Mujer Torero

She is skilled, and knows the ways of the beast.
He is elegant only in power,
sheathed in musculature, an engine of force.
She holds the lance, spike and sword.
The heat of the arena is hammer to the anvil
of his flesh; his eyes are iron, not yet tempered.
If she leaves the arena alive,
she will wash the sand and blood from her mouth
with lusty wine, and choose a handsome youth
from the crowd, to turn her bed
into a coliseum of lust, celebrating
the fierce sweetness of victory, and life.
In the deafening roar, she steps to the sands,
lance balanced on her hip;
with dancer’s grace, she waits.
When the charge comes, she teases
his molten eye, meeting it until she turns,
pivoting from its rage, and burying her lance.
Again the crowd shouts to heaven;
she is numb to it now, and the spray
from her enemy has left blood spattered
on her cheek.
The sleek boy in her bed
will admire her perfection, oiled by sweat,
but bearing scars.
She will suck his cock to fire him, then lay back,
a mock surrender, waiting to be filled,
to be impaled, at last, without blood.
Her spike drives in
behind the beast’s ear, and it staggers.
Only her sword remains, it is all she will need.
The boy is unexpectedly strong,
as he turns her over, to have her from behind.
As he mounts her, she relaxes her vigilance;
as he takes her hair in his fist, the crowd is at last gone.
He can do what he wants,
as long as his cock is inside her,
with the memory of the arena’s sand,
tingling against her skin.

Noir

I don’t want color
except for sputtering neon above the liquor store door
or the bleached skin tone of the lobby posters
in the all night triple x theater.
That’s the secret of the primal man and woman,
we are black and white
cut out of the darkness
with jagged edges of broken glass.
They say she’s a black widow,
that ambulances back up in the predawn
to the rat trap hotel where she lives,
to haul out her johns on gurneys.
Sure, sure, bullshit, of course.
I see her most nights in the 24 hour diner
nursing coffee and smokes
and staring out at the exit ramp lights for the turnpike.
Black and white,
ripped pages out of a coverless paperback,
that’s what we are.
White streetlights shine cones of advertisement
down on the hookers who stand under them.
They all know me, and smile as my jangled nerves
send me circling their corners, a shadow
like an undeveloped Polaroid, underworld drifting,
grey ash on a dead cigarette.
Wanting caffeine for my veins,
I hit the diner sometime before dawn.
She hasn’t got a customer tonight
and those are good nights, because she’s lonely,
and we go back to her hotel.
She gropes at me with tears in her eyes,
kisses my chest and stomach, leaving lipstick streaks
that are black on my skin,
because we never turn the lights on.
When she lies back and I fuck her,
I know all I have to fill her with is the essence
of the desperate night, cheap warmth,
and love that’s afraid it would wither in sunlight.
Dawn smudging the sky, she’ll sleep till dark again,
and me too.
I’ll wipe the lipstick off my skin with an old tissue,
toss its red stains in the trash,
red, red in the dim sunlight that makes its way
through her window blinds,
but we won’t see it.

The Leashed Panther

In her evening dress and jewels, she sips wine,
and the conversation (her voice laced with intelligence,
and sardonic humor), touches on poetry,
the wearisome qualities of egotists,
and the permanence in the psyche of art.
There is, in unguarded moments of watching her escort,
a feral color in her eyes.
Come midnight, dinner done, the night wind stirring the curtains
of her bedroom, she unclasps the diamond at her throat,
slips her nylons down her legs, and places a wrist to the bedpost.
The black stocking serves; leash applied,
though her free hand twitches as she smokes,
and as she continues her keenly incisive discussion.
But soon, her talk strays
to her desire to tear at him with her nails,
and to see the scarlet pattern of passion,
in ribbons down his arms and back.
He allows her to finish her cigarette, then wisely
ties her other wrist as well.
Her black dress, discarded on the floor,
reminds him of dangerous energies:
the panther’s outer sheath of shadow,
cloaking muscles that are strangers to surrender,
and hungry for prey.
Her legs curl, inviting with feline grace.
As he begins to fuck her, he is glad that her teeth
lack the tearing sharpness of the creature she resembles.
Still, he pulls her head and mouth back by the hair,
to control her, as she snarls her pleasure.
He thinks of violence stilled by spears, and there is a moment
when her arms cease to strain toward him
in their bonds, accepting at last that she is overpowered,
and releasing her power in a rush,
her body’s primal struggle giving way
in the only way she can be free;
to allow the clutch of need to reach her,
past sharp walls of mind, past clawing defenses of body.
Then she screams into the night,
the midnight wind catching her cry,
carrying it to challenge the stars.
She will pull them down in fiery lines,
to rip at her restraints with lurching bursts of white heat,
until she hangs weary in them,
satisfied, for now.

Touch in the Bed of Light

The air carries the softness and luster of pearl,
but the wonder of that fades, when he feels her stir beside him,
feels her fingertips brush his cheek.
Across barren winters he slept alone, under the distant moon
after she died, and their long life and love together was done.
How brittle and wrenching, each night, to remember the sight
of her eyes forever closed, gently ended, beloved features stilled
in a crone’s deep dignity.
When in the dawn of a cold morning he also sighed
and breathed out his spirit,
there was an end to age, and the partings it brings.
She cries out softly, as if she too had been sleeping,
lonely in dream, to awake and find her body’s completion
within the reach of a yearning hand.
There in the white light of a morning without night,
he brushes jet-black hair from her forehead, sees lips
full and longing, graced with hope and lust,
as they were on the night they first chose each other.
She cries again as he comes to her, withered body renewed,
and his lips touch tears on her face that are pure
as a crystal stream, free from any salt of pain.
In a single moment, then, is melded
the awkward, hungry touch of youth, fumbling at clothes,
starved for the heat beneath;
the surging strength of the muscles of desire, night after night,
unquenchable, in a poor young couple’s apartment;
moments of harsh delight, riding waves of aggression spiced with need;
the sweetest, gentlest fuck, her back against his chest,
her body brimming with life and their child within;
the touch of her mouth on his cock in middle age,
body aching from the weight of days,
but with her lips and tongue banishing all weariness;
moments of red anger turned to passion,
her nails scoring blood-streaks across his back;
her voice, breathless in laughter, broken in tears.
The healing balm of arms to hold each other, when the dark seemed close.
There in the morning of the soul, they kiss again,
breath coming in gasps threaded with every jagged
and peaceful moment of their time, layered into the rapture of reunion.
When he enters her, it is if a white sun has burst within them,
they are radiant, filled and filling.
He feels her breast in his hand, and the tears are gone.

We Are Glass

Through the dusty windowpane of his eyes, he sees her crying,
and thinks, in a gentle awakening, about the pathway
that sex can carry into memory,
to find, so surely, what we had forgotten.
It was a soft fuck, just on the edge of sleep.
She’d been reading, papers from work spread on her lap,
across her legs, as if their bed was a briefcase broken open.
Her thoughts behind her glasses, narrowed.
In his mind, he’d drifted through his own workday for a while,
until thought itself had slipped away, a filled glass toppling over,
slowly, spilling out its gathered water,
to spread, and become ungraspable.
He had dreamed, then, thoughts of work becoming memories of school;
a day when he had held a prism up to a sunny window,
and watched it split the light into bars and streams of running color.
Had she looked at his face, sleeping?
Had she seen in it that thing forgotten,
a time when light could enter into them,
when they saw each other with the lust to each be opened,
to spill everything out from where it had been gathered and hoarded,
and be filled somehow, in that perfect emptiness?
He had dreamed then that the window and prism
had become stained glass, like church when he was young;
he had returned, grown, and an angel from that colored glass
had stepped from the pane, kissed his forehead,
and then breathed into his mouth.
As her lips had left his, he had wakened, to find his wife,
papers pushed to the floor, glasses set aside, gliding downward
to kiss his chest, the muscles of his stomach, to caress his cock,
and take it in her mouth.
Fresh from dream, he had held her close,
as she had returned to kiss him again, to slip herself over him.
Her tears had started then, as they had quietly fucked,
wetting his face, her own buried hard against it.
We forget the brightness sometimes, how it shines into us.
So he holds her, with the peace of remembering
that we can break without being touched.
His own eyes slip shut again, dust washed from the windowpane,
by tender lust, and a glass filled with tears and light.