BECOMING SAGE
ONE
This may be the best poem I have ever written:
The next time innocence or ignorance asks me
as evidence of the shallow imaginations of the majority
“So how exactly do women like you um..a..ya know.. do it?”
I will answer thusly:
We stand
naked before each other
lift one leg high into the air
point our breasts towards Mecca
and our cunts
to the moon
and shout three times
I fuck thee
I fuck thee
I fuck thee
We women fuck
with our hands
and our mouths
and our tongues
and our teeth
with the soft tips of our reaching fingers
and the gentle pull of our nails across our lover’s skin
with the pressure or our knowing palms
and the warmth of our needing grasp
with our necks and our throats
with our eyes and our ears
with our arms and our legs
wrapping around our universe of one other
with our bones and muscles and tendons
with our backs arched and our heads back and our breasts inflamed
with our every movement
and with the unequivocal need to touch and be touched
we fuck
Sometimes I will fuck a woman
with my clit on her clit
kissing vaginas
breast to breast
waving our bodies
like damp sheets
caught in a violent wind
entangled on a line
trying to move through each other
into each other
becoming each other
Sometimes I will fuck the back of her neck with my teeth
fuck her mouth with my mouth
suck at her breasts with my hands
fuck her nipples with
the tip of my tongue
along her side
and behind her knees
on her ass
and as deep inside of her
as I can reach
We will fuck
with the depth
of our breath
pulling in and pushing out
subtle and strong
we inhale and exhale each other
in and out in and out in and out
We women fuck
with our hearts
and our souls
and our minds
we fuck
with our words
and our thoughts
and our understanding
with our pain
and our anger
and our fear
with our joy and our exhilaration
with our tenderness and our fists
we fuck
with the music and dance and poetry
inherent in our bodies
we fuck
with dominance and submission
with power and knowledge
with horror and beauty
we fuck and suck and arch and bend and pant and scream and cum
Sometimes we fuck with only our imaginations
sometimes we use objects of our choosing
sometimes we take turns pleasuring
sometimes we crash into each other like drunken waves
and sometimes the sweetness overwhelms us
and the world breaks open
swallowing us whole
We woman fuck
with trembling hands
and quivering lips
uncontrollable desires
unspeakable desperations
hidden needs
forbidden fascinations
necessary penance
and explosive passions
we take each other in
and sometimes
when something
usually called magic
lights a candle
between us
we take a little piece
of the mystery
of the universe
the stuff that makes rainbows
from rain
we wrap ourselves in
and together with our hearts and hands and lips and lust and mouths and tongues and teeth and fingertips
we redefine worship
creating our own Eden
Goddesses of our own making
we fuck and we fall
and it all has something
everything
to do with
Love
loving each other
loving ourselves
loving our existence
When we women fuck
we lose ourselves in the pleasure of pleasing
we love ourselves by loving the other
we know ecstasy by giving it away
we women live
and die
for the nights that pass
without our knowledge
oblivious to the outside
that tries so hard to deny
our necessary existence
and discredit our contribution
to its making
forgetting all
we bury ourselves deep inside each other
and we fuck and suck and laugh and scream and pant and coo and cum and touch and torture and lick and lay back and cum and stroke and strain and arch and ache and cum and cum and cum...
Now
you tell me
how,
exactly,
do you do it?
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Take away my eyes, my ears, my legs but should I lose my hands my life would be over. For I am a writer, it is what I do, who I am, what I live for. It is how I locate myself, define myself, understand myself. It is the one thing I have always know, it is my one true gift or at least I thought it was.
I don’t really know who I am any more I only know who I was: a writer, a performer, a model, an accomplished lover, a good friend, a survivor. But things are changing, I am changing, I am becoming something new and unknown. My eyes see differently, my fingers feel differently, my ears hear differently, my heart loves in a whole new way. My spirit is expanding and taking me over. I am in process; I am becoming. What exactly, I do not know, all I do know is I am becoming.
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9/11 - Who could forget the infamy of it?
There was a small TV sitting on the counter of the auto repair shop when I went in to drop off my car. I caught a glimpse of a plane flying into one of the twin towers. "What movie is this?” I innocently asked the guy behind the counter.
“This is no movie.” he replied. I was confused. Then the man standing in front of the counter began to recite the events of the morning. He never took his gaze from the screen as he spoke, he never looked at me or if he did I did not know for I was now transfixed on the TV screen as well. He recited these things as if it were his job to do so, as if he were made for it, as if his whole life had come to this moment of recitation, and though it was somehow grand that he should know so much and should recite it so authoritatively, he was not at all happy to do so. It was, in fact, horrible: the times, the places, the flights, their numbers, the number of passengers on board, the buildings hit, another plane off track heading towards somewhere, the number of people assumed to be at work in the tower as we watched... Then the first tower fell. For a moment I thought I was being taken, it was all too incredible. The man behind the counter and the one in front were in cahoots, and I was on some modern version of Candid Camera. But the joke had gone on too long. I realized , it was all too horrible to be anything but real.
Many lives would change that day and I wondered briefly if mine would be one of them. But I knew really it would not. I knew I was isolated, separate and ultimately protected from the wave of change that would inevitably follow. Sure the economy would slow, my sales might dip a little, but that would be the extent of my tragedy; of my change.
But my life did change that day. Not as a result of the event unfolding globally but as the result of a simple phone call. A phone call which I had in truth been waiting for, which I had anticipated and worried over and was in fact selfishly grateful to the horrible events of the day for providing me with a distraction.
“Hi Jamie, it’s Megan Harding,” said the voice on the other end of the phone line.
“My God,” I distractedly replied, “Can you believe what is happening!”
“I know it’s so tragic, but on a happier note we would like to offer you the role of Annie. Will you accept?”
“Absolutely.”
And so with all the fires out of control and planes off course and buildings and lives crumpling and political scandals unraveling and blood and ash and horror that had left me untouched, this brief conversation would drastically change the course of my life in ways I could not yet imagine.
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The description is of a priest touching a young boy
as i read
i am turned on
the writer
an older man
who was once the young boy
tells the account
not with sadness or anger or regret
but with a factuality
as if solving a mathematical equation
as if it was average
inevitable
he tells the story
as if all is right with the world
and I wonder how long it took him to forgive himself
but an old priest is touching a young boy
and i am turned on
am i sick? deprived? uncaring?
I should say he should know better
did I cross a silent boundary somewhere in the night
did I trip out of the box
fall over the line
plummet into the abyss
where all acts merely are
and judgment is not?
or
have I simply forgiven the world for its sins
have I finally forgiven myself
still I know
he should have known better
other assessments are not so simple
pleasure is its own cosmos
separate and unexplained
beyond all laws
except nature and instinct
it is the trigger on the gun
the instant of release
an ejaculation of all that separates us from beasts
it is beautiful in its baseness
rooted in the body
reason has no power here
it is the last bastion of those who would enslave us and dare us to care about
more important things
I remember nights
men pressed against me
so many men
so many nights
names i did not know
i did not ask
i did not care
if there was nothing from the knees down or the waist up
the act would be more enjoyable
but this was not joy
this was pleasure
and they were enough
how old was I
22 23 maybe
and he 15
should I have known better?
he was a back woods boy on a dirt bike
scrawny lean eager
sexy perhaps
in an unclean sort of way
he did not turn me on
his desire did
unclothed
he smelled of old kitchen rags left too long by the sink
he tasted sour as I took him in
he arched in an instant
he came like a wound splitting open
I
would teach him to savor
teach him to breath in sex
breath in pleasure
breath in sensation
breath in the world
its colors and sounds and not breath out
until the colors bled
the sounds silenced
and the world transcended
I would teach him about himself
then I would teach him about me
not me the individual
but me the universal
I would teach him about woman
I would teach him
I would teach all of them
the red footed woman
I would teach them the act of pleasuring
I would teach them how to fuck woman well
not yet knowing that this was what i wanted to do myself
how old was i
12 i think
and he 24
i wore make up and high heels
perhaps i was mature beyond my years
perhaps it did not matter
i see 12 year old girls now
they are beautiful beyond reason
desirable beyond consciousness
and I lack testosterone
i was full of passion
but frightened of sex
the kind that made shame of young girls like me
he did not ask for this
he did not ask
he was kind and quiet and adoring
he laid me down
listening to my breath
stroking my skin
moving down my body
a shadow on a wall
possessing my parts like territories claimed in a war
years of reaching inside
wounding myself
a dark desperate child
fumbling hungry
alive in a way no one seemed to notice
seeking out the strangeness
ignoring the shame
traversing the map that was me
digging for a treasure I hoped was there
igniting secret fires within to keep me warm
I had a sense I should quell
but I liked too much the burning
he knew me better than I knew myself
finding his way with a precision I lacked
a tongue for a compass
compassion his guide
reading my whims and wants
a topographer of my lust
he poured over me like sweet gasoline
and I blazed
full and beautiful
at last
i tried to keep still
tried to stifle the sounds coming from with in me
he unlike i knew abandonment was inevitable
i was afraid that if I left my senses
it would be for good
he unlike i knew this was just a small reprieve
the world would flood back in all too soon
i would return to my 12-year-old world
my 12-year-old body
my 12-year-old angst
for now I had stolen a moment from the metronome of time
the beat somehow stopping for us
stepping aside
allowing safe passage
it seems strange to me now
that I do not remember his face
nor his name
just the top of his head
black curls between me
his hands small brown
the color of dirt after rain
his voice
dripping to tell me
i tasted sweet
i never saw him again
a gift and he was gone
some might have thought he should have know better
i believe
he did
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The early onset of my fierce sexual appetite has always been curious to me. While most girls were still screaming cooties and trying to grasp the birds and the bees, I was masturbating with an alarming tenacity. There was almost an air of violence to my self-satisfying acts. One might have considered it self-sexual violence. While on the outside I seemed a relatively normal little girl, going through that awkward stage where I was too skinny and no matter how I curled my hair it still looked scraggly and my ears stuck out funny; a normal little girl hugging her stuffed animals and playing with her dolls. But most anyone would have been shocked to know what I was doing when no one was home or silently in the morning before anyone else was awake or behind the locked bathroom door. I pushed myself until I was hurting. Experimented until I was soar and bruised. Did things to myself I was certain no one else would dare. But no matter what I did it was never enough.
I have heard so many stories of ones first time and the awkwardness, or callousness in which the act was carried out. My first sexual experience was a relief. I felt fortunate that he was older and experienced and knew how to please. He was kind and gentle and sweet, everything that I was not to myself. He showed me that sex was not necessarily an act of desperation but could be one of profound tenderness. I slowed down, took time to learn my body and started to think of sex not just as an act, but also as an art form.
After college I figured I’d missed the 60’s so I would have to have my own personal sexual revolution. I wanted to touch and be touched, fuck and be fucked, feel, in all its beautiful and horrible and disturbing implications. I wanted to know what and who I was as a body divorced from the being. I wanted to know how far I could go, would go, how deep, how high, how heavy. I wanted to know how much I could take. I wanted to know the full weight of men (not yet able to grapple with my true desire for women), the skinny shy intellectuals, the dark delicious and utterly uncaring rockers, the desperate and disbelieving accountants. I wanted to know what power my body possessed – what could be had by slender legs and a flat stomach and a pretty smile and long cascading hair, big brooding eyes and a “nice” ass. Did I care if they knew I was intelligent, creative, emotive? Sometimes, but I tried to push that caring aside and feel only with my body. There were men that I cared for and women that I pined after, but in the end it was always my restless skin that led me on into territories unknown. I am lucky, I guess, to still be here - whole and unscathed – physically at least.
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I'm not nervous
not really
it's not like I've never done this before
I've just never gone this far
it is a nice house
I put my things in the bedroom
In the living room, the fire penetrates to the back of my knees
It is time
what would my grandfather think? I giggle,
lifting my dress over my head
naked
I drape my dress over a chair
trying not to tremble,
not to sweat
where?
in the kitchen?
of course, the light is better there
my bare back and bottom against cool wood
olive flesh ridged against maple grain
How's this?
"That's nice, I like that, hold it..."
your voice
I look up to meet eyes
I hadn't noticed before
deep and sky blue
I soften
move easier
feel the encouraging compliments
sing with the Bonnie Raitt background
I begin to enjoy
later
you take me home
crack me open like eggs into a bowl
lying needy upon my breasts
words poke at my belly
until it aches with emptiness
"consume me," you beg
and I take you in
reluctant but wanting
soon
we tear into each other
greedily ripping off chunks of insignificant flesh
prying away layers covering the core
impatient with process
we drill holes through to our secret selves
pour one another into champagne glasses
and toast the New Year
but
by morning
you solidified
as if fated by Medusa
and those precious pools
so deep and sky blue
once brimming with promise
are as blank as the 8 by 10 matte photos of me
which hang naked and lifeless on your walls
I must leave you now
what else can I do?
I only wish I could get the living bits of you out from under my fingernails
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After graduating from a prestigious Catholic college with a degree in theology I became a nude model. To most, I presume, this would appear a strange turn, a miscalculation perhaps or even a mistake. But to me it was the most natural of transitions. I was thrilled with the challenge of forming myself into une objet d’art; positioning myself into simple poses that would demonstrate the lines of anatomy and the play of light and shadow on the human form. There was a skill in holding that position for an extended period of time, shifting my weight imperceptibly and flexing my muscles ever so slightly in order to keep steady and alleviate fatigue. I would reach a trance state; a meditative state. I would roam the world in my head. I would exit my body all together and float around the room; browse the renditions of myself; penetrate the minds of the moving hands trying so hard to capture something, me, something of me on that page. I would rummage through words; the volumes and volumes of them I had collected in my head. I would form them into things; build bridges and small cities and tiny universes out of them. I would construct scaffoldings which I could latter use to turn a poem. And when my time was done I would put my body back on and run from easel to easel, seeing myself through the brush strokes and charcoal lines and delight in all the different renditions of me immortalized in the students sketch pads.
Then I started posing for the camera. Though I was nervous at first, I settle in quickly and within the safe and sacred confines of my naked body before the photographer’s lens, I would find a home. Next to poetry and that particular place inside a woman, there is nothing on earth I would come to love as much as this; to be naked, exposed, free and in front of the capturing lens; to pose myself sensual, soft, alluring or strong bold and rebellious or vulnerable and strange or emotionless and stoic, a sculpture, a statue, a mutable piece of art, a walking talking subject, pieces of me placed just so over furniture, behind the curtains, framed in the light patterns on the floor or in the woods, wound around a branch or curled around a rock or stretched out in a field of wild flowers; just me, all me; the wondrous and wild creature of me stalking the photographer’s lens. Calling it to me, luring it in, enticing, evoking, entrapping. I would learn the skill of it; the perfection of posing; of transforming my body into photographic beauty, of bending light and using shadow, knowing the tricks of proportion and lens perception. Positioning hands, feet, fingers just so, tilting the head, stretching the neck, setting the eyes, elongating the legs, making graceful the arms and the curving of the back. I would find the grace within me, weather it be the sweet gentle kind or the edgy provocative kind, or the creative and curious kind, it was grace and it would possess me. I would practice it so much so that, like a bad habit gone good, it moved into me gave me its life and vowed to never leave. Lovers have commented on the way I move across a room once I’ve taken my clothes off as if waiting for the media to arrive, laying on the bed as if posing for one of my admirers, that the way I would straddle a chair after sex would make them want to get out the camera. One lover insisted I stay naked as long as possible in the morning simply because she loved to watch me move; loved the way I sipped my coffee in the nude, smoked a cigarette in the nude, played with the paintbrushes, read my book, pondered over words, changed the cassette all in the nude. She said it was different when I had my clothes on. “ Most women become self conscious when naked but you become… real”. All I know is that if this were a perfect world I would never wear cloths again nor would I ever be more than 20 feet from the photographer’s eager lens.
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But this is not a perfect world and in our western culture there is no fine line between art and pornography; indeed there is no line at all. And though there were doors I distinctly did not open there was a whole world of gray that I waded in and out of. Like sex the arena of nude modeling became a way to push my boundaries, push myself, see how far I would go, find my power; find my breaking point. And though I thought I was staying in safe proximity to shore while testing the waters, I had no idea the scars I was leaving on my heart and the holes I was boring in my soul. It seems some part of me was hell bent on justifying the irrational emotions of an abused little girl who believed who she was, was unlovable and what she did, was unforgivable.
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At some point we forgive the past. We stop assessing cause and assigning blame. What happened simply becomes what happened. But we can never know if others will be so forgiving of us.
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I suck at auditions, at least that had been my story for years. I never really considered myself much of an actress it was just something I did as a part of my modeling career (and I use the term “career” loosely). To be honest, before my resent endeavor when at the age of 34, I decided to write, produce and perform my own one-woman show; I hadn’t been on a stage live since college. And any decent part I’d ever gotten in anything was because I was noticed as an extra and moved into a real role. So when my friend came out of the woman’s room at one of the local dyke bars with an audition notice for a lesbian comedy – I thought “no way” I’m not a real actress. I was on a high from the success of my show and didn’t want to follow it up with an audition, which was sure to be a disappointment. Still I kept the flyer. And from it’s folded seclusion in my jacket pocket it called to me: a searing “what if”, a consideration of the possible, a scenario for what’s next. “What could it hurt,” I reasoned, “I’ll just do it for the experience of it,” and so I called. I couldn’t actually make the audition time but the assistant director agreed to meet me at her apartment for a private audition.
Auditioning for the part of Annie turned out to be the most natural thing I’d ever done. Once Megan explained the character and scene to me; the stripper ex-porn star and aspiring photographer who has fallen in love with Anita the straight laced magazine editor and is afraid that her sordid past will render their union impossible, I knew this was a roll I could embrace. How many times had I stood staring at the object of my affection wondering if she could ever truly understand me, accept me, and forgive me for my past regressions? The good girl with a bad body who could not resist the pull of trying something new, who was in love with the experiment of life, who had to be different, had to be bold and daring and audacious, tempting all of life and fate simply for the game of it. Who loves all things sensual and is curious about all things sexual but really above all craves sweetness and gentle things. Who will see that in her heart of hearts she just wants someone to love who will love her back; someone to come home to and to grow with; someone who will not judge her for what she has done but will adore her for who she is. She wants to be able to tell her secrets safely without recrimination and reveal her pain to an understanding soul. And give all of herself in exchange for a life and love without fear. I felt so hopelessly misunderstood, from my perpetual need to push myself to my obsessive need to write and my undying desire to love. Who could get all that was in me and why would anyone even want to try?
Annie was my new hero. She was everything I wanted to be. She was a champion for the human spirit. She was no stranger to the dark side but she was fearlessly following her dreams regardless of the odds. She was starting over and I knew I was doing the same. Something had been stirring in me for a while; a need for change, a leap of faith, a desire for something daring and unexpected. I wanted life like I’d never know it before: raw and real. I was hungry. I wanted to throw caution and all other obstacles to the wind and jump into something blindfolded and with both feet. I wanted to learn how to fly with no knowledge of landing.
And so I took all that I was and have been and could be, all that I knew and felt and feared, all the desperation and liberation that lived with in me and began to read. I read that monologue before me as if it were my own, as if I had penned it with my own hand. There was no distance between Annie and me, as I stood in that small room before a stranger and revealed my deepest self. By the time I was done I was practically in tears and so was my unsuspecting audience. She took a moment to compose her self and finally said, “Well, that was very good. So …” she hesitated “Do you think you would have any objections to taking your clothes off on stage?” I nearly laughed out loud. “None at all,” I answered “None at all.”
And so with the infamy of 9/11 in the background I became Jamie by day and Annie by night, left everything familiar behind and started over.
