Not done yet- Wanting it all

I made this collage a long time ago when I was thinking of my mother. Apologies to the various artists whose work I borrowed to create it. There is a girl and a sentry in the picture and on the eve of the anniversary of my mother's death it still evokes how I feel about her. I needed that sentry in the picture to bear making it. I needed sentries in my childhood to survive it. My mother was larger than life. She was terrifying and beautiful and very crazy (I've heard dozens of proffered forensic diagnoses) All I know for sure is that she was crazy and very smart, driven by hatred and her own twisted version of love and that she was my mother.

I believed her always. It's easier now that she's dead to see what was truth and what was her fiction, what was the family mythology. It's easier now to begin to understand that everything I was molded to be, everything that I was told that I was, was a carefully crafted and reinforced construct. Somehow I was still true somewhere in all of that crazy making, hidden away, waiting to make my escape.

What does this have to do with masturbation and desire? Everything. When the person who gave birth to you, who burned as bright and as powerful as the sun defines you from birth as dirty and wrong and twisted and incapable of love or being loved- it  fucks with your ability to understand your own desire and desirability- it skews your sense of self so badly it takes a lifetime to undo it. That process of healing and reclamation is a little like slapping make up over a birth mark at first. You apply it hoping to make the birthmark disappear and it does outwardly but you always know it's there, always see it in the mirror even when it's hidden. Over time the birthmark fades and on occasion burns back to life and fades away again.

When you are both sexually abused and then punished sadistically and sexually for the same abuse there is no hope really of ever pleasing, even when you are doing everything you are told and smiling if you can, before the shock settles in. I notice as I write that I am using the word you instead of I. It's a way of putting some distance between this material and myself, between myself and my mother, between all of this ugly and the light I want to rest in now.

Pleasing was hopeless but I never stopped trying.As an adult, nothing broke my heart more than not  being able to please my partner sexually. If an orgasm were not the net result of sex for my partner I disappeared into a thick well of shame and inconsolable sorrow. I got really good at making sure that never happened, but sometimes, it does. Sometimes I am not successful in calling forth every orgasm I see just beyond my fingers, mouth, pussy and my mad bedroom skills. The word overachiever comes to mind and I'm not talking about this to brag on being great in bed (though I am), I am showing how desperately I applied myself to learning pleasure, to learning how and when to touch, how to listen, how to pay acute attention to my partner's desires and implement them with the attention and will of someone trying to save the world.

I wonder where my own desire belongs in this pathology of my own sexuality which is a twisty ball of barbed wire and misfiring synapses that I could spend a lifetime trying to unravel it and never get that work done. I've accepted the ways in which I'm kinked and dark and full of strange hungers. I've been lucky enough to find a partner for whom my kinks work. No matter what rough patch we might hit, sexual chemistry is never a problem for us. But my desire outside the two of us is different. That desire is still in my back pocket. My desire for myself, for what gets me off by myself is still stuck somewhere long ago. Held in a child's too small hands. That was big stuff for a little kid to  navigate and survive. And I am so grateful that I finally found a place where good sex exists. Hot and sweaty, long and full of good hard fucking, tender sweet spots of a kind of touch I never knew existed that always makes me cry and plenty of laughter. Lots of joy. This is something I never expected and will never take for granted.

But my own desire for me, my own hungers that are specific to masturbation and self touching, self fucking, are still mysterious and terrifying. Now that I am wide awake and aware. Now that masturbation is a conscious form of meditation I can't escape the dark lands where my desire is mucked and tainted and stuck in the way back times. My fantasies are so complicated and perverse and so entwined with incest it's a wonder I managed to ever come that way at all. On my own, with my brain firing up images and movies, where I sometimes am all the characters at once but always land someplace where I have no power, no voice, no hope and this is where I get off, without fail, every time.

I can only imagine how uncomfortable this is to read. Mothers, incest and dark fantasies. Masturbation and moldy desire that has the stink of rot to it. I had no idea when I started this project what it would actually be like. How much of my trauma would out. How entwined my self touching and my abuse were and still are. I am such a prolific smut writer I wonder how come I can't just re-script this stuff. Why can't I write my brain patter differently. I have so much easy access to hot material, why isn't that enough? Not to mention all the delicious smut in the world, and porn and images- there is so much content why can't I use that instead?

I won't masturbate tonight or tomorrow. I will light a candle tomorrow for my mother, lay out the rosary that represents her experience of the divine as a child, set out the Buddha that represents her experience of the divine as an adult. I have a statue of the Mother Mary that will go on the alter and a small strip of photo booth pictures of one very good day with her and her daughters and her grandchildren all squished in the booth and smiling genuine smiles. I will do my ritual where I allow myself to love her and hate her all at once. I will hold both the dark things that she did to me and other memories at the same time- the sand dollars we collected at Ocean Beach, the sound of her voice when she sang along to Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughn. I will remember how funny she was even though her humor was always sharp and thorny. I will remember how she told me I could fly and then cut my wings over and over again.

The next day or so will be a time to both grieve that she's gone and celebrate it. Because her being gone means that she can't hurt me anymore. Her being dead means that I can love her safely, from a great distance. Her being gone means I can try and find my own truth about me and keep on mitigating all of the things she told me that I believed. That I was no good, a waste of space, dirty, and wrong. That I was crazy. That I was a slut and a whore. That I was a liar and never loved her. Of course I always loved her but I often wondered if she was right and I didn't understand love. Her love (and now that she's dead I think she did love me, sometimes, in her own warped way) didn't ever make sense to me. I spent my life trying to earn it and never got it, but now that she's gone I can feel it sometimes. Now that she's gone I get to make it so if I want.

***

I had an orgasm two nights ago. I was alone in the shared living room space I live in and it was very late. I had to keep stopping every time the bedroom door opened. I felt a bit like a criminal in the dark, waiting for the house to get quiet and trying again. I did come eventually, an hour into it, including interruptions. I did come. I remember the intricate fantasy that got me there but I can't share it. Not now. Maybe not ever. It was ugly and did the trick. But I'm still not done yet. It's June and Masturbation Month is over and I'm not done yet. I'm finding shifts and big truths and learning things that I hid from myself all of these years. I'm going to keep on going. And after I'm done with the yearly mourning ritual I will try again.

See I want it all. I want everything I'm entitled to by virtue of being human, being female, being fractured and being whole all at once. I want to know my desire inside and out like I know yours. I want to be able to hold it in my hands up to the light without flinching. I want to step all the way in, all the way in, to my own wanting, my own yearning, my own open throated hunger and stand there without shame. I want my mirrors to stop shattering. I am ready to face the truth and claim it all for me because I want it all, every bit of wet heated through hunger that belongs to me and always did. I am taking it all back for me, ugly and beautiful.
I am absolutely determined.

I'm grateful for the conversations I've been able to have about this strange work, with you who are engaged in it, or just reading it, or not reading it but supporting it anyway. I'm grateful to have company in this. Glad for your voice, for the resonance I find and for the compassion.
May the coming day be good to you.

Days 30 and 31- Disclaiming Desire- belated

Disclaim-

v. dis·claimed, dis·claim·ing, dis·claims

v.tr.

1. To deny or renounce any claim to or connection with; disown.

2. To deny the validity of; repudiate.

3. Law To renounce one's right or claim to.

v.intr. Law

To renounce a right or claim.

One of the women in my long term project writing group * was encouraging all of us to stop using disclaimers when we submit our writing. There was a good discussion that left me with tremendous discomfort. I have been thinking about the importance of my disclaimers and what they do for me. In my writing they allow me to say that I don't know what's happening here with these words. I don't know where I stand and what they mean. That it feels shaky and terrible. That there's no there, there. It allows me to step away from what I don't think is good enough. That is the crux of it for me, I don't think it's good enough and disclaiming it is what makes me feel safer.

My daughter and I talked about it and how women disclaim all the time, that we are expected to. It seems like it's a good way to keep everyone comfortable. I looked up the word and thought about the definition; let it marinate. Speculating on this need I have to insert a disclaimer in my writing- not always- not when I know the writing is good- which sometimes I do. I have short stories that I know are good. Starchy Critics in fancy suits could tell me they are terrible all day long and it wouldn't change my mind. It's evident. I know where I stand. They are good. And then there is this other shaky ground. Different kinds of writing, non fiction writing. My novel,which is a whole other land to walk in. I have no map to follow there, no direction or understanding if it's good, if it counts, if it's real. Just like this masturbation practice; I have no firm, known, place to stand. No certainty. No knowledge that it's good or alright or acceptable. Just like this body. Just like this first person true writing. I want to disclaim it all.

"To deny or renounce any claim to or connection with; disown"

That has been my MO for much of my life. I separate myself from this body that I live in as though I were a tennant renting space in a run down studio in the wrong part of town. I come home and turn on the television and eat something tinny and sour and go to sleep. I leave as soon as I wake up. I walk away as best I can. I disown it. I deny it. I know it's not good so I avoid it. I know this body is used up, was used up before I ever got to have consensual sex as an adult. I had my first STD and pelvic (stirrups and all)  when I was in the first grade. I got passed around like a party favor before I had enough words to parse meaning from my experience. All I knew for sure was just how bad I was, how bad this body was. How dirty and wrong. I learned to hate being a girl. Dread being a girl. I learned how to be a boy to escape it. I learned that I was a slut before I had breasts. I learned how to take anything they wanted to shove into me, including handfuls of shame, stuffed like gritty mud down my throat. I learned to have a smooth and even expression. I learned how to disappear. I learned how to be good at being a bad girl. I learned how to be a thing that would die. I learned how to disclaim, and deny everything about me, always. That was my only chance. Anything else was too dangerous for them and for me.

"To deny the validity of; to repudiate"

to deny the validity of :
my life, my body, my experience. To deny the persistent earnest thrust of my own desire. To deny my right to feel desire, to settle into it and see what it wants, where are the edges of it and what do they feel like? Are they smooth and soft? Sharp and ragged? They are. The edges are all of these things and there are breaks in them where there is open space, for the mysterious desires I haven't discovered yet. What would it look like to make my own desire true? Valid? What would my life look like if I carried it in my open hands as if I had a right to be a woman who walks with desire? A woman who walks as though sex and self sex were her right. What would my life look like if I allowed my desire to roam freely, unleashed- if I let my want loose on the world? Why does that feel so dangerous? Because it is. Because if we, who have been used up before we are old enough to choose actually live our lives as if they belong to us, inhabit our bodies without denying their existence, if we claim that for our own then we can't be broken. That's dangerous for everyone isn't it?

So many question marks. I want to disclaim this writing right this very second. For reasons I could list out quickly and succinctly. But I won't. Not right now. I'm trying non-disclaimer on like a new pair of jeans, still too stiff, not broken in yet, not really mine. I'm tasting this discomfort. It tastes like an unripe pear that leaves my tongue tasting dry and a little fuzzy. It doesn't swallow well. But I'll just keep going anyway. Because that is how I save myself every day. I just keep going.

***

I've been able to masturbate just once in the last few days. I could not come. But here's the thing I am liking. It felt good to touch myself. I felt pleasure in the exploration, in the touching, stroking, the sound of the water falling, the buzz of the vibrator in between my legs that I kept clamped together because I was standing up. Because I only had a little time. Because I wasn't alone. Because I needed to take care of my family. Because people were in line for the shower. And it was okay. I didn't feel like I the self touching without the punchline was an inconsequential act or a waste of time. It was good. I am liking that shift.

Today I am all giant ache. I am frustrated and wanting. My desire is loud and brassy and will not be denied. It is thrumming between my legs and cunt and clit are awake and demanding and I can't shake my awareness of them. Every time I move I am aware of the need, the want, the twitching of nerve endings waiting to be tapped, lit up and set free. I have texted my partner who lives miles and miles away, all day, the ways that I want her. The things I want to do to her; the things I want her to do to me. I am hungry. I can own that. I lay claim to that wanting. I take if for me right now.

There is some hope if I can stay awake a little longer that I'll  be able to masturbate tonight. I predict it will be short and sweaty and sharp and that I'll want more. But who knows? I only know I'll do my best to stay there all the way in that desire. I'll stay in these uncomfortable new jeans with the taste of unripe pear in my mouth. I'll not disclaim it. I'll not repudiate it. I'll do it for myself. I'll do it for you.

Thank you for your patience. Thank you for your witness and your own touching and writing and for your own claiming. I hope this coming day is full of surprise.


* Dive Deep- Writing Ourselves Whole with Jen Cross

Day 29 Belated- the bread and the bones

 I am so aware of every bit of this body. My skin is whispering to me, the ache behind my jaw is muttering and the secrets spilled out this month have dug in deep and bitter in the pit of my stomach. There is also an ease, a deepening movement in my belly as I breathe, a feeling of more room to rest. This body awareness that started at clit and cunt has spread through me like good olive oil moves into thick, crusty bread, slowly soaking it, until the bread is meaty and tastes like olives and the heart of summer when you bite into it. Until you can't separate them, bread and oil, they have become one good thing.

I want to tell you what it's like to carry these old secrets my whole life, etched into my bones with a hunting knife and sandpapered down by time but still brailled into me. Still sore to the touch. I want to tell you about what it's like to set them out for you, along side this dangerous masturbation practice, this self fucking and this immersion into every bit of this body. The dirty dank things and the full throated coming songs. The raw brutal truth of the old shadow whispers and the raw anxious truth of the new pussy songs, that are all achingly true and real and typed into this little box for anyone to read or no-one to read at all. A little too much truth is how I always feel but it's what's here, and I've shown up to write what's here- the bread and the bones of it.

These are things that are hard to set to words. Can't find good bridges after the hook. There aren't good harmonies for this music which has too much sad in it to stand. But I am so grateful to be feeling each finger, typing these words, to feel my feet which I've just washed in cool water and peppermint soap- they are happy in the cool air from the fan. I'm grateful for my tired throat which has a little more room now for air to move in and out, for words to sound, for sound to sound, for coming to echo in like a small, grateful canyon. I'm happy to be aware of my truculent cunt who is keeping a count of the orgasms she hasn't had yet, impatient and she is heated and a little swollen right now, waiting and waiting and waiting.

I'm not sure what will happen when this month ends. This is big healing stuff this masturbation practice. The writing about it. The sharing it with you. It is important. It took me by surprise just how big, how new and shifting and I'm not done yet. This blogging personal content is a new practice too and perhaps I will finally launch a blog that wanted to be a book that's been waiting for a long time now. I'll let you know.

I'd like to have flower petals here for you, dark chocolate and pot roast and baked potatoes. I'd like to have siren songs and wet pussies and hard cock dreams, sweaty humping fantasies, the smell of leather in the room and wet flurried fingers that smell like happy girl. I'd like to have really good dreams to unfurl here on the page, with soft, hard, stroke, throb, glisten and strike. I'd like to have a little moan and sigh for you, and open thighs.

Instead I have just another day stuffed full of sickness and fatigue and too many people and no doors. I still hold out hope for tomorrow, for coming and sharing it with you.

I am so grateful for Jen Cross who inspired this work- if you haven't read her blog Coming Home- you really, really should. Such amazing work and words and generosity and bravery. Also my blogging colleagues at Her Daily Grind, fortunately this is the body and 2fingertouch have such amazing words for you to read, explore and roll around in. Huge work, brave work- hot work. Check them out. Without this good company I'm not sure how this all would have played out. It's a scary business this writing, first person I- about masturbating and about trauma. It's lonely too. And this good company has made all the difference for me. On two occasions it felt like it saved my life.

And I'm grateful for you, for your presence with yourself and with me, with your witness and with your words, spoken and unspoken. Written and unwritten. I hope this coming day is good to you. 

Day 28- the energy orgasm

I think I first learned about energy orgasms by riding other people's orgasms during sex to their conclusion. I was used to being totally disconnected to my body and very tuned into my partners unless the sex was so ugly or scary that I couldn't stand it and then I'd just go away. As a child I went away whenever possible. I found it harder to go away from my mother than my father. Simply because she was my mother I think. And I loved her. She was the far scarier of the two even if she was less horror flick bad guy than my father. And I loved her. So I have some memories of being terrified and also hyper aware of everything that was happening.

An abundance of flesh and hunger and strange need I didn't understand. The eyes of a stranger in my mother's face. And for a brief window of time when I was four or five and she had gotten sober and left my father, she was always kind when she found the bed we shared wet because I had peed it again. Or found me sleeping in the closet with the wet blanket over me because I had been sleep walking again. That kindness was scary too because my mother was never kind about messes of any sort, certainly not messes that involved pee and I always wondered where my real mother was.

I had really planned on this being an upbeat sort of post you know. It's just all a tangle. Sex, desire, incest. All a tangle. It makes me tired. I feel like I'd really like to be done now with this business. Like to have healed stamped on my forehead. But the more I pay attention the more I pay attention. The more I pay attention the more I see, feel, remember, hear, smell. I get queasy in these moments. I always want to throw up. I also so want to protect you, me, the world from these words, from these sour milk smelling truths.

***

The energy orgasm. I used to feel it as my partners (and these were the days when my partners were men) were on their way to coming, and just ride it like a theme park ride, up and around and down and up again, the building, the tightening, their breathing would increase and so would mine, their excitement would increase and so would mine and when it was over I felt a relief, a physical relief. This wasn't exactly my own energy orgasm. But it was the beginning. For a long time it was enough.

***
I remember phone sex, when I was finally getting my hands on women. Sitting in the dark, the phone tucked into my ear and my hands touching nothing, sometimes just resting on my belly. Eyes closed, listening in the dark to the low voice on the other end of the phone and I would talk too, and make little sounds of pleasure,  but mostly I would be completely present. In my body and in theirs. I would find my way into the person on the other end of the phone. Find the ways to the wet and hard. Focused and one pointed. They could feel me. I could  feel them. I didn't need my hands to come. Some of those orgasms were all energy. It felt like an enormous wave of heat moving through me. It felt like a different sort of brain in those moments, in my body and not at the same time and it felt like rocking and it was everywhere. That orgasm was in my chest and shoulders, in my throat and belly, in my thighs and all the way through my pelvis. I felt it in my public bone and in my cunt and each of those energy-gasms were long and slow and delicious.

I was a popular girl on the phone. People always tried to get me to go pro but I knew it wouldn't be the same. They felt so good with me because I knew them, wanted them, was heated by the thought of them breaking down into real with me, into hard and wet need and ache. I loved moving them with my voice and my long fingered reach across the miles. I had other kinds of orgasms on the phone too, sometimes they really demanded I touch myself but I never liked it as much. I liked the energy-gasm best.

***

I wanted to have one tonight and I will try. I will turn off the light I'm typing to and get quiet and pay attention and bring you to mind. I will think of  you in the dark on your bed and think of touching you. I will think about the power of being able to move you because I know that gets me off, in person or far away.
I will think about you feeling my fingers pushing up the inside of your thigh, my knuckles pushing hard from the outside of your jeans at the v, pushing into you and feeling your gritted teeth, response, feel you move against me, hear your breathing hitch and get faster.

 I will remember our last dungeon space and what I felt there, what you felt there and what I made you feel there. I will roll around in that memory until I reach some sort of thick heavy movement deep inside and see if I can get that energy moving me, moving me until I come in that strange way that doesn't require fingers or electricity. It's an open throated coming, it's a completely letting go coming, it's a deep sighing down coming, it's the kind of coming that makes me want more. I can feel it already. A movement, slow circling below my waist and a sparking inside that feels sharp and hot.

***

Thank you for your patience. I am chasing this as fast as I can and feel like I'm running out of time. I have so much more to feel, to say. I have hot to get to yet. I have more.

Day 27- Belated- from this body

AngelzTears

I've had little sleep and what I've had has been filled of dreams where I am frantically searching for places to secret myself away to masturbate. The doors always open, I'm caught before I can begin and my cunt is annoyed at my broken promises. This is not unlike my search for time and space for masturbation in my waking life for years now. Moments stolen just for me in the bathroom, the water running, hiding from my partner, my children, and the waiting, hungry world. Sometimes no matter how I hid away I was, I still got caught. My partners disapproval when it existed was sharp and painful and full of sorrow. I could never articulate masturbation's importance clearly enough to be understood. I did find other women who masturbated and were willing to talk about it with me. I have friends for whom this is a non negotiable act. They helped me get stronger around my need to keep it for myself, no matter what anyone thought about it. 

***

Will I come today? Unlikely.

I have a sick child. She is grown but in moments like these when she is in so much pain and has a fever and can't swallow, she becomes small again and I become my best and strongest self- the mother. No matter how damaged I was, how little I knew about how to be a mother or how many mistakes I've made, my mother self is the best of me, always. I always stand in strength in that role. Today I have been the mother all day, doing energy healing (which I know sounds so crazy hippy woo-woo).

 I was raised with a lot of dogma about energy. I was taught that it is all the same energy, that animates us, that we use for creativity, sex and healing. That it's all the same. I don't know how much of what I was raised with is true; I discard the notion that masturbation saps the energy that is needed for other things and shouldn't be "wasted". I do think that it's all energy. That we are all energy. I can use it for writing, or healing or masturbation.  I just don't consider masturbation a waste of time, or not creative, or generative.

Sitting and being open to light is orgasmic in a different way than masturbation. The body gets busy using energy for healing instead of coming. Both expand and contract. There is movement and a release. There is a joy that comes with the creative, the healing and the coming. It's all of a piece. 

***

I was pregnant with my first child at 21. This was absolutely terrifying and healing at the same time. That this body which was used so assiduously as a receptacle for sperm and objects and garbage would be consecrated by this good use, this good thing, to grow and nourish and birth a human being was amazing. My parents were at that birth. I labored at home, in their home, for 48 long hours and the baby kept moving backwards, back up the birthing canal. My cervix would close back up. My midwife kept having to tell me to open my legs. I kept closing them without being aware of it. Looking back at it from this distance I am surprised that I didn't, literally, lose my mind. 

To open my legs in the middle of this tremendous force that had taken over my body, these giant, gripping contractions of uterus, this pushing of baby out, was counter-intuitive.To open my legs in my parent's living room where my coked out father waited with a video camera would be a crazy thing to do. I feel sorry for my exhausted midwife who couldn't understand what the problem was or why I kept fighting what needed to happen. 

As bad a scene as that was, the actual birth, the having a baby part, was magic.To have something, no, someone, come from that place, in between my legs, that place of shame and secrets and mis-use was the best sort of gift. I understood new secrets about this body. That it could be used for good things. I still hadn't learned that sex could be good, or that there was such a thing as pleasure in fucking, or joy in physical intimacy but I learned that my body could grow and nourish and birth a baby. And that baby was a gift and still is. 

My second baby was born 9 years later, in a hospital because it was a high risk birth. My parents were there again. But it was less traumatic though I almost died. Less traumatic because I wasn't in their house. I was in someone else's house. And in the end they had to cut her out of me so my abusers weren't there for that. I could keep my legs closed. And still get a baby in when it was over. Even better. 

***

I don't know what my life would have been like without having my babies. I suspect I wouldn't be here to speculate about it. I was programmed early to self-destruct. I never planned on living to be twenty one. Having children meant fighting to stay alive, and to keep them alive. Having those children showed me my body could be useful, my vagina and uterus and cervix, were all working parts that had a purpose. How bad could they be if a baby could pass through them and into the world? 

I'm grateful for these children of mine, who support me even when I write sex, who love me no matter what and let me love them back. I'm grateful for your persistence and patience, grateful for your witness and words and hope that this day comes to you in a strong way, in a good way.

Day 26- The night battles (belated)

I crashed at eleven thirty. I woke up at two and sleep seems to be gone. Is it my roiling stomach? The steroids I'm on to breathe? The night battles? I don't know. Maybe all of them. Maybe it's my broken promise to you. I did not post today. I did not come today. Having no privacy is a more acute condition in my little apartment on the weekend. I'm not the only sick person here today. Today was full of movement, neighbors, cat fights, sick people and need. Tonight the shower was a popular place. No doors to hide behind. Inside or out.

I've stripped the internal rooms down. Cut out all the secrets and hung them up to dry like meats in a butcher shop. I've challenged the shadows and the ghosts are not pleased with me. The terror has eased some but is still present like my heart beat. There is something about the night that makes it harder to breathe around even when my lungs don't hurt. Even when I'm well. It's lonely here in my chair. I just walked outside (which I've been doing all my life, walking outside in the middle of the night) in a neighborhood that doesn't welcome such wanderings. I've always insisted on it. I've always demanded my right to be outside in the middle of the night in any neighborhood. When I was young and finally off the street, I lived on Market Street  in  a terrible little hotel, full of rats and roaches and gun shots, I used to be so afraid to use the filthy communal bathroom I'd pee in my little sink in the room. But then there were the nights like this when I would put on my jeans and get a jacket and walk anyway up to the Castro. Daring the world. Taking my space in it. I lived in worse neighborhoods and walked them too.

Lots of close calls on those nights. Because we know don't we, we women ? We know better than to walk around in the middle of the night alone in any neighborhood. Doesn't that mean we want whatever comes? Doesn't that mean we are asking for it? Won't everyone, ourselves included, just shake their heads and say what was she thinking?

Does it matter that these are the places that we need to take for ourselves? It doesn't. It doesn't matter how many take back the nights we have- no one will ever think it wise or sensible for a woman to walk the street between the hours of two and four. But we get to. I get to. Sometimes I still need to prove it to myself. That I'm free. That I can shake off the night battle that is raging in my brain, old fingers pawing through my belly, looking for scraps, old hands stroking my soul, looking for anything not locked down to steal. There's something about bare feet on the night time sidewalk that is so kind to me.

There was a time when I just stopped being afraid or maybe just caring. A time when I insisted on taking my world for me. And I had a lot of close calls. I found a lot of trouble. Once, when I was 19, in this same town, I had a bunch of young men chasing me down Shattuck at three in the morning, shouting rape her, rape her. I got away. I always managed to get away. At least from the strangers. I had partners who raped me but that was different. I chose those beds to sleep in. When I was little I never chose that crib, that bed and I never managed to get away. There was no getting away.

***

I was curious about what today's masturbation practice would feel like. Because I have rage at the center of me. Anger is lose in my body and it feels like a dangerous place to be. I wondered how I would touch myself and where I would land. I had this vision of myself pacing all the corners of the spaces I live in, inside and out, on patrol. A shotgun in my hand, waiting for them to get here. The ghosts. Because they aren't happy with me. I can feel reproach and muttered threats from where they lie tossing in their restless sleep. I like to think it's because it's hot there. Oh not a traditional hell perhaps but someplace that makes sense for these child eaters, flesh traders, sex takers, soul stealers to land when they die. I don't know what that would look like but most days I like to think it's unpleasant. I am not the forgiving type. I don't think anger keeps me from healing. I think anger keeps me sane. Reminds me that it wasn't my fault even though I often want to think that. I didn't walk the night when I was little but I wanted to. I couldn't grow up fast enough to fight. Just as well. It would have been the end of me.

I pictured myself standing sentry over me. Keeping watch. Firing the warning shots. I imagined myself coming with bullets between my teeth and a knife next to me, ready. I imagined myself coming hard in my own red  hot angry fingers, tearing out the orgasm that belongs to me. It felt violent. It felt like it had to be. It felt heated through with sex starved hungry ghosting rage that was my own. It felt like the wailing of all the children and the howling of wolves. It felt like angry need. And underneath, perhaps, fear.

***

So it's four in the morning. I don't know if I will sleep again tonight. I am aware of my body that feels heavy and tired and exhilarated by the night walk. I want to go back out in my bare feet and legs and skirt and taste the night with my mouth, and my cunt, and know that I can. I might yet. I tell you I'd come for you if I could. I'd come for me. I'd come for all of us, brazen and open and eating up the night because it belongs to us even when they take it away. It belongs to us no matter how many times we are beaten, raped and told it doesn't. Told we should have stayed home. Told we should have worn pants. Had shorter hair, longer hair, had no facial hair. Worn a bra. Not worn lacy panties.Not dressed like a boy. No matter how many times we are told we deserve it because were are girls, children, adolescents or women or queer, or trans, or any other kind of easy looking meal to the ones who do that messy, wet night work, the sidewalk is ours too.

I'd like to come for you but I won't tonight. I might pee on the grass or gutter and mark my territory. Why not? I might find a place to sit outside with a notebook and a cup of tea and wait for dawn. I'll sit on the cool sidewalk tucked away from the street, cross legged and write. I'll rest under the open sky because my ceiling feels too close to me. I'll be waiting there for the sky to light up. Right now the sky is smoggy looking, thick and orange gray. But the air tastes sweet.

I hope this coming day is good to you.

Day 25- like stuck and sticky

Tonight I am closed down

Waiting

 shaking from too much truth 

too much open 

too many secrets peeled open

and old death threats 

choking me 

each time 

I started to drift off to sleep 

I'm still here 

I did not die on the spot

the shadows did not come for me in the night

I'm still here but stopped 

like stuck, like sticky 

stamen, 

crushed flower petals 

crumpled dollar bills 

unused condoms in shiny

wrappers 

I am craving a particular touch 

now 

a sparking to you 

I am needing fingers that aren't my own 

and fingers that are my own 

all at once 

in the dark in the light in the rain that fell 

today while the sun was shining 

that warm wet surprise

I want to be 

oh I want to be 

open 

yielding 

wanton thighs are itching to comply 

but there is a frozen stone 

in the center of me 

like a cherry pit 

chewed on and spit out 

hard and sour 

I want more rain 

spit

the scent of you rising 

and me 

I want freedom for my fingers to find 

all the ways in and out and in and out 

of me 

of you 

I want the liquid promise 

I want to taste the hunger 

avarice 

in the air 

in my cunt 

in yours 

I want to tell you a story 

with less dark twisty turns 

with more thrust in hungry

hips 

movement 

wet lips against 

sharp razored edges 

the sound of women moaning 

behind the velvet curtain 

the sound of me moaning 

behind my hand 

that smells like me 

before the rain

that smells like me 

on a good day when shame 

has been tucked beneath

the bible on the bottom shelf

I want to give us 

a place to play 

carnal carnival rides 

lace curtains 

damp panties, boxers, 

the sound of zippers 

the sound of belt buckles 

and sighs

the sound of wet rising and 

spraying out

I want to come right now 

but I can't

there is no room in this tiny place 

to make that happen 

I had to be sneaky 

sly 

to touch me at all today 

and I did 

I did

because I keep my promise 

so my fingers are damp on the keyboard 

my face is damp with stale tears 

my cunt is sore and aching 

I am still here 

wet girl 

no come.