you.”

I smiled back. “I like you, too.”

She said nothing until the drinks arrived. I took a sip of my vodka and, in a moment of madness that included overlooking the fact that it was only lunchtime, knocked the rest of it back.

“So what is a girl like you doing at this disgusting colonial gathering?”

I nodded my head over at the rolling bookcases in the corner. “I just come for the English language books.”

Again, she smiled her wide, wide smile. “That’s very worthy.”

“Why do you come?”

She inhaled and let the breath out slowly, languidly. “I just need to get the hell out of the house every now and then. Too many staff, too in my face. I’m not used to that kind of crap. I grew up learning to make do for myself.”

“There are far better places to spend an afternoon.” On the cool, white sheets of my bed, I thought.

“Yeah,” she said, “but then I wouldn’t have met you, now, would I?”

I blushed. And it bothered me that I blushed. I wanted to slide under the table and stick my head between her legs while she went on sipping her martini. But I thought, maybe, that would be slightly excessive.

“I’m having a little dinner party on Saturday. Wanna come?”

“Oh, I’d love to.”

“Then do. And you can meet my wife.”

My heart sank. My mouth dried up. The vodka had suddenly settled on my stomach like battery acid. I should have known she wouldn’t be single. I should have known someone like Jude would always have someone dancing attendance. I was sure that, from the time she’d reached puberty, someone was prostrating themselves at her feet, begging to be trampled on. And, for some reason, the fact that it was a wife and not a husband, made her seem all the more unobtainable.

But I would go to the party anyway.

Because sometimes I bake

[image error]This is a recipe for Dark Chocolate Chocolate Walnut & Orange muffins. I promised it to a few people so it’s here for easy download.

Dark Chocolate Chocolate Walnut & Orange Muffins

(right click and save to download)

Trailing Wisps of Glory: Goodbye Ms. Angelou

[image error]“I believe each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.”

I was very sad to read of Maya Angelou’s passing. I’m not a poet or African American or any kind of woman in the way I think she was, and yet she spoke to me. There are so few people in the world who will tell you the honest truth, and she was one of them. She wrote the truth as she saw it, with all the integrity she had, and yet she was an optimist. It’s there in her maybes, and her pledges to rise, and her defiance of her body’s haste. There are few people in the world I have admired unreservedly, but she is one of them. There are few role models like her – so raw, so compassionate, so dignified.

Not too long ago, I wrote a post on the ERWA blog about writing, and I used her poem ‘Men’ to encourage prose writers to aspire to the kind of precision that poets find in language. Not crafty, or complicated, or esoteric. Just right. Just deep and true. Her similes and metaphors were forged so naturally. In the elegance of great simplicity.

One day they hold you in the

Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you

Were the last raw egg in the world.

(Men)

I loved the vastness of her eye. Prehistoric, cosmic, reaching inward and outward. Even in the details she chose to settle on, there’s a panorama of rich meaning that stretches over the horizon. I remember the poem she read at Clinton’s inauguration.

Each of you a bordered country,

Delicate and strangely made proud,

Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit

Have left collars of waste upon

My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,

If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs

The Creator gave to me when I and the

Tree and the stone were one.

(from On The Pulse of the Morning)

And Ms. Angelou knew about love. Wrote about love in ways I never will. Yet I can’t even find it in my heart to feel envy – only admiration.

Beloved,

In what other lives or lands

Have I known your lips

Your Hands

Your Laughter brave

Irreverent.

Those sweet excesses that

I do adore.

What surety is there

That we will meet again,

On other worlds some

Future time undated.

I defy my body’s haste.

Without the promise

Of one more sweet encounter

I will not deign to die.

(Refusal)

Of all her poems, my favourite is one of her darker ones. For me, this poem speaks to the sin of disengagement, the waste of cynicism. To me, it’s a commandment to own internally what you experience in the world, but to refuse to allow it to diminish you. It is possible to carry the truth of the world inside you, and yet reject solipsism. It’s important to me, because it’s the hardest challenge she ever laid down and I will spend my life trying to live up to it.

We die,

Welcoming Bluebeards to our darkening closets,

Stranglers to our outstretched necks,

Stranglers, who neither care nor

care to know that

DEATH IS INTERNAL.

We pray,

Savoring sweet the teethed lies,

Bellying the grounds before alien gods,

Gods, who neither know nor

wish to know that

HELL IS INTERNAL.

We love,

Rubbing the nakednesses with gloved hands,

Inverting our mouths in tongued kisses,

Kisses that neither touch nor

care to touch if

LOVE IS INTERNAL.

(The Detached)

If you’ve never read any of her poetry, I hope you will take the opportunity to read some. It’s all over the web. Read it aloud, linger in its rhythm and the roundness of the words. She made language both a sword and a caress.

A great lady, a great poet, a great human being has passed. I’m not religious but I know she was, and she trailed wisps of glory with every line she wrote.