CLOUDING
Sex was heavy matter, a mewing prowess. Doing it or not mattered nothing at the moment it could happen, and it mattered a lot in the past that the future would bring. Lost is the reflected glow from each other's eyes, the warm tone that their voices will never find again. This is their distance transposed, like the footsteps of a visitor who lingered for too long, imbibing the routine of someone else's ground. Don't even think about giving a hint of the simple manner that you are also made of, that surrounds you and supports you, a creature structured by a few truths of varying brightness, not always readable, not always narrable. Knowing where the billowy dreams debouch, what language to speak to those whom you receive into your intimacy, the pain that will come from the unveiled second of a face.
YESTERDAY'S FLESH
No longer dammed, there gushed your liquid — you went pouring it randomly in secretive nights, your oblivious, fugitive fibers yearning for the next corner, you were indifferent to the resin on the sidewalk, to the memory of amber and the colloidal insect, to the acrid effluvium of the gingko bilobo, to the female where you penetrate other mysteries, all of this you shook in a frothy trail, gasping incandescently, your eyes fixed on the living picture of yesterday's flesh. Post-coitum, the ever somber animal. They'll say we were made by sex, made for sex. What's the answer to that?
PSYCHE COMPLAINS
You have called it mons Venus, and ever since my face is parched by spite for the orography that her name depresses, for the unfortunate choice of referring to the sacred tremor by evoking her, that cheat douched in any sea, plus its fluttering, petty archer sect. It is mine the last dune free from her weapons, her pretexts, her limits — I walk it still unscathed, immune to the poison that haunts me nevertheless, that name that infects the world with deception, with subjection. The last mount is me, I erode myself in the volcanic thrill you credit to her.
SONG OF A GIRL FRIEND
Midway through the ride I wanted to fuck him. I did not conceive of the act to the taste of such verb, for I dislike its masculine arrogance, but I confess that then it did not occur to me the much more appropriate rig him. I was enraged by his obvious inability to gauge the unmissionary disposition I was in, and I felt there and then like whipping him for his proud, inconsiderate and downright mediocre niceness. I didn't rig him, though. Accustomed to the abrupt suppression of my enthusiasm, I continued the conversation flawlessly, permeated with ventrilocated giggling, implausible affinities and hideous acquiescences, which would lead us to tea time and marzipan muffins.
MIDSOMMAR
The pack prowled, adjacent to the shepherd playing future melodies, taming the chill at a distance from the bonfire that warmed the meager flock. His song would be heard only by the wolvesses, and the blue goatling that they dreamed of and that the nymphs awaited. The sound of the water matched their silent conversation and Oberon's soft voice reciting the book of the night. It was then that the weaver caught sight of sperm stars — she felt a universe to come.
INACCURACY
She had not rejected him when she could, and with that she mentally moved away from the world that cherished her. But he, always vague and always darksome, remained a mystery. He came from where the men of his world came from, inlaid at the bottom of a steep cliff, motionless as rocks, suffering the freshness and violence of the tides without remedy. She didn't know him and she belonged to him, much like her garden that he peered into every day, and didn't dare to approach him for fear that he would abandon her dreams, leaving her alone again, amateur without a love. One afternoon she went down to the garden. He would appear, she would introduce herself, and both would lose themselves at last on the rolling bed of a Pierre Étaix movie. Since he was late, she left all the same, road away on her mobile bed, hoping to pick him up on the way — but never finding him. He had preferred the room she had left. Unobtrusive, bored, in the long cold summer of the exilés, he ignores the lover who seeks him in the recesses of unrequited dreams.
ACHILLES IN PARÁ WITH PENTHESILEA
Your right breast is burnt — and even so, left-handed as you are, you won't target me better. What I inspire in you is the doubt over the river you belong to, and what bank you should ride when your scouting is done. Here I am on your way, and the certainties you boasted are worth nothing, you will not possess me, you will not throw my exhausted body to the inhabitants of the river, which once overflowed seasonally from the clay of forgotten monsters. You look at me and my heart quickens, I look at your single breast and I sense its taste, what more shall I know of you, if you stumble away, if you moan in a mixture of Greek and Hiscarian, which your tribe adopted for the love of bizarre genitives and sentences' internal order, if you stop and lie down to give up because it is too late, it is always too late for those whom life catches on the sidelines. Then I stumble on the root of the kapok where you attracted me. The river knows the invisible paths of its history.
THE SCREEN
The skin that you don't own is where desire begins. It's an idea you have, the screen where the projection of your printed memory of shapes, movement and physiognomy takes place, to which the chemical deposit that you are, that we are, reacts, and which we counter with the spirit that bemoans this flesh, all that is organic in us and that in our cyborg future will still unsettle the purely electric being to which we aspire.
TENSION
The film actor's deep voice, his smile of gracious virility, his eyes imbedded with Byzantine memory, slowed her hand, which aimed to explore the tweed of her boyfriend's chest but instead brushed the flannel of his stomach. Her boyfriend, meanwhile, pondered the problem of guessing the repertoire that would satisfy her. She then bit down on his neck in a purposeful motion as his hand tightened on the swollen limb that prematurely moisted the bucket of popcorn between his legs. She sighed and leaned back in her sit, and soon the two of them were grinding corn in unison with the wilhelm scream or whatever I usually vent in the vicinity of these birds.
BENEŠ'S IDEA
In distancing himself from his painting Milenci (Lovers, 1969-70), the artist puts a layer on it. A barrier, a veil. That would be the inevitable instinct in the Czechoslovakia that had seen its Spring crushed. Vlastimil Beneš watches over. It is not from his style that he moves away — the canvas is his, if possible enhanced by an obscene crudity that he does not use in another erotic painting, The Lovers in the Green Room, where he figures the copulation under the aegis of the colour surrounding the two lovers, while omitting their faces. But now Beneš takes a step back, looks for an outside perspective, builds a mise-en-abîme. With this he does not abandon his work, but prevents the abandonment that will come. He comments and documents the transgression it contains, which it exerts, which it will have to suffer. Its reality is successively posthumous, contrary to what it records: the promise of a synchronous, specular pleasure, yet to be consummated. Beneš's picture is a suspension of time, enjoyment, consequences. It's an act that will come into being — after the thaw.
BY THE AFTERNOON
The death of the heart hovering above, compressing the lovers' extinct time. The afternoon lacerates the civil purposes, silence resonates like a meaningless toast, bringing slices of past dialogue, reworked by memory that is losing its features, life is a dismantling lego, a puzzle that separates and strays, life is undone, and the only palliative for the daze that won't take long is this visceral joy of disobeying without others knowing; not cursing, not waiting, not celebrating ghosts, unremembering, unremembering more, there is a lust in absence, there is a feast of renunciation where we celebrate the roads from where we returned and the seas that persist and shine secretly like moonlit eyes.
Model: Anna Williams
