Your Mouth Just Above the Water; My Hand Upon Your Back

...He reacted from it toward the sublime and the ideal.  It was not enough that something should be touching, charming, graceful; it had to have about it a certain radiance, the power to inspire veneration.  One had to feel forced to one's knees before it, or lifted by it to the skies...                                                                                              ---   Some Prefer Nettles by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki



Last Sunday was a night the type in which one is reminded of the heights that are reachable by virtue of one's body. The altered states that can be achieved simply by the rush of strangers, of heat, of pain, of depths, of floating.

There is something quite healing about vulnerability and risk with a stranger.

With a friend.

With an audience.

And in the end, being gently returned :

Home safe and with the excitement of a child.


(pause)


Here is to all of those who know the true meaning of power

Who understand - in its true sense-

how little it has to do

with trickery or misgivings.


[Watch out for games, the actor's part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed]


I will run my fingers down the outside of your throat

taut; controlled

so that you may swallow your pride

and enjoy the sweet asphyxiation

of an honest lie.


-k


(italicized in the brackets, above: lines from a favorite A. Sexton poem)
(image: via Redsnapper921 Tumblr)