What You Do To Me

Jubilant does not begin to describe me. Ebullience does not scratch the surface of this. I am joy uncontained, passion unbridled, desire immeasurable. I am vast beyond comprehension and strength beyond comparison. I am powerful and raw, a seething mass of potential that grows only stronger, larger. I am unimaginable destruction and insurmountable benevolence. I am one, I am all, I'm Above and Beyond.

You can't see me, feel me, touch me. You can't hope to encompass, envelope something so tremendous with simple sense and sensation. A shiver running along the length of me would race forever in every direction. My pleasure is supreme, my pain is ultimate. You would look on me in awe, and tremble at the thought.

You would bow and beg, all of you who could stop the shaking long enough to move, to utter a single word. If you could see the way I feel tonight, you would flee in terror. You would burst into flames. You would fall in love so deep it would drown you. I am the center of all things, the creator and destroyer of all things.

Come live with me and be my love.

I have found, in these far-off, dreaming days, that I am insanity made flesh. I am love, given birth. I am wrath brought to life. I am a series of concepts, vague and powerful emotions. I am a creature of pure desires, consciousness of thought, awareness of action.

I could tear you to pieces, shred your flesh and crack your bones, peel the very fibers of your body apart with my bare hands. I relish that knowledge, that power. I am alive with it. Aroused by it.

I could bring you to a climax so severe, the aftershocks would topple cities. The flood would drown nations. Your voice would lift and crack, lilting into octaves beyond hearing, and deafen entire civilizations. Your body would spasm, so close to eruption, that Pompeii would cower and know it was on the cusp of death.

I could fill your heart with such reverence, such adoration, that it would hammer against your breast like a madman, like an army of madmen, raging to be let free. I could paint such innocent, pure affection on your face that all who looked upon you would gasp at how completely you love me.

I could burn all the worlds in the cosmos to ashes.

I am ineffable, intangible. Blinding brilliance, haunting darkness. Triumphant and defeated. Derelict, monolithic. I am multitudes and contradictions. Fragile and indestructible. I am a paradox of simple complications.

Come live with me and be my love.

I will poison you with poetry to leech the venom from your veins. I will siphon all the vileness and swallow it, let the infections fester in my guts and rot the flesh away. I will turn the light on all your darkness and devour your despair. I'll wrap these monstrous hands in you and strangle all your demons. You came into this world without them, and without them you will leave it.

I am not Salvation, she has danced out of my reach. I am not Redemption, she has flitted out of sight. I am not here to save you from the fear, or greif, or pain. I am here to hold you when the weight becomes too great. I am here to kill those things, should ever they arise, and show their twisted heads so that my blade may truly strike. I will protect you, when I can, whether with violence or with love. I will destroy you, if I have to, and I will pick the pieces up.

You are more than I can ask for, and more than I can be, though I am vast and infinite, omnipotent. Insignificant. I can burn the worlds to dust, but only you can show me life. I was made to do this thing, to belong to you.

Come live with me and be my love.

Unflinchingly Yours,
-S.R.

(Re)Occuring

I awoke from a dead sleep to the sound of screams, and reached for my sword. Sheets, sweat-soaked, tangled my legs as I scrambled out of bed, hunting furiously in the dark for my weapon. I cocked my head, listening as I fumbled in the pitch black. The scream echoed, but only in my mind, as if she screamed from across a chasm that existed only in my head. In a few moments, even the echo died away and it ocurred to me that I don't have a sword. I'm not wrapped in a bedroll, sleeping beneath the stars in my boots. I'm not being pursued. I'm standing in my bedroom, naked, breathing hard, and trying to decide when the characters I created became such a part of me that I shared their nightmares.

I awoke from a dead sleep and reached for you. I don't know what roused me. The house is silent, no vivid flashes of memory assail me. Not even the foggy idea of a dream gives me indication as to why I woke. I reach for you anyway, sure that whatever startled me out of sleep threatens you. I know I placed my body between it and you, sleeping at the edge of the bed furthest from the wall, just in case. The bed beside me is empty, save for pillows I've scattered in my restless sleep, a comforter I tore off at some point to alleviate the stiffling heat of the August night. Then it ocurred to me that this is ridiculous. Why should I wake and leap to protect you? Why should that be instinctual? You've never been here, never slept beside me. We've hardly met, and yet, I'm grasping for you in the darkness to reassure myself I haven't failed to keep you safe.

Sometimes, I like to gaze at my reflection long enough that it appears to be someone else. Like a word you repeat over and over until it loses its meaning, becomes so many impotent syllables. I think there's freedom in that breif span of meaningless words, a power to make them mean whatever you wish. I like to stare at my reflection until it becomes someone else, so I can create something attractive about myself. I admire the supple, full lips, so uncharacteristically soft. The promiment tone of biceps and legs thich with corded muscle. I find myself wondering about the eyes first blue, then green, then grey and back again. I wonder what thoughts they conceal, what they might convey with a look, what I might find about the man who belongs to those eyes if I just studied them a bit longer. I want to touch him and be touched, and it occurs to me that I can finally relate to all the people that have let me capture them in little glass jars and sit them on my shelves.

Sometimes I like to stare at the world. I like to watch, for hours, as the sun creeps overhead, changing shadows in its arc, spilling golden, ambient light first here, then there. I like to watch where the sun alights, as it warms the verdant leaves and grasses of these rural towns or sends streaks of fading light dancing across waves crashing onto an empty beach. A human interaction will spoil my study, but that so rarely happens. It occurs to me that the world, on its own, is a vastly more full place when it is emptied of mankind.

It occurs to me I'm not fond of the word 'occurs'.

I've been thinking and I realize I want to feel skin against mine. I want to feel lips. Hungry, insatiable lips. I want to kiss and be kissed, to feel another body pressed into me, strategically placed. Where my hands cup her cheeks, my thumbs roving up the curve of her ears. Where her breasts are flattened against my chest, soft supple skin pushing against me, a pleasant weight, just enough to get my heart beating. Her hips, just barely grazing mine, her legs wandering up and down my own, crossing each other at the ankles, brushing at the thighs, calves, toes. I want to feel her hands on my back, each fingertip a seperate point of gentle pleasure. I have never kissed a woman without craving her fingers on my naked back, kneading the muscles between my shoulders as if those ten points of contact could somehow give her more of me.

I want to sink into her slowly, without all the tearing of flesh, the clenching of teeth, the low, rumbling rage in the throat that so often accompanies these flashes of eroticism. I can see her hips rising, just slightly, to meet me. A hint of impatience. One bare, shapely leg wrapping around my waist, pulling, just a suggestion of desire. I can see my hand, absent-mindedly holding that leg from beneath, as if supporting what she wants. A promise of an ecstasy that is as slow and deliberate in arriving as it is certain to arrive.

I can see her body, littered with kisses. The hardly visible glistening of sweat and saliva on her skin. Eyes fluttering closed. A soft, almost inaudible sigh escapes her open mouth, rolls over my lips and into mine as if a part of her is inside me at the moment before she's wrapped around me completely.

In time, I'm sure, I'll awake from this. Perhaps reaching for a sword or an absent, half-imagined lover. Perhaps with fingers turned to claws and teeth to fangs that will seek to tear flesh, shed blood, degrade and destroy. To bring pain like only the Sadist in me can imagine. But it occurs to me that this, this brief and ultimately meaningless fantasy, is more and more a reflection I've stared at long enough to make it mean anything.

Thoughtfully Yours,
-S.R.

Fear of Desire

I'm conflicted, two sides of a very different argument and both of me at odds with me. Its an unusual situation I usually find myself in, bounding between two thoughts and never quite certain one appeals to me more than another. On one hand, I find myself wondering (adorably, I might add) about finding that special someone. That person we're all supposed to find and settle with. Presumably after a string of failed, violent relationships. You can't find what you aren't looking for, after all. I have always imagined that would be my course one day. I set out on this journey and, at its end, I find a home.

I enjoy relationships, in a very general sense. I enjoy the camaraderie, the closeness, the comfort. Feeling as if I can make a fool of myself saying silly things in silly voices and be taken as affectionately as if I were actually something cute, not something with rusted edges and ragged scars. I enjoy delving into another human being and finding things in there, little things to be enamored with. Subtle details, like the way she breathes when she's on the cusp of sleep. Or how she came to know her favorite flower. Each of these experiences is novel, and they never lose their appeal to me. That exploration is what I crave, the satisfaction of my curiosities is so complete. Few things, I find, compare to turning a new lover into something more substantial.

Then again, I disagree.

I have not tired of my petty perversions, the potential I've wasted on country diversions, perfecting the art of coersion, the diversions from the normal, natural flow of things. I relish each new challenge, not as a conqueror relishes his victory, but more akin to the way a particularly loyal servant enjoys pleasing his master. Even when I'm playing the master.

I long for attachment, but find attraction much more gratifying. I crave affection, but I pursue attention with nary an intention to linger. I slip in and out of lives, appearing, penetrating, vanishing. Never cruel, never unkind. I'm sort of ethereal, sort of ephemeral, preternaturally adept at spinning and spinning, spying a prize and making it mine, then flitting away before daylight reveals me. There are ugly, callous things in me that I would not share. I don't leave for fear of becoming attached, for fear of committing, but for fear of rejection. Of mistaken identity.

I've played the white knight so many times, I almost believed it was true. I almost fell for my own prowess, almost knew the festering, derelict parts of me were gone, evaporated like so much sweat in the August sun.

Maybe it isn't a desire for new lovers, new lusts, to replace the old that drives me, then. Maybe its that aversion to being seen for what I am, instead of simply who I've shown.

But then, trepidation wouldn't fill my head with long, supple legs or painted toenails, toes curled, ankles dressed in thin, silver chains, abdomens glistening with a fine sheen of sweat, the heady smell of desire, the enticing lock of eyes, the shock of sudden pleasure, fingertips piercing the flesh on my back, as if trying to peel the skin from the bones, trying to hook themselves into my muscles and hold on for dear life. Fear wouldn't fill my head with these things.

And when it comes right down to it, I'm never really rejected. I've never felt that cold emptiness, the hollow clang as the golden gates slam shut, barring me entrance. No, I'm much too clever for that. I will bring you to the edge, I will walk you to the precipice and, just before you push me over, I'll pull you back from that place and show you something warmer. Something you've wanted to see, something I've saved for just such an occasion. All the while unconscious of my own actions, conscious only of the way they move you. I'm unintentionally profound, accidentally touching.

Purposefully, forcefully arousing.

I aim to please you in ways that will leave you devestated. Catatonic. I will secret myself behind jokes and self-deprecation, and when you've fallen for that charm I'll have my prey. When next I inhale, your nerves will tremble of their own accord. Cognitive thought will jumble in your throat, choke you, until every breath is a gasp. Every impulse, every synapse, fires contiguously until your brain is a mess of mashed wants and spasms. I'll breathe in that scent, that sated phermone, and grow stronger. I'll be a fucking orgasm vampire.

And then I'll fly away before you regain your senses. Before what just happened dawns on you. Because now you've seen me exposed, you've seen me vulnerable and afraid, uncertain and absolutely in control. You've seen what I can do, and what I fear most. You've seen all the things that lurk around the dark corners in me, and all the things that hide because they're frail and easily startled. The sinister and the sincere. The loathing and the loving. In the span of a few dizzying seconds, you've seen all there is to see.

And if you're out for revenge, I'm much to ripe for the feast.

Terrifyingly Yours,
-S.R.

Some Kind of Monster

Full disclosure,this isn't going to be pretty.

I'm dangling perilously close to one of those black moods that have, by now, become so infamous. The long, silent weeks have taken their toll. I find loneliness always seems to hasten my descent down that road. It leaves me too much time to reflect, and I have never cared much for what I see in the mirror. I suppose my own actions are to blame here. It isn't as if everyone else dropped off the face of the earth. I've exiled myself and, having faced what I'm trapped here with, I've changed my mind. I want to go back. I don't like exploring this place. Nothing about it appeals to me. Everything here is malodorous and black, as if covered by a thick coat of tar like the inside of my lungs. Nothing is substantial, but everything roils and shifts, churning like the poisoned guts of a leper. It reeks of rage and death and cruelty. Part of my feels at home, the rest is all revulsion.

I have, however, discovered some truths, albeit not desirable ones.

The first, is that I will never be as attached to you as we'd both like to believe. Don't get me wrong, it isn't for lack of intention, nor desire. I want to paint portaits of your body with words. I want to sing your beauty until the words have died away, the notes themselves have unraveled, the tune fades into legend. I want to create a goddess of you, of all of you. I'd show you all my secret places, share all the things I love most about this sprawling world and all the worlds I've created. I want these things more than I can conjure, and I will lead you to believe it. I will, myself, believe it. And once you've exhausted me, once I have given you all there is for one person to give to another, I will move on. I will never cry for you, I will never pine for you. One day, you'll just be gone. And nothing will have changed in me.

I don't fear that, that false sense of attachment. I don't fear the damage it will do when you come to realize that, when all is said and done, one day you'll mean less than nothing to me, as so many others have. I don't even fear that you will only ever love me for the things I can give you, and not for what stands behind them, cowering from the light, covering the ugly things with good intentions. My fear, is that you'll lash out at me when you reach this epiphany. I'm afraid, because I know I would destroy you.

That was my second truth. I am significantly more dangerous than you have been led to believe. I will give you all, in some sense of the word. I will twist and bend, will leap and sing and write and laugh and drink. I will be everything you desire. You'll fall for me. Not because I want you to, necessarily, but because I need you to. I will come to love you, and I will need that love reciprocated. I can make that happen. Love is all a matter of wit and charm, the right conditions, the proper sweetness, seasoned to taste. Every love is different, every one is a challenge, and I have never failed. I will turn your thoughts to me, turn you feelings tender, and then I'll have you.

I'll never try to harm you. As I said, I am all of good intentions. I'll never lie, never strike harshly. I'll bring you smiles and laughter, I'll bring fire and lightning to your nerves, until your every physical urge is for my touch. I'll drive you mad with desire. You'll adore me the way I need to be adored. I will live and breathe to satisfy you, until the day you turn me loose.

Until the day you try to hurt me.

It isn't a matter of thought, but reflex. You'll land the first blow, and every one after that will shatter you further. The great, dormant beast of my wrath will rise up and crush your bones to glittering dust. I'll rend your flesh and spatter the sky with your intestines. I'll paint mountains red with your blood. I won't rest until there is nothing left of you but pain. Until your stripped and battered, raped again and again. I will wring the life from your throat and feed on it for the simple, treacherous hunger to watch something suffer. I won't allow you to harm me, and therefore you have to die.

The shadow of this rage will darken your world, and all who come before it will tremble in fear. Nothing grows, nothing flourishes. The inky black will settle over those fertile plains where you spent all your happiest moments until all is coated in tar and reeking of decay. I'll weep then, knowing what I've done to you. I'll cry because I never wanted to bring you anything but joy, but pleasure. I won't cry at the scars I leave behind, I'll hardly notice those you've left on me, save to pick the scabs on occasion. I never really heal, never really tire of watching blood pool from my broken skin and flow down into the earth. The wounds aren't deep, though. Not deep enough to cause me any discomfort.

I will move on, then. And nothing in me will have changed.

There's not enough left alive in there to change.

Fundamentally, Loathsomely Yours,
-S.R.

Magnetic Presence, or, Magnificent Ass

She crashes over me like thirty-foot swells, battering aside my defenses like weather-worn, wooden palisades in a hurricane and I, tossed and turned by undertows, have managed to talk her out of drowning me. For the moment. Her tempers, I gather, are gathering tempests. She soothes and rages like Zeboim. She's a force of nature, beauty embodied in power. She'll leave me with scars if I'm careful and shattered, mercilessly, against a cliffside if I'm not. Though I've stayed afloat thus far by strength of will and crafty plays of word, it can't be long before my awe distracts me, and I drown.

Saying I want her is like saying the sun is bright. It is something that can't be quantified, unless broken into such minute detail it becomes hardly worth saying. I, by merely existing, want her. It is a simple truth, a physical characteristic, like the brightness of the sun. Something that just is.

Perhaps the sea salt in my blood has saved me, or the ocean air that clings to my lungs, trapped there as I am trapped, not unwillingly, in this current. I have never felt comfortable being too far from the ocean, more than a few hours drive to the coast and I grow listless, as if part of me is somewhere out of reach.

She is like that. Out of reach, unattainable, untouchable. On a plane somewhere beyond mere mortal perception. I feel as if some cosmic tear has been created, some rend in the membranous tissue between worlds, at even being able to glimpse her as she rolls over me. I would reach through, and run my fingers through her hair, but I'm afraid my flesh would simply cease to exist in such a place. We often glorify the object of our affection, but this feels less like desire, and more like a gift. The gods, it seems, are as infinte in their mercy as they are in humor.

I feel drawn in two directions, torn between dancing this silver-tongue dance, continuing to pirouette, to spin and leap until breath escapes me and I fall, panting, or dead, to the stage. Torn between letting the words that swell and churn within me continue to pour outward and stepping through that span between worlds and seizing her in my arms.

My fear then, is not that I would die in the passage, but what I would do once I laid hands upon her.

I could not shred such a creature, even should I be granted the power to tear waves from the sea. I could not sink my claws into her flesh, tearing into limbs and devouring her as I have so often done. Nor could I surrender entirely, give up the power I've craved and killed for, and allow her to devour me as so many have tried. I would wage a war within myself, then, a war without end.

I would relish every second.

She bursts in my imagination, a star going supernova. She could swallow everything in her path with pure, destructive energy, but she prefers to create like some goddess, bounding effortlessly from world to world and planting seeds on each, leaving behind roses and tigerlillies, flowering in the mid-afternoon sun. Each of them a garden, each of them teeming with lives.

Perhaps I have gone too far in a strange direction, now. From characterizing concepts as feminine entities to creating a concept of a woman, but I see little difference. She radiates, and I am pulled into her orbit, seized by gravity or something less substantial and more imagined. Something very akin to affection, but infinitely more vast.

Perhaps I've inhaled entirely too much water.

In time, I'm sure, it will rust my gleaming, steel armor. Cause my, admittedly golden, heart to decay, tarnish my silver tongue. The sea will come to claim me and I will go along with it. As I said, I have never felt right being too far from it.

Until then, I will have her, in this world or some other. In one capacity or another. I will wrap her in arms of flesh or of letters, and let her drift away on lilting lines of poetry or fall asleep on the rocking, steady beat of my heart in her ear. I will pour kisses across her naked skin like sweet, warm rain in late June, or I will spill out pages of sweet nothings, little nonsenses to coax a smile to her lips. And I will bask in that glow, from near or afar, as the tides may take us both, until the ocean claims my body, and the gods of this world or the next claim the soul.

Delightfully Yours,
-S.R.

Wound Round in Desire

I'm rapaciously salacious, tenaciously ostentatious. Every appetite voraciously edacious. I'm flirtatiously audacious, but fugacious as pages are capacious and calling me ungracious would be fallacious, then my outer skin's testaceous and setaceous but by nature I'm veracious and pugnacious, loquacious to make you sequacious, not mendacious though I'm hellaciously predacious and you're so damn curvaceous, those lips so vinaceous, that scent all rosaceous, you're down right bodacious.

How many adjectives can I rhyme? Throw in adverbs to add words to keep track of lost time. If I've spilled a million words in working spurts to earn my way, that's fine, because every spot of ink is worth the world to get inside.

I want you, is what I'm saying.

I'm all desires, the older I get the more I realize it. The only things that speak to me are needs and cravings, and while I'm all for the taking, I'd rather be given. You drive me mad with things I've never understood, and set me ablaze just by knowing that you could. You could reach through my pores and hook your fingers in my veins, shred my failing organs and claw your way into my brain, in turn I'd write you symphonies and shriek the verses all delirium. I'd kiss you but the kiss would be a thousand bolts of lightning, all streaking from the sky at once and turning me to ashes. I'd touch your lips just long enough to find direction for my blood to flow and when it all turned south I touch you only long enough to blow.

I've honed my tongue against the sharpened blades of all the worlds I've made, and turned the most erotic flights into those harsh realities, all I want is to turn you on, that alone would satisfy, then find that pool between your thighs, and take a dip and burst inside.

I want the taste of you to linger on my lips for days, long after the morning I awake to tangled sheets. Long after the smell of you has gone out of this room, long after you've flown west from here, guided by the stars, toward home. I wish I were less honest, or capable of promises that would entice you back into my bed, but I can only say I want you here instead of in my head.

I know my mind in ways a man should never know himself, but all that vaunted knowledge doesn't help to drive this longing out.

I want you collared, leashed, tied to my bedposts by your throat, unable to move but to protest the hungry way my teeth sink into your flesh, the insatiable wandering of tongue and hands, raking your skin and leaving the bruises and the red, ragged and jagged scratches behind like marking conquered territory. I want your back arches, legs trembling, the tone of every muscle defined by the way it strains against me, as if your own body is quarreling with how it wants more despite the agony. I'm feeling more sadist than sated and though I'd loathe to cause you pain I want to feed on every aching moan and take my nourishment from the sound a strap of wood makes when it welts your back, your legs, your ass, your breasts.

Until you beg me to stop or give into my lust. Until you want me more than I want you now.

If words won't bring you into my arms, I'll seize you. I'll storm those graceful walls and topple your defenses. I've never cared much for the seige, I prefer pitched battle on an open field, but you've conquered me from that palace I built you in my mind and though it seems deranged I find myself unable, unwilling to yield.

I'm wrapped around your finger, but before the end you'll wrap around me.

Lovingly, Lecherously Yours,
-S.R.

Imagination

I like to imagine I'm the man of your dreams. All wit and charm, quick with a joke that lights up your face and brings laughter bubbling out of your throat. Just as quick to urge my name from your lips with a look, a sharp gleam in the eyes that sends shockwaves through you from where my fingrnails touch your skin until every nerve is either a raging torrent or a searing inferno, until your need to feel more of me is all you can fathom.

I like to imagine you find me adorable, despite sometimes deplorable thoughts. Vulgar jokes and crude remarks aside. We all wanted to be coveted, regardless of our faults and flaws, in light of our virtues. Perhaps my constant references to Whitman will entice you, or the way I re-tell Shakespeare when I'm entertaining a crowd. Maybe the sly, subtle, occasionally obtuse references to absurd pop-culture or Dungeons and Dragons will be more appealing. Maybe its the half-bastard accent I take on when I've had enough to drink, swirling between just-Irish-enough-to-be-punched-in-the-face-by-an-Irishman and something I've made up on the fly.

I like to imagine you want me. Desperately, at times, the way I surely want you. For all my willingness to be obeissant, I have never liked to be more attached to you than you will ever be to me. I imagine its my words, my one real gods-given gift, that most attract you. For anyone that couldn't find some interest in them will undoubtedly find the rest of me drab, boring, and needlessly conceited.

I like to imagine taking you and being taken, the sex fraught with conflict, roiling and heady like great waves pummeling a cliffside, battering at the land as if it could reclaim what man has taken from the sea. I will be hard, commanding, and you'll leave me with cuts and bruises, tender wounds to remember you by while I'm away. You'll scratch and bites and tear my flesh. I'll make you feel like the first, the last, the only. The Alpha and Omega of making me cum.

And you are, in that breathless span of seconds, hours, days. That aching convulsion of limbs so remniscient of the whirling chaos that was the universe before the gods set it in order.

Too soon you'll wake from your dreams, and I'll become irrelevant.

But you'll return here, and we'll dance together. Slowly, spinning in circles on the sidewalk while cars pass and the streetlight overhead hums its constant tune. You'll flit away, on the trail of fleeting night, and I'll give chase. I've lived this hunt a thousand times, more. I've lived it in the secret places I keep hidden from outside. In the forest surrounding the cabin where I keep all my heart's collections, all my collected hearts. In the moonlit glade, near the fountain where the hunt always ends. On the cracked and broken road that leads off the edge of this world, through the utter darkness beyond, into the starry canopy still further, and then to another edge where nothing passes.

I've lived this hunt, lived for it, and never lived at all.

I have never chased you, never found you and caught you, never fallen for your laughter or fallen, laughing, into your arms. There is no green pasture, no seaside cliff where the smell of salt and life hangs heavy in the air. There is no willow staring off into a forest, contemplating like Macbeth watching Dunsinane. Or Aragorn peeering into Fangorn Forest.

I am, after all, only imagining.

I am, after all, only the man in your dreams.

Sleepily Yours,
-S.R.