Last Night

There's a flicker in the oasis of his eyes. He seems calm. He always does, but there's a slight and unexplainable shift in his persona. A barely perceptible ripple of energy that I can feel beneath the warmth of his skin...

I have him pinned beneath me, challenging him with my gaze. Angelo looks back at me unperturbed at his trapped state. He could probably toss me off with an effortless heave. I don't know how he always manages to be so composed. He looks as well-kept as when we first started (though it was only a few minutes ago). He had chosen restraint. I had not.

Suddenly I feel self-conscious. My naked body feels damp and flushed, and my breathing is heavy. I let go of A beneath me, and reach up to my tousled hair, trying to comb through the impossible knots. A laughs, and for a moment reaches up and occupies himself with my hopelessly tangled tresses. I notice he still has his pants on. God. I'm a complete wreck and he's still half-clothed. I shift slightly and tug at his belt, half berating myself for my negligence.

But suddenly I find myself beneath him. He's on top of me know, flinging the belt off and kissing me hungrily. His force surprises me. His hands are pushing my legs apart impatiently. I unconsciously resist. An instinctive fear had arisen in this sudden assault. Remembering where I am, I start to push against his chest to overthrow him and regain control, but he barely budges. I make as if to kick him between the legs, and he immediately starts back. I take the opportunity to arm myself with his belt which had landed on the nightstand next to me.

"You little bitch", he says, half-sneering behind the smile that was spreading on his face. He rips his pants off without taking his eyes off me. Then he advances, and "thwack!". The belt hits his skin harder than I had meant to. I freeze, horrified that I may have hurt him, but he snorts and says, "My dear, that almost tickled". Wrestling the belt out of my hands, he tosses it to the other side of the room were it lands with a dull thud. He pulls my legs down so that I'm lying beneath him, my hands pinned beneath his. I expect him to attack me like before, but he doesn't move. Angelo just looks down at me smiling. And for a moment we linger like that, until I wrap my legs around his waist to pull him closer. I feel his hot breath on my ear, and with our bodies entangled, he feels like an extension of myself. If he were to pull apart a horrible vulnerability would overtake me...

Succumbing

A slight breeze. The shutters flutter momentarily, leaking sunlight into the room. I catch a glimpse of cerulean sky. There's nothing here but the clock ticking and me waiting for the day to die. All I feel are the contours of the hours. In a moment this calmness will be unbearably vacuous and insipid. My heavy-lidded passivity will evaporate in the warmth of some emanating ardency. A little while more and I'll have to peruse, pursue, my desires - the only helplessness I enjoy.

The Smirk

"In approximately forty-eight hours I shall try to fit forty to fifty people in my apartment". The heathen settles back in his chair, with an air of satisfaction, whiskey in one hand and cigarette in the other.

"That's nothing new. You have parties all the time don't you?" I respond indifferently.

"Yes, but all my current and ex-lovers are going to be there." He takes an abrupt puff at his cigarette and exhales with his head tilted slightly upwards. His arrogance betrays him in this gesture.

"And what's the logic of this suicide?" I ask, wondering if I should feign surprise, but I'm too accustomed to his ways. It pleases him to shock people, so I comply by adding, "You're mad".

The heathen laughs in glee and takes another drag of his cigarette. It always pleases me to see the eyes of the other scintillate. "Logic?" He says. " Pleasure has no logic. I'm curious to see what happens."

I contemplate this. I know he delights in a spectacle, and images of vaudevillian horror enter my mind. Forty bodies crammed in a tiny apartment, sweating and breathing in each others odors. A conglomerate of people getting high on each other in their gas chamber of hellish ecstasy...

"It'll be civilized," he smirks, glancing at me as he stubs out his cigarette.

"I didn't know you had forty to fifty lovers".

He gives a short laugh. "No of course not. Some of them are potentials. Some of my guy friends are coming too..."

"Fifty lovers in one room..." he adds, seeming to ponder. He breaks his own reverie with his customary abruptness: "Sometimes I can't tell between heaven and hell". He takes a last swig of his whiskey, looks down at his empty glass and for a moment appears morose. But then the smirk rehabilitates itself, effacing all traces of vulnerability. His visage assumes once more, an impenetrable smugness.

Heady Stupor

Words trickled out of his mouth. His deep and hushed voice lulled me even more. I swivelled in my chair. I wasn't in the mood for conversation. A dreamy slothfulness had overtaken me. He continued to muse philosophically. I drifted in and out of what he was saying, marvelling silently every now and then at a pretty sounding word or phrase without trying to make any sense of it. I listened to his voice without understanding. His voice always calms me. I immersed myself in the nectareous sensuality of that sound.

Suddenly he is silent. He looks at me expectantly. I stop twirling my hair which I didn't realize I had been doing. A trace of a smile appears on my lips and his. " Was I soliloquizing?" he says. I fidget. Sigh heavily. And without much reflection I posited myself on his lap, deliberately brushed my hand past his crotch, and with the languor that possessed me, explored him as if I had never encountered him before.

An Expulsion

A man was spewing vulgarities on the bus. Uncontrollably cursing some non-existent transvestite. I was behind him and far away enough but I still recoiled. "Motherfucker mother fucker motherfucker". He went on and on in a helpless tirade. Denunciation, then silence, then denunciation again. He was in the grip of some profound hatred, his head held high in indignation. He was a gurgling gutter. Horrid and foul. It repulsed me, and this paragraph is the leftover stain of that besmirched bus ride.

Irked

I get irritated every tuesday on my walk home from school. There's always this old man, more medium-old than old, who sits outside a church and sings at the top of his lungs, flinging his faith into the air. His voice is raw, solemn, unbearable. Everytime I pass him I have violent thoughts of wrestling his hym book out of his hands and bashing his head against the wall. It bothers me that every tuesday this holy man provokes my unsanctimonious thoughts; that whenever I encounter his figure hunched against the wall of the church, it becomes obvious how easily suspectible I am to annoyance. Everytime I encounter him I encounter my own weakness. It's a little thing to get vexed over, yet I'm more irritated, this tuesday than all the other tuesdays. Maybe it's PMS or something.

The Heathen

He's like an angel about to fall, and he prides himself on this perilous existence. He's articulate,witty, animated, restless, and prone to extreme indulgence. He takes his pick from his buffet of women. I don't know how many he's had. If these victims of his persuasion all knew each other there'd be some sort of revolt, but as a skilled charmer he'd probably be able to reinstate the spell, or at least save himself. He has a methodology when it comes to women that he claims never fails. Ironically it has something to do with restraint...

His laughter always startles me a little. It is always sudden, and almost seems as if he is shouting, as if he is trying to project himself beyond his own physical sphere. The same with his gait - when he walks he seems to precede himself. Vigor spawned from his endless destinations perhaps.

I don't understand him, or rather I don't understand his need for continuous engrossment. He's not flighty in any way. He's anchored by sensuality, and its cessation would most likely induce bouts of depression.

Speech comes easily to him, though he speaks more in gestures. I can't explain it. It's as if he gestures with his voice. Profanity is a rhetorical device he uses to make himself seem more valiant. He associates audacity more with courage than stupidity. In any case saintliness doesn't suit him, but he's quite the gentleman. A vulgar knight. A shimmering vision of danger and chivalry (I lack better words to describe his non-generic magnetism), which is probably what his damsels fall for over and over again. He offers them the chance to be vulnerable and then saved.