“You got a compliment at Clearwater.”
“I did, really?”
“Uh, huh,” Abie says and opens our yellow-gold fridge. “You drank my root beer.”
“Didn't.”
“So where is it?”
“Why don’t you look before you accuse someone?” My right hand clenches except for the middle finger.
“Well if you know, you could avoid all this by telling me in the first place.”
I worry about my heart which shudders and seizes up like an old car.
And I’m in love with Larry McMurtry who teaches my educational philosophy class. He has a wife and four kids. They live in a house with a wrap-around veranda and they’re enormously happy. No. They’re not. His wife is dying. It’s very sad.
There’s an old man who wears a tight white bathing cap when he swims. Abie says he was a rower in the 1939 Olympics. When I’m at Clearwater, my head clears. My brain’s forecast is generally cloudy with light or heavy rain and frequent threat of storms brewing. Clearwater women walk with tropical ease even though extra flesh drags on them like a mother with six kids tagging on to the hem of her skirt. I think all the women are beautiful and that I am too. Abie and I have our favourite rock at the base of the quarry. It’s flat and specked with flecks of quartz that sparkle in any weather. Once I arrange our knapsacks with extra sandwiches for Abie and fruit for me, I spread out a bath towel, slip out my clothes as though it’s the most natural thing to do, lie down and close my eyes.
“Hey, ya hear Wally’s up for coke?”
“Figured he’d be up for something with those dogs of his,” Abie says.
“Yeah well, he’s turning religious on us, some high priest, something like that.”
“Oh yeah?”
“High Priest, Church of the Universe, so here we are naked before God.'
The man’s squatting between Abie and me. I open my eyes. It’s the man with drooping balls. He drives his shiny black truck down the path to these rocks and unloads his cooler of beer hunkered down with ice. Not everybody drinks and no one gets drunk and if they do, they’re quiet about it.
“That’s the guy who complimented you,” Abie says.
I turn onto my stomach. “The one you started telling me about?”
“That’s the one.”
“So?'
“So he says you’ve got the best tits here.”
“Really? He said that?”
“Yeah. You’re such a sucker, you know that?”
“So I like compliments,” I say.
“Like is putting it mildly,” Abie says.
I get up and walk over to the edge of the rocks and dip my toe in the water. The water is cold and clear because there’s an underground spring. The old rower says there’s a slope of rocks going down just like there is on the outside of the quarry. And one summer a diver bashed his skull diving off the rocks at the top. I just jump off the rocks at the quarry’s base. And then I’m so happy, I laugh and laugh and even Abie smiles.
“You want a towel?” Abie calls out when I pull myself onto the rocks.
“Na, I’m fine,” I say and I lean back as if I’m catching the last rays of sun although the sky is overcast and it’s the end of August.
“You’re so predictable,” Abie says on the drive home.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” I say and I turn away because I can’t help smiling.
© Janice Colman 2008
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Wally's Cock
Clearwater was somewhere outside Freelton─could have been north or the opposite, possibly east or tempestuous west, I’ve never been one for directions, but then I’ve discovered some amazing sites along the way. Anyhow it was off Highway 6, then there was that Freelton exit and a slim highway, and if you paid attention, on the right side, a wood sign with “Clearwater” scrawled in black paint. Take that path, drive along with branches scraping your car but don’t pay any mind like when your kid falls and scrapes a knee, and then you come to a log house and another make-shift sign saying welcome. Two Rottweiler’s will come running and barking up to your car and if you go further they’ll chase you down and they’ll win every time. And then Wally a tall skinny guy will amble up to your car, his cock and long hair swinging in the breeze.
“Folks,” he’ll greet you every time you ease up, with the stones rolling under your wheels. “Here for the day or weekend?” And then he’ll wait, smiling and occasionally scratching.
“Just the day, this time,” we’d say every time. We never stayed for the weekend.
Wally was a tall guy so if you rolled down your car window and if he stood beside the car and if you leaned forward to hear him because of the racket his hounds were making, you’d get a real close-up of his prick. I was weird that summer─spent most of my time lying on the flat hot rocks beside the quarry with my eyes closed or checking out the clouds. “Looks like rain today,” I’d say or “This is the life,” when the sky opened blue and wide. The first summer I took my top off and kept my lime and blue bikini bottoms on. I also had a bikini with ties on the side so the material rode up the side of my hips and I liked that. The second summer when some of the women were weaving daisy garlands in their pubic hair, I slid of my clothes, did it really fast like jumping in cold water, which the quarry water was all summer. Sometimes I opened my eyes like when one of the members squatted beside me –
“Want a beer?” he said and I looked up to see his prick grinning away at me.
“I don’t drink beer,” I said.
“No beer?” he said.
“I like the smell, though,” I said and closed my eyes.
Abie stood up. “Her father used to drink beer.”
“Gotja,” the man said, tugging at the brim of his blue “Coors Lite” cap.
The first summer after I married Abie, we went on a science weekend with the other counsellors from Green Acres Day Camp. Most counsellors shared a bunkhouse, but Abie said “We’re newlyweds, you know what I mean,” and so we had the tiny cook’s room off the kitchen to ourselves, which didn’t really matter, because of the horses grazing orchardgrass and bromegrass in the pasture.
“What’s that?” I said to Abie, both of us in our Tyrolean hiking boots and flannel shirts.
“His cock,” Abie said.
“His cock,” he said, smirking at me.
“But I’ve been horseback riding since I was a kid and I never ─” I said.
“Well, maybe they gave you old nags,” he said and I burst into tears.
Which was really weird considering I’d started sucking on cocks at Manitou-wabing when I was twelve years old and Micheal Breier was still alive.
“Folks,” he’ll greet you every time you ease up, with the stones rolling under your wheels. “Here for the day or weekend?” And then he’ll wait, smiling and occasionally scratching.
“Just the day, this time,” we’d say every time. We never stayed for the weekend.
Wally was a tall guy so if you rolled down your car window and if he stood beside the car and if you leaned forward to hear him because of the racket his hounds were making, you’d get a real close-up of his prick. I was weird that summer─spent most of my time lying on the flat hot rocks beside the quarry with my eyes closed or checking out the clouds. “Looks like rain today,” I’d say or “This is the life,” when the sky opened blue and wide. The first summer I took my top off and kept my lime and blue bikini bottoms on. I also had a bikini with ties on the side so the material rode up the side of my hips and I liked that. The second summer when some of the women were weaving daisy garlands in their pubic hair, I slid of my clothes, did it really fast like jumping in cold water, which the quarry water was all summer. Sometimes I opened my eyes like when one of the members squatted beside me –
“Want a beer?” he said and I looked up to see his prick grinning away at me.
“I don’t drink beer,” I said.
“No beer?” he said.
“I like the smell, though,” I said and closed my eyes.
Abie stood up. “Her father used to drink beer.”
“Gotja,” the man said, tugging at the brim of his blue “Coors Lite” cap.
The first summer after I married Abie, we went on a science weekend with the other counsellors from Green Acres Day Camp. Most counsellors shared a bunkhouse, but Abie said “We’re newlyweds, you know what I mean,” and so we had the tiny cook’s room off the kitchen to ourselves, which didn’t really matter, because of the horses grazing orchardgrass and bromegrass in the pasture.
“What’s that?” I said to Abie, both of us in our Tyrolean hiking boots and flannel shirts.
“His cock,” Abie said.
“His cock,” he said, smirking at me.
“But I’ve been horseback riding since I was a kid and I never ─” I said.
“Well, maybe they gave you old nags,” he said and I burst into tears.
Which was really weird considering I’d started sucking on cocks at Manitou-wabing when I was twelve years old and Micheal Breier was still alive.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Highway 6
From the time of her conception until today, thirty-three years later, I’ve been drunk on Caroline. Tried to kick the habit, but she stuck in my blood like a lost lover and the truth is I liked her being there. And I think that’s where my problems with Abie began. See, there’s a cunt-full of difference between life before and after children. Abie always figured his inflated cock would fill my heart and soul. Even though I soon grew to love and hate him, he was all I had. But when I lay eyes on Caroline, I was gone. No good-byes. I zipped up my heart, brought my luggage to the front door, and joined the wild snowflakes celebrating outside and pulling an all-nighter.
“What the hell are you doing? It’s freezing in here. Are you out of your fucking mind?” Abie screamed and turned up the TV. But I was ready for even the foulest weather and I laughed─with my baby wrapped inside my coat under my dress and strapped against the sweet-as-goat’s-milk warmth of my belly, I let out a long low belly laugh and left. Abie never knew what hit him.
Decades later he emailed me from Moscow. “You never understood me”─capitalizing the adverb in the most annoying way. Had he bent over to contemplate the pin-point opening at the tip of his cock, he could have more introspective (with Abie there was no other way─his cock has always been his white cane).
“You kept me awake all night,” he says.
“I was the one jumping up,” I say.
“You’re the one with tits,” he says.
I lean forward. "Yeah, well what do you think of this?" I say, pulling at the discoloured skin under my eyes. When I was a kid spending summers in Lake Alverna, I smeared my mother’s steel blue and purple eye shadow on the skin beneath my eyes and paraded up to Robbie Dainow, “See what you did,” I said. “Make-up!” he scoffed and held my hands behind my back while Allen Herscovici wet his hands in the lake and knuckle-rubbed my skin. “Is not!” I said as the make-up morphed from my skin to his.
I look back on this life with a mixture of longing, humour, and regret. This morning Abie told me he’s closing his deal in Russia. He’s shacked up with his girlfriend Anya, who was living with him in Toronto until she got fed up and returned to her tiny Moscow walk-up. Abie was out of rent for his drab apartment hotel so he drummed up a ticket and now he’s in Russia wheedling and dealing.
“It’s going to be a nice Chanukah,” he said.
“Well, you just better enjoy your life” I said. “Because you’re in the last act.”
“The way I think of it, I have one-third of my life left and that’s a good chunk.”
"Yeah, but with what quality of life?” I said, looking out my kitchen window at the stark winter trees and cold grey sky.
**********************************************************
Abie bundles Caroline into the royal blue baby backpack he bought through the Mountain Co-Op Catalogue. He’s efficient getting us out of the house. We visit his cousin Claire, her husband Henry and their baby Joshua who’s the same age as Caroline. Henry and Claire’s Bathurst apartment is stuffed with Amway products and sometimes they take Joshua to Amway revival meetings. They used to be Buddhists and they’re still vegetarians though Claire sneaks chicken when Henry’s not around. She says the abrupt change in her diet makes her face break out and I think of Utrillo.
Even in excess snow which can never equal the mountainous stashes of my Quebec childhood, we go to the Farmer’s Market in Kitchener and the Elora Gorge. In early June, we head for Clearwater. This is one of the good things about Abie. He’s up for just about anything. We were driving on Highway 6 and picked up a long-haired hitchhiker. “Who’s gonna stop for a hippie around here?” I said, so Abie pulled over, the pavement crackling under the tires. (There are certain sounds that make me happy and sound of pebbles under a car’s tires is one of them─memories of my father driving up the path to our country house─headlights and stars and my mother with her skirt swirling, half walking, half running through the gap in the cedar hedge to greet him.)
“Hey you guys up for a swim in the cleanest water you’ll ever find?” the hitchhiker said.
“We’re just going into town to pick up books for school.” Abie said and I turned around and smiled.
“Thanks,” I said, “That’s nice of you to offer.” And I smiled again. There’s a warm rush following gentle words or gestures, a soulful swelling up that fills my heart and settles in my cunt. And that’s when we started going to Clearwater.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
“What the hell are you doing? It’s freezing in here. Are you out of your fucking mind?” Abie screamed and turned up the TV. But I was ready for even the foulest weather and I laughed─with my baby wrapped inside my coat under my dress and strapped against the sweet-as-goat’s-milk warmth of my belly, I let out a long low belly laugh and left. Abie never knew what hit him.
Decades later he emailed me from Moscow. “You never understood me”─capitalizing the adverb in the most annoying way. Had he bent over to contemplate the pin-point opening at the tip of his cock, he could have more introspective (with Abie there was no other way─his cock has always been his white cane).
“You kept me awake all night,” he says.
“I was the one jumping up,” I say.
“You’re the one with tits,” he says.
I lean forward. "Yeah, well what do you think of this?" I say, pulling at the discoloured skin under my eyes. When I was a kid spending summers in Lake Alverna, I smeared my mother’s steel blue and purple eye shadow on the skin beneath my eyes and paraded up to Robbie Dainow, “See what you did,” I said. “Make-up!” he scoffed and held my hands behind my back while Allen Herscovici wet his hands in the lake and knuckle-rubbed my skin. “Is not!” I said as the make-up morphed from my skin to his.
I look back on this life with a mixture of longing, humour, and regret. This morning Abie told me he’s closing his deal in Russia. He’s shacked up with his girlfriend Anya, who was living with him in Toronto until she got fed up and returned to her tiny Moscow walk-up. Abie was out of rent for his drab apartment hotel so he drummed up a ticket and now he’s in Russia wheedling and dealing.
“It’s going to be a nice Chanukah,” he said.
“Well, you just better enjoy your life” I said. “Because you’re in the last act.”
“The way I think of it, I have one-third of my life left and that’s a good chunk.”
"Yeah, but with what quality of life?” I said, looking out my kitchen window at the stark winter trees and cold grey sky.
**********************************************************
Abie bundles Caroline into the royal blue baby backpack he bought through the Mountain Co-Op Catalogue. He’s efficient getting us out of the house. We visit his cousin Claire, her husband Henry and their baby Joshua who’s the same age as Caroline. Henry and Claire’s Bathurst apartment is stuffed with Amway products and sometimes they take Joshua to Amway revival meetings. They used to be Buddhists and they’re still vegetarians though Claire sneaks chicken when Henry’s not around. She says the abrupt change in her diet makes her face break out and I think of Utrillo.
Even in excess snow which can never equal the mountainous stashes of my Quebec childhood, we go to the Farmer’s Market in Kitchener and the Elora Gorge. In early June, we head for Clearwater. This is one of the good things about Abie. He’s up for just about anything. We were driving on Highway 6 and picked up a long-haired hitchhiker. “Who’s gonna stop for a hippie around here?” I said, so Abie pulled over, the pavement crackling under the tires. (There are certain sounds that make me happy and sound of pebbles under a car’s tires is one of them─memories of my father driving up the path to our country house─headlights and stars and my mother with her skirt swirling, half walking, half running through the gap in the cedar hedge to greet him.)
“Hey you guys up for a swim in the cleanest water you’ll ever find?” the hitchhiker said.
“We’re just going into town to pick up books for school.” Abie said and I turned around and smiled.
“Thanks,” I said, “That’s nice of you to offer.” And I smiled again. There’s a warm rush following gentle words or gestures, a soulful swelling up that fills my heart and settles in my cunt. And that’s when we started going to Clearwater.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Jack's a Natural Angler
There is a man named
Jack K Williams who prefers
to be called Martin in public cause
my writing's too pubic and Jack says
he likes to maintain a low profile, goes to church
on Sundays and he never reads wham bams
except for mine, he listens
for the flow, he knows how to swim
through all my words, cautions me about
murky waters and shows me where,
how the water runs so clear and deep that
if you stare straight through
you can see speckled pebbles and
learn rock bottom can’t be
all bad. As for Jack, he
doesn't need goggles, doesn't strap fins
to his feet so's to wind his way
between streaming words, sometimes floating free,
sometimes with the wind in his hair
like Hemingway, he knows the geography
of words, understands questions, like
why do stars skim on clear water,
why does thunder make me laugh
and the sun cause shivers
to spiral up my spine, why
do the purest word shells
lie open and empty
on the shoreline in the morning.
I think that Jack must have
been born in the country still young
with unharnassed smells and sounds, where
words are still collected
in rain barrels, imagine Jack,
to stand naked in the moonlight,
straining for those distant rumblings,
knowing that fresh words will fall
in torrents. I would stand with my breath
hovering in my throat,
my tongue out to catch a drop, savoring
the taste of a word, some potent phrase,
before swallowing. I’d be full of glistening
gems, Jack, drenched, I would be
drenched with the sweetest tasting
words, fresh as first time lovers
of any age.
Jack knows about natural wonders,
he can stand and point where the water
is so clear that there is no separation
of surface and floor, he warns me
to be watchful of undertows that
swirl, continuously changing direction.
He knows, this man Jack, when I flaunt
my favorite four letter confections, that
I’m just a city kid in the country, or
a country kid in the city, either way
I’m an obvious misfit, while he’s
a natural angler,
and I’m just this softly smiling
sometimes tired woman at the end
of a long day coming home to someone
who reads my words somewhere
in the south. he says he’ll write
cunt to surprise me - I’m
going to wear white silk with
pearl buttons and nothing
underneath.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Jack K Williams who prefers
to be called Martin in public cause
my writing's too pubic and Jack says
he likes to maintain a low profile, goes to church
on Sundays and he never reads wham bams
except for mine, he listens
for the flow, he knows how to swim
through all my words, cautions me about
murky waters and shows me where,
how the water runs so clear and deep that
if you stare straight through
you can see speckled pebbles and
learn rock bottom can’t be
all bad. As for Jack, he
doesn't need goggles, doesn't strap fins
to his feet so's to wind his way
between streaming words, sometimes floating free,
sometimes with the wind in his hair
like Hemingway, he knows the geography
of words, understands questions, like
why do stars skim on clear water,
why does thunder make me laugh
and the sun cause shivers
to spiral up my spine, why
do the purest word shells
lie open and empty
on the shoreline in the morning.
I think that Jack must have
been born in the country still young
with unharnassed smells and sounds, where
words are still collected
in rain barrels, imagine Jack,
to stand naked in the moonlight,
straining for those distant rumblings,
knowing that fresh words will fall
in torrents. I would stand with my breath
hovering in my throat,
my tongue out to catch a drop, savoring
the taste of a word, some potent phrase,
before swallowing. I’d be full of glistening
gems, Jack, drenched, I would be
drenched with the sweetest tasting
words, fresh as first time lovers
of any age.
Jack knows about natural wonders,
he can stand and point where the water
is so clear that there is no separation
of surface and floor, he warns me
to be watchful of undertows that
swirl, continuously changing direction.
He knows, this man Jack, when I flaunt
my favorite four letter confections, that
I’m just a city kid in the country, or
a country kid in the city, either way
I’m an obvious misfit, while he’s
a natural angler,
and I’m just this softly smiling
sometimes tired woman at the end
of a long day coming home to someone
who reads my words somewhere
in the south. he says he’ll write
cunt to surprise me - I’m
going to wear white silk with
pearl buttons and nothing
underneath.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
U B th' HiWay
ther’s 2 things that i love
words an’ music babee
words an’ music
shee-it, i wish
i had legs from here
2 ther an’ a high big
ass i wish
i had tits to match an’
long black-wild
hair an’ a smile that culd make
th erth swing open an' honee
when i’m with u thats how
i feel, like i’m queen of th wurld, six
feet tall an’ when i press
my body against u, we’re
right in tyme, cunt t cock we
stand smack tight against
each othr an’ my hips
are swingin swoop de doo
raz a ma taz, soo ee
i wantya babee yada ya
ooee. dont ya know i
smile all smirk an’ snide-wide
in yur ear, flick my tongue
on th side of yur neck, i cross
th street of yur lips, right
an’ left side of th drivr–
u bee th high way, an
i’ll take a drive in th country, jst
movin along takin in th fresh air,
th corn, animls in ther pure postcard
posin. an’ i might take
sum allurin sideroads, discovr
a pristine lake evn i know
th wurd, might undres as
i walk randumly tward or in
de-creed order bottom t top
or top t bottom, but th point
is by th time i get
to lappin yur shores, i can’t wait
to thro myself in but i don’t, i tease
my ownself - toes in, toes out, up
to th calves, arm bendin over,
nipple jst submerged, ass kissin
th sun–oh honey my cunt
yearns, buzzin right up
an down for u, an’ when
yur on fire u know th words
r tru, my leg hurts, knee hurts 2, lisn
i’m sayin i need
2 go for a ride, take me
fast take me slow, fingr on
my belly, mind on what’s below
fuck me, stay
any which way, i’m tired
of this weed, that music, i’m out
of fuck an’ i’m so in
luv with u make my mind sing an’ if
i’m outta tune, tone deaf, disruptin
evn th clouds, honey I luv
yur voice, yur th sexiest man alive, u got
th biggest pair of balls in town, whethr
yur up or down, th look th grandnss
of yur prick nestled
in yur orange hair so I know this
must be heaven, remembr
that summer night u drove me clear
outta town i kept askin
where u takin me, laughin and giggling
an rubbin yur thigh with u grinnin
all the while like i nevr seen
since and the stars like heavens blanket
lyin ovr us, i drank like i was in the desert
i jst wanna tell u, th stars
are hidin under these covers an
if u tiptoe an lift th corner,
th one on th bottom at th right,
u’ll see stars shinin so bright
evn ur blind eye will blink. thas all
and oh, somthin
somthin more, undr the blanket if u look
up close, betwn my legs
thers a north stars swingin
raz a ma taz whoo ee for you.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
words an’ music babee
words an’ music
shee-it, i wish
i had legs from here
2 ther an’ a high big
ass i wish
i had tits to match an’
long black-wild
hair an’ a smile that culd make
th erth swing open an' honee
when i’m with u thats how
i feel, like i’m queen of th wurld, six
feet tall an’ when i press
my body against u, we’re
right in tyme, cunt t cock we
stand smack tight against
each othr an’ my hips
are swingin swoop de doo
raz a ma taz, soo ee
i wantya babee yada ya
ooee. dont ya know i
smile all smirk an’ snide-wide
in yur ear, flick my tongue
on th side of yur neck, i cross
th street of yur lips, right
an’ left side of th drivr–
u bee th high way, an
i’ll take a drive in th country, jst
movin along takin in th fresh air,
th corn, animls in ther pure postcard
posin. an’ i might take
sum allurin sideroads, discovr
a pristine lake evn i know
th wurd, might undres as
i walk randumly tward or in
de-creed order bottom t top
or top t bottom, but th point
is by th time i get
to lappin yur shores, i can’t wait
to thro myself in but i don’t, i tease
my ownself - toes in, toes out, up
to th calves, arm bendin over,
nipple jst submerged, ass kissin
th sun–oh honey my cunt
yearns, buzzin right up
an down for u, an’ when
yur on fire u know th words
r tru, my leg hurts, knee hurts 2, lisn
i’m sayin i need
2 go for a ride, take me
fast take me slow, fingr on
my belly, mind on what’s below
fuck me, stay
any which way, i’m tired
of this weed, that music, i’m out
of fuck an’ i’m so in
luv with u make my mind sing an’ if
i’m outta tune, tone deaf, disruptin
evn th clouds, honey I luv
yur voice, yur th sexiest man alive, u got
th biggest pair of balls in town, whethr
yur up or down, th look th grandnss
of yur prick nestled
in yur orange hair so I know this
must be heaven, remembr
that summer night u drove me clear
outta town i kept askin
where u takin me, laughin and giggling
an rubbin yur thigh with u grinnin
all the while like i nevr seen
since and the stars like heavens blanket
lyin ovr us, i drank like i was in the desert
i jst wanna tell u, th stars
are hidin under these covers an
if u tiptoe an lift th corner,
th one on th bottom at th right,
u’ll see stars shinin so bright
evn ur blind eye will blink. thas all
and oh, somthin
somthin more, undr the blanket if u look
up close, betwn my legs
thers a north stars swingin
raz a ma taz whoo ee for you.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
Of Drummers and Bodybuilders
“[Mark] sweetest baby of mine, I don’t know how you deal with me when I’m all riled up like this, when my soul overheats and seizes. Just fuck me baby, swing your hard-on over this way; it’s all OK in the end. And even though you’re miles away–with all our words and how fucking cool we are, throw me over your long-distance shoulders and hammer down my exposed nerves with one hardcore email fuck.”
The truth is, while trying to play it cool and easy, I’m pissed off. Listen schmuck, I want to say, I want details, like the date and time of day you first sucked and fucked your way into my heart. And what I’m wanting to know is you remember me, that you think of me, that yearning tugs at you like a lost child and will not let go.
“Lie on me,” I said that first night.
“I’ll crush you.”
“So how much do you weigh?” I said, although from my bodybuilding days, I was a pretty good judge of mass. Some men are really puny these days, although Mark was six-feet tall with moderate muscle mass.
“Two-hundred, maybe two-ten,” he said.
“Try me.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. All your weight. No prissy stuff.”
“You sure some woman,” he whistled. I didn’t tell him about my sumo-builder man, Garth.
I hear the tongue of a drunk becomes thick and woolly and I’m thinking my clit must have felt like that. Did it? I need to know because it’s details that make even dreams seem real─like how many times you kissed my cunt because I read somewhere― and I thought, wow, what a fucking hip bit, my drummer man’s gonna spin over this―circling Kailish, that famous Indian mountaintop in India, could cleanse the sins of a lifetime. And for one hundred and eight koras, one would be granted access to Nirvana and complete emancipation. Which is a really neat concept. I’m offering Mark my flange, my hair pie, my piss flapper, my quim to tongue in mesmerizing swirls so he’d be granted not only absolution, but also access to eternal paradise.
I need to impress him. Hung up on making a dent in this man with the gold earrings, who could phone fuck like an angel and a pirate. Except those times when his voice travels so deep low down and dirty. I have trouble hearing certain tones. I get it from my grandmother. So I’d moan and breathe whoo whoo into the receiver that he wouldn’t know low tones elude me and phone fucking is no great thrill anyhow. Not like skin to skin.
Phone fucking just doesn’t do it for me. Neither does body painting─when I was a builder, Crazy Bob the nighttime assistant manager of the Work-Out on St. Clair invited me over to his mother’s group home where he and his Greek lesbian girlfriend Sophie kept a room. Bob had this idea that if I painted Sophie’s tits and if she’d returned the favour and decorated mine, we’d all get turned on and fuck between all those swirls of colour. I’m an artist. I mean I paint, but painting tits doesn’t inspire me. I’m kind of good at design and colour, but I have a long ways to go in the rendering department. “Mind if I take a photo?” Bob said. “Sure thing,” I said. I grimace when I’m around cameras. My lips purse and the tip of my nose elongates. I have this thing about my nose.
“So, what ya think?” Bob was saying behind the camera.
“Kinda boring, really.” I said.
“You’re no fun,” Bob said, putting his arm around his Sophie.
There’s nothing like music. Music is like sex for me. (What was that Pygmalion quote? ─“Gin was mother’s milk to her.”) I stand at the side of the stage with the music streaming toward me. The audience is a backdrop. One night at Healey’s, I inched my way to my favourite listening spot. The room was packed. Some were there to revel in the music of a famous blues band. Others pissed away a night on the town, drinking and getting rowdy.
The band was American, most of them from Chicago–keyboard, drummer, bass player, lead guitar. I stood watching the bass player, his fingers shifting slides with such ease, shuffling his legs with a soft side-to-side hip tie-in. The lead guitarist wore a large gold cross on his chest. And then I saw a mountain range of drums. Heard the swish of snares that draws women in, the hot symbols, a bit of a steady one, two, three beat, and just when the drummer was immersed in that scene, he’d switch, slide in more snares, and using the soft balls at the end of the stick, mute and ease the sound. He was in a different place, just jamming away and in the groove with his eyes closed and smiling.
I was wearing a white Lycra v-neck shirt and tight black shimmering gym pants. The room was packed─ strangers standing close to each other, shoulders and assorted body parts touching. A drunk’s hand arced out toward the lead guitarist’s instrument and my builder’s muscles tightened, tension branching out into my biceps and hands. “You don’t want to do that,” I said, seizing the guy’s wrist, which was small and bony. “I got no feeling left in my wrists,” the drunk whined. It was a sweet builder’s moment.
“Isn’t the bass player cute?” said a frizzy dark-haired chick to no one in particular. “I’m going to have him.” She swayed purposefully forward, her walk shifting into a ripe wiggle. I moved to the bar. The gym made me comfortable in my skin. Generally I ordered one white wine, two max. The whites were tasting cheaper and cheaper, so I usually brought gum for immediate after use. I flexed my pecs (for the sake of pecs and not tits, which are different entities). Flared my delts. Subtle flexing is an art.
The drummer ordered lemonade. “Thanks about the wrist thing. Man! You are strong!”
“It was cool, wasn’t it? Like the Olympics. Been training all my bodybuilding life for this moment. My arm was iron, man, one lead pipe. See I’m a certified hypnotist. So you got a witch and builder mix.”
The drummer stared. “My brother, Charlie, he’s the bass player, loved it. We were watching and man, you got some pipes there! I know he wants to thank you. We got this thing Charles and I, like if he sees you first, can’t have no fighting, two brothers on the road.”
“Where were the bouncers? My ex used to be a bouncer and he and his buddies would’ve been there in a flash. Probably broken the asshole’s wrist.”
I’ve always been intrigued with Garth’s dark side as he calls it. Charlie walked over. Short guy with a navy blue polka-dot kerchief wrapped around his head and tied in back and shoulder length dreads. Decent delts. A bit of a paunch, but builders don’t give a fuck about fat in the off season. He wanted to get ready for a photo shoot for a new album, kind of jazzy this one, he said, maybe I could give him a few work-out tips, though he was really into Zen these days, did I know anything about Zen and maybe we could talk? He was sharing a room with his brother the drummer, but if he could get a lift with me that would be so nice, we could talk and then maybe go upstairs and meet up with his brother.
Hey little girl, why the fuck you messing around with a musician? I brought Charlie to my silver rental. Almost slipped on the ice on Spadina Street, yelled whooeee, got lost along the way to his hotel, skidded in the snow, giggled a lot, and parked in a hopefully acceptable zone across the street from Quality Inn on Lombard, diagonally across the street from Gilda’s Club. Cancer across the street in a renovated fire hall and I was sashaying around, hoarding every ounce of available nightlife.
“C’mon just one kiss.” I opened the car door. “Kiss me,” he said, “c’mon just a simple kiss, just one. He leaned forward. His kiss was soft as candy and all the while I was telling myself off, even as we took the elevator to his room, which he did with such assurance, clinking his hotel room keys like he was congratulating himself. What the fuck you doing? Just another walk down another hotel hallway. I walked into the room. Two single beds with a small space between them and an equal space from one bed to the door, also from the farthest bed to the window and from each foot end of the beds to the window. He closed the door. I was definitely in.
“Your brother?” I said.
“Come let me kiss you.” he said, slipping his hands under my top and laying them flat on my stomach.
“Such muscles,” he whispered. “I bet you have a six-pack.”
“It’s a myth, sweetie, about builders and six packs. Only in-season. See I’m in my off- season. The world has this thing for rippling bodies. It’s about mass baby. Bottom line. You’re such a fine man, but I can’t, really. I’m not playing, I can’t honey. You should’ve grabbed the frizzy chick that was fucking hot for you.”
“I could’ve had her anytime. I love muscles. I chose you.”
I didn’t want any loving with a potential musician for my festival, because then, well then I was just a female among how many other eager mouths and cunts. So I told him no, but I could give him a massage, one of those upper body tough massages pressing out muscle knots while the masseuse politely inquires, “On a scale of one to ten, how does that feel?”
“Will you take of your shirt?” he said.
“No, but you can take off yours.”
At the end, I climbed over him, we both stood up, he reached into the “v” of my Lycra shirt and gently lifted my right breast. Took tender hold of my nipple and graciously kissed it. I will never forget.
“I can’t stay,” I whispered, straightening my clothes. “Gotta leave. You shoulda grabbed the young chick.with the dark curly hair.”
“But it’s you I want. I love a woman with muscles.”
I slid under his arm and out the door, apologizing all the way to the elevator. Can’t have the bass man fucking the impresario. There are those chicks who would run across hot coals for a musician. “Hey ya, honey,” a musician prick might call out, “you jest run across those coals for me and sure I’ll fuck ya.” And the wacko chick would dash across, purse, tits, and fake jewelry flying. An impresario was different. I was full of my art and in love with my soul. I had deep-set eyes. The attentions of various artists and writers did not cause me to feel honoured. I preferred . . . I didn’t know what I preferred, except I had no heroes and I liked it that way.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
The truth is, while trying to play it cool and easy, I’m pissed off. Listen schmuck, I want to say, I want details, like the date and time of day you first sucked and fucked your way into my heart. And what I’m wanting to know is you remember me, that you think of me, that yearning tugs at you like a lost child and will not let go.
“Lie on me,” I said that first night.
“I’ll crush you.”
“So how much do you weigh?” I said, although from my bodybuilding days, I was a pretty good judge of mass. Some men are really puny these days, although Mark was six-feet tall with moderate muscle mass.
“Two-hundred, maybe two-ten,” he said.
“Try me.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. All your weight. No prissy stuff.”
“You sure some woman,” he whistled. I didn’t tell him about my sumo-builder man, Garth.
I hear the tongue of a drunk becomes thick and woolly and I’m thinking my clit must have felt like that. Did it? I need to know because it’s details that make even dreams seem real─like how many times you kissed my cunt because I read somewhere― and I thought, wow, what a fucking hip bit, my drummer man’s gonna spin over this―circling Kailish, that famous Indian mountaintop in India, could cleanse the sins of a lifetime. And for one hundred and eight koras, one would be granted access to Nirvana and complete emancipation. Which is a really neat concept. I’m offering Mark my flange, my hair pie, my piss flapper, my quim to tongue in mesmerizing swirls so he’d be granted not only absolution, but also access to eternal paradise.
I need to impress him. Hung up on making a dent in this man with the gold earrings, who could phone fuck like an angel and a pirate. Except those times when his voice travels so deep low down and dirty. I have trouble hearing certain tones. I get it from my grandmother. So I’d moan and breathe whoo whoo into the receiver that he wouldn’t know low tones elude me and phone fucking is no great thrill anyhow. Not like skin to skin.
Phone fucking just doesn’t do it for me. Neither does body painting─when I was a builder, Crazy Bob the nighttime assistant manager of the Work-Out on St. Clair invited me over to his mother’s group home where he and his Greek lesbian girlfriend Sophie kept a room. Bob had this idea that if I painted Sophie’s tits and if she’d returned the favour and decorated mine, we’d all get turned on and fuck between all those swirls of colour. I’m an artist. I mean I paint, but painting tits doesn’t inspire me. I’m kind of good at design and colour, but I have a long ways to go in the rendering department. “Mind if I take a photo?” Bob said. “Sure thing,” I said. I grimace when I’m around cameras. My lips purse and the tip of my nose elongates. I have this thing about my nose.
“So, what ya think?” Bob was saying behind the camera.
“Kinda boring, really.” I said.
“You’re no fun,” Bob said, putting his arm around his Sophie.
There’s nothing like music. Music is like sex for me. (What was that Pygmalion quote? ─“Gin was mother’s milk to her.”) I stand at the side of the stage with the music streaming toward me. The audience is a backdrop. One night at Healey’s, I inched my way to my favourite listening spot. The room was packed. Some were there to revel in the music of a famous blues band. Others pissed away a night on the town, drinking and getting rowdy.
The band was American, most of them from Chicago–keyboard, drummer, bass player, lead guitar. I stood watching the bass player, his fingers shifting slides with such ease, shuffling his legs with a soft side-to-side hip tie-in. The lead guitarist wore a large gold cross on his chest. And then I saw a mountain range of drums. Heard the swish of snares that draws women in, the hot symbols, a bit of a steady one, two, three beat, and just when the drummer was immersed in that scene, he’d switch, slide in more snares, and using the soft balls at the end of the stick, mute and ease the sound. He was in a different place, just jamming away and in the groove with his eyes closed and smiling.
I was wearing a white Lycra v-neck shirt and tight black shimmering gym pants. The room was packed─ strangers standing close to each other, shoulders and assorted body parts touching. A drunk’s hand arced out toward the lead guitarist’s instrument and my builder’s muscles tightened, tension branching out into my biceps and hands. “You don’t want to do that,” I said, seizing the guy’s wrist, which was small and bony. “I got no feeling left in my wrists,” the drunk whined. It was a sweet builder’s moment.
“Isn’t the bass player cute?” said a frizzy dark-haired chick to no one in particular. “I’m going to have him.” She swayed purposefully forward, her walk shifting into a ripe wiggle. I moved to the bar. The gym made me comfortable in my skin. Generally I ordered one white wine, two max. The whites were tasting cheaper and cheaper, so I usually brought gum for immediate after use. I flexed my pecs (for the sake of pecs and not tits, which are different entities). Flared my delts. Subtle flexing is an art.
The drummer ordered lemonade. “Thanks about the wrist thing. Man! You are strong!”
“It was cool, wasn’t it? Like the Olympics. Been training all my bodybuilding life for this moment. My arm was iron, man, one lead pipe. See I’m a certified hypnotist. So you got a witch and builder mix.”
The drummer stared. “My brother, Charlie, he’s the bass player, loved it. We were watching and man, you got some pipes there! I know he wants to thank you. We got this thing Charles and I, like if he sees you first, can’t have no fighting, two brothers on the road.”
“Where were the bouncers? My ex used to be a bouncer and he and his buddies would’ve been there in a flash. Probably broken the asshole’s wrist.”
I’ve always been intrigued with Garth’s dark side as he calls it. Charlie walked over. Short guy with a navy blue polka-dot kerchief wrapped around his head and tied in back and shoulder length dreads. Decent delts. A bit of a paunch, but builders don’t give a fuck about fat in the off season. He wanted to get ready for a photo shoot for a new album, kind of jazzy this one, he said, maybe I could give him a few work-out tips, though he was really into Zen these days, did I know anything about Zen and maybe we could talk? He was sharing a room with his brother the drummer, but if he could get a lift with me that would be so nice, we could talk and then maybe go upstairs and meet up with his brother.
Hey little girl, why the fuck you messing around with a musician? I brought Charlie to my silver rental. Almost slipped on the ice on Spadina Street, yelled whooeee, got lost along the way to his hotel, skidded in the snow, giggled a lot, and parked in a hopefully acceptable zone across the street from Quality Inn on Lombard, diagonally across the street from Gilda’s Club. Cancer across the street in a renovated fire hall and I was sashaying around, hoarding every ounce of available nightlife.
“C’mon just one kiss.” I opened the car door. “Kiss me,” he said, “c’mon just a simple kiss, just one. He leaned forward. His kiss was soft as candy and all the while I was telling myself off, even as we took the elevator to his room, which he did with such assurance, clinking his hotel room keys like he was congratulating himself. What the fuck you doing? Just another walk down another hotel hallway. I walked into the room. Two single beds with a small space between them and an equal space from one bed to the door, also from the farthest bed to the window and from each foot end of the beds to the window. He closed the door. I was definitely in.
“Your brother?” I said.
“Come let me kiss you.” he said, slipping his hands under my top and laying them flat on my stomach.
“Such muscles,” he whispered. “I bet you have a six-pack.”
“It’s a myth, sweetie, about builders and six packs. Only in-season. See I’m in my off- season. The world has this thing for rippling bodies. It’s about mass baby. Bottom line. You’re such a fine man, but I can’t, really. I’m not playing, I can’t honey. You should’ve grabbed the frizzy chick that was fucking hot for you.”
“I could’ve had her anytime. I love muscles. I chose you.”
I didn’t want any loving with a potential musician for my festival, because then, well then I was just a female among how many other eager mouths and cunts. So I told him no, but I could give him a massage, one of those upper body tough massages pressing out muscle knots while the masseuse politely inquires, “On a scale of one to ten, how does that feel?”
“Will you take of your shirt?” he said.
“No, but you can take off yours.”
At the end, I climbed over him, we both stood up, he reached into the “v” of my Lycra shirt and gently lifted my right breast. Took tender hold of my nipple and graciously kissed it. I will never forget.
“I can’t stay,” I whispered, straightening my clothes. “Gotta leave. You shoulda grabbed the young chick.with the dark curly hair.”
“But it’s you I want. I love a woman with muscles.”
I slid under his arm and out the door, apologizing all the way to the elevator. Can’t have the bass man fucking the impresario. There are those chicks who would run across hot coals for a musician. “Hey ya, honey,” a musician prick might call out, “you jest run across those coals for me and sure I’ll fuck ya.” And the wacko chick would dash across, purse, tits, and fake jewelry flying. An impresario was different. I was full of my art and in love with my soul. I had deep-set eyes. The attentions of various artists and writers did not cause me to feel honoured. I preferred . . . I didn’t know what I preferred, except I had no heroes and I liked it that way.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
The Poetry of Cunt
the poet martin wrote: one more thing,
where I'm from cunt is
about the worst word imaginable.
you seem to use it tenderly and I'm not trying
to be funny. what's the deal
there?
the poet janice wrote: vagina sounds too clinical, pussy
purrs and generally I don't like felines. vagina’s a name
for a quim queen or a prairie cunt. to regulate, ground
for sneaking out and coming home past one–vagina!
you’re grounded, don’t you know how
to manage your parts? grounded
for a month, tucked away in a closet,
and the chick with the disgraced cunt walks wilted
wearing pink so all the kids know that
if they peek under her skirt and crinolines,
there’s an empty space or worse,
a prosthetic vagina. an adult ashamed
might choose vagina, a word
whose first letter hides near the end
of the alphabet, but whose last
is first, cause you just can’t get away
from a cunt, even saying the word aloud
has guts and bravado. Now,
I can call a man a prick,
"Oh you fucking prick!" while he fondly
boasts about its heated heists and women
waving fans hotly chat about this prick
and that. But a cunt, baby,
is a real living thing, raw sex
and honest. it’s a word
of endearment like I love you sweet
sweetest of cunts, didn’t another
great poet, not named martin–some dude
called Will, compose in a slash
that bit about goodnight sweet cunt and
parting being sweet sorrow, cause you know
it’s true. when a cunt and a prick love each other
there is nothing gonna separate them, not
age, not another woman. that eye on a prick’s head
is straight focused in a taut loving line
with a cunt clearly in front. So I wondered,
when southern martin penned, cunt’s a baaad
word, what the fuck's this man scribbling, does
his cock take offense and if so baby,
cunt cunt cunt million times, it’s about your
cock, martin, with its eye
at the tip, the first line of vision taught,
that tactile tingling line
between a cock and a cunt, something
magnetic, something about love, lust
aching, hope, dreams, something
about trembling, waiting, so
how’s it bad, martin from the south. shy cunts
leave a latch on the door cautiously
opening and if you peek gently in, you’ll catch
sight of a fucking flower bed, a hot house
with tropical plants, Oh this cunt
is a tropical plant shifting colours, so’s
you never quite know
the season or what the weather's
like. you gotta test the temperature, baby,
when you're loving up an authentic cunt, shit
what a word and such a generous welcoming,
taking off the latch, letting
you come right on in and giving
you a tour, sneaking you to the back room, peering
into secret cupboards with glowing treasures so tightly
packed that when you open the door, they fall,
honey baby mine, sinking
into your arms, down to your cock, there really
is a botanical garden inside and a waterfall
to sit under and recite
the poetry of a cunt.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
where I'm from cunt is
about the worst word imaginable.
you seem to use it tenderly and I'm not trying
to be funny. what's the deal
there?
the poet janice wrote: vagina sounds too clinical, pussy
purrs and generally I don't like felines. vagina’s a name
for a quim queen or a prairie cunt. to regulate, ground
for sneaking out and coming home past one–vagina!
you’re grounded, don’t you know how
to manage your parts? grounded
for a month, tucked away in a closet,
and the chick with the disgraced cunt walks wilted
wearing pink so all the kids know that
if they peek under her skirt and crinolines,
there’s an empty space or worse,
a prosthetic vagina. an adult ashamed
might choose vagina, a word
whose first letter hides near the end
of the alphabet, but whose last
is first, cause you just can’t get away
from a cunt, even saying the word aloud
has guts and bravado. Now,
I can call a man a prick,
"Oh you fucking prick!" while he fondly
boasts about its heated heists and women
waving fans hotly chat about this prick
and that. But a cunt, baby,
is a real living thing, raw sex
and honest. it’s a word
of endearment like I love you sweet
sweetest of cunts, didn’t another
great poet, not named martin–some dude
called Will, compose in a slash
that bit about goodnight sweet cunt and
parting being sweet sorrow, cause you know
it’s true. when a cunt and a prick love each other
there is nothing gonna separate them, not
age, not another woman. that eye on a prick’s head
is straight focused in a taut loving line
with a cunt clearly in front. So I wondered,
when southern martin penned, cunt’s a baaad
word, what the fuck's this man scribbling, does
his cock take offense and if so baby,
cunt cunt cunt million times, it’s about your
cock, martin, with its eye
at the tip, the first line of vision taught,
that tactile tingling line
between a cock and a cunt, something
magnetic, something about love, lust
aching, hope, dreams, something
about trembling, waiting, so
how’s it bad, martin from the south. shy cunts
leave a latch on the door cautiously
opening and if you peek gently in, you’ll catch
sight of a fucking flower bed, a hot house
with tropical plants, Oh this cunt
is a tropical plant shifting colours, so’s
you never quite know
the season or what the weather's
like. you gotta test the temperature, baby,
when you're loving up an authentic cunt, shit
what a word and such a generous welcoming,
taking off the latch, letting
you come right on in and giving
you a tour, sneaking you to the back room, peering
into secret cupboards with glowing treasures so tightly
packed that when you open the door, they fall,
honey baby mine, sinking
into your arms, down to your cock, there really
is a botanical garden inside and a waterfall
to sit under and recite
the poetry of a cunt.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
When Garth Ass-Fucks My Soul
Garth’s a tall wide-square box man. We often argue.
His mother is Pentecostal. He was slapped around and
chain whipped, I saw the raised lightning scar
from boiling water poured on his thigh, traced the tip
of my index finger on its raised worn smoothness
in our early days when I sucked on his frost-bitten
toes, his mother having cast him into
the Ontario winter small town cold. He ate
chewed food from garbage cans, his sisters spitting
leftovers on the floor, while his mother crashed
holy roller, eat or I’m going to whup you, slashing
the air with a bicycle chain locked in the
cutlery drawer for just such fanfare and now
Garth is a tall-wide square man with a quicksilver
mind and spreading balls. His hands are like butterflies
on my hips when he takes me from behind. Sh sh
he says and sings lullabies to ease the pain. I guess
I love him for his spreading balls and the way
he places his hands on my hips, for
his orange pubic hair and his festering
love. Sometimes I want to slam him out the door
that stands like a stage set without walls, yet
he holds me, his left arm like a fallen tree
blocking roads, traffic, ongoing life.
When he drapes his left arm across my back, I duck
underneath. It’s true he’s a tall wide barrier and nothing
gets across or through. You think you got me I say, but
inside I’m fuckin’ outta here. He knows
he can’t hold me cause I’m an ex
body-builder escape artist, can’t fathom
that rage barrels down and on its exit, stops
at an en-route highway cunt with its gift shop of
memories such as Garth’s balls overlapping
his redwood thighs, his hands on my hips while
he sings his gentle ass-fucking lullabies. I know
all his secrets at least quite a few, I’ve got
the balls of a tree-stomping lumber Jack
from the north with a poet’s southern heart
and an artist’s ego. But if
he surrounds me with his unyielding arm
one more time, I think this highway cunt’s gonna
open its doors and post a sign—everything’s
on sale. How can I stay all
pissed off at a man who sings lullabies with
his big hands lying gentle on me while
he’s ass fucking my soul.
Coyright Janice Colman 2008 (Excerpt from upcoming poetry collection - Headstrong Poetry)
His mother is Pentecostal. He was slapped around and
chain whipped, I saw the raised lightning scar
from boiling water poured on his thigh, traced the tip
of my index finger on its raised worn smoothness
in our early days when I sucked on his frost-bitten
toes, his mother having cast him into
the Ontario winter small town cold. He ate
chewed food from garbage cans, his sisters spitting
leftovers on the floor, while his mother crashed
holy roller, eat or I’m going to whup you, slashing
the air with a bicycle chain locked in the
cutlery drawer for just such fanfare and now
Garth is a tall-wide square man with a quicksilver
mind and spreading balls. His hands are like butterflies
on my hips when he takes me from behind. Sh sh
he says and sings lullabies to ease the pain. I guess
I love him for his spreading balls and the way
he places his hands on my hips, for
his orange pubic hair and his festering
love. Sometimes I want to slam him out the door
that stands like a stage set without walls, yet
he holds me, his left arm like a fallen tree
blocking roads, traffic, ongoing life.
When he drapes his left arm across my back, I duck
underneath. It’s true he’s a tall wide barrier and nothing
gets across or through. You think you got me I say, but
inside I’m fuckin’ outta here. He knows
he can’t hold me cause I’m an ex
body-builder escape artist, can’t fathom
that rage barrels down and on its exit, stops
at an en-route highway cunt with its gift shop of
memories such as Garth’s balls overlapping
his redwood thighs, his hands on my hips while
he sings his gentle ass-fucking lullabies. I know
all his secrets at least quite a few, I’ve got
the balls of a tree-stomping lumber Jack
from the north with a poet’s southern heart
and an artist’s ego. But if
he surrounds me with his unyielding arm
one more time, I think this highway cunt’s gonna
open its doors and post a sign—everything’s
on sale. How can I stay all
pissed off at a man who sings lullabies with
his big hands lying gentle on me while
he’s ass fucking my soul.
Coyright Janice Colman 2008 (Excerpt from upcoming poetry collection - Headstrong Poetry)
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Mrs. Strubb's Dills and Gary's Cock
I'm on a sex sabbatical after deciding Dr. Stein and Dy were right. Coyle is not good for me. And anyhow I've fallen in lust with my bathroom floor. It’s late spring and Gary Brown is playing guitar on his sister Linda’s balcony overlooking our garden. He’s practising “Cocaine” because he’s learned how to pick like Reverend Gary Davis. I’m lying on the reclining lawn chair and following the sun around. At eleven in the morning, my body is shining with Johnston’s and Johnston’s Baby Oil and I’m lying near the hedges separating our houses. At five in the afternoon, I’m reclining below our raised patio and facing Gary who parks his chair so he can watch my journey and strum on his guitar. I’m wearing a favorite blue and green floral bikini with a push-up bra although my breasts really stand up by themselves. The bikini comes with a dress to match that has to be hand-washed.Gary stops playing his guitar, gets up, and disappears into his sister’s room. My face is lathered with a combination of Noxema, Oxenol, and Calamine Lotion. I have a handy basin of water, washcloth, and clean towels, so as Gary comes round the hedge, I’m completely presentable.
“Hey Janice. You’re growing up, you know. I can’t believe it’s the same Janice that Shelly peed on. Remember you were standing under our front balcony and Shelley peed on you and you started yelling.”
“Yeah, well, I just washed my hair and I was wearing my new white blouse and your creepy fart of a brother comes along, unzips and pisses on my head.”
Gary looks like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.” He starts playing “Freight Train” and I’m watching because he’s teaching me how to pick and anyhow he’s really nice to watch. “Hey,” he says, “You want to come over and get something to eat?”
I can’t open our fridge without my mother sneaking up to check whether I’m eating the family’s supper or slurping all the juice from the cherry container, or devouring a week’s supply of raspberries. She could be in her bathroom douching up, and there she is behind me. Gary likes to eat. First, he prepares a platter of food in his kitchen.
“You want some dills?”
“Strubbs?”
“Na, Mrs. White’s.”
“Sure,” I say.
“How about rye? You want rye or challah?”
“Listen, I’m putting a few raw eggs on that plate.” His father used to be a pro-boxer.
“Hey, Janice, you want coke or milk?”
"Hey, careful with that platter," he says and follows me downstairs. I trip and drop the eggs. “Lick it up,” he says, and I tell him to go to hell. He soothes me by playing ragtime on the old upright piano. I walk over to the pool table and shoot a few back-hand plays.
We’re lying on his mother’s old couch that she can’t part with because it’s from her honeymoon set and maybe she’ll get it reupholstered one day. But meanwhile the patent-leatherette sticks to my skin and pulls my flesh when I try to shift around. Gary kneads my left breast which really hurts, only I don’t want to say anything to break the mood, and he’s kissing me—sort of an elaborate dog lick that tickles at first, but then just gets on my nerves. I start writhing and moaning and digging my fingernails into his back and shaking my head from side as I’m listing my past boyfriends and eleven fucks like counting sheep. Sometimes I forget one or mess up the order and I have to begin all over again. And all the while Gary’s going on and on— “Damn damn damn,” he’s saying.
“Listen Janice, I have to know the woman well before . . . I have to feel relaxed you know. It has to be meaningful.”
“But you’ve known me all your life.”
“Yeah well, maybe I’ve known you too long. Maybe that’s it. Christ, it’s almost incest.”
“Look Gary, it’s OK, maybe some other time. Hey, all you have to do,” I say, kissing him on the nose—the Brown’s have small round noses—“is stand beneath my window and throw a stone at it.” I’m a romantic at heart.
“No Janice, I want to do it now. I mean it. Maybe if you suck me off a bit, I want to make it with you, I really do.”
I’m eyeing the Mrs. White’s pickle jar on the floor while I’m sliding around on top of him. All that writhing and arching is making me sore.
“Hey what the fuck are you doing? You’re crazy, I swear,” he shrieks as I pour pickle juice on his prick.
“You didn’t have champagne,” I say, slurping him up. I take him in my mouth, roll my tongue around and up and down. Meanwhile he’s groaning, “Oh you’re so good, who taught you all this shit, I’m going to come.” No fucking way am I going to let him come in my mouth. So I slide up and slip him into me so fast that he almost starts his “oh damn” litany again. But I ride well. When I was a kid I took riding lessons at Sunset Lodge outside Ste. Agathe. I loved riding those palominos and it shows. I wiggle my ass side to side and up and down and I figure I’ll lose three inches off my twenty-three inch waist. One thing about fucking, when it’s done right, it’s great exercise. Anyhow Gary shudders, comes, and sighs. I get my clothes.
His grandmother, Mrs. Garfield, is sitting in the kitchen sipping tea. “Say hello to your parents for me. You’ve grown up to be a beautiful young woman, hasn’t she Gary?”
Gary smiles. “That’s what I told her.”
“Well, well. Don’t be a stranger, dear.”
“Oh I won’t, Mrs. Garfield.”
Mrs. Garfield wears dresses with floral prints. She has a preference for short sleeves that press out the fat on the back of her upper arms like sausage escaping from its casing. Whenever Gary’s father Eli is in the middle of another bankruptcy, Mrs. Garfield wears her best dresses. For two weeks, as she sips tea at the kitchen table, she turns her head ever so slightly, “Don’t be a stranger, dear.”
In her top floor bedroom that covers the full length of the house, my mother is busy organizing. She’s wearing her brown lace-up oxfords with sturdy high heels. I’m not sure what she’s sorting out. A pale green sheet covers her bed on which she’s placed a worn black daily calendar, copies of the Gazette, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, Time Magazine, and a large pair of scissors with black plastic handles.
“What are you doing, Mum?
“Oh, Janice, I didn’t hear you come upstairs.”
“Are you busy?”
“Well, yes, no—I was just sorting.”
“I’m seeing a lot of Gary and I was thinking I might talk to you. I like him.”
“That’s nice, dear.”
“I mean really. I really like him.”
“I see.”
Her shoulders lift up and down; I know she’s sighing so I spill it out, fast.
“I’m thinking he’s the one, and I want, I’m wondering, but I need your permission, if I could get some birth control. The pill I mean, I want to go on the Pill.”
“I see.”
“I mean I’m coming to you the way I’m supposed to, you know, and— are you keeping these IF Stone Weeklies?”
“I have to sort through them first. I’ll have to talk to your father.” My mother’s eyes dart
from side to side. They do that, get big, with veins snaking through the whites, her pupils dashing about on frenzied patrol.
“But I’m asking you.” I look around her room—at her night table with assorted creams in coloured glass vials, a framed photo with the caption “Florence and Phil, Balmoral, Naussau, 1954” and a neat pile of books with her black reading glasses on top. Her cupboard door is open.
“I have to ask Daddy.”
“You always have to ask Daddy.”
“That’s not fair, Janice. This is a big issue and your father . . .” She brushes the back of her hand across her eyes.
“I know, I know,” I say and walk out.
“Hey Janice. You’re growing up, you know. I can’t believe it’s the same Janice that Shelly peed on. Remember you were standing under our front balcony and Shelley peed on you and you started yelling.”
“Yeah, well, I just washed my hair and I was wearing my new white blouse and your creepy fart of a brother comes along, unzips and pisses on my head.”
Gary looks like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.” He starts playing “Freight Train” and I’m watching because he’s teaching me how to pick and anyhow he’s really nice to watch. “Hey,” he says, “You want to come over and get something to eat?”
I can’t open our fridge without my mother sneaking up to check whether I’m eating the family’s supper or slurping all the juice from the cherry container, or devouring a week’s supply of raspberries. She could be in her bathroom douching up, and there she is behind me. Gary likes to eat. First, he prepares a platter of food in his kitchen.
“You want some dills?”
“Strubbs?”
“Na, Mrs. White’s.”
“Sure,” I say.
“How about rye? You want rye or challah?”
“Listen, I’m putting a few raw eggs on that plate.” His father used to be a pro-boxer.
“Hey, Janice, you want coke or milk?”
"Hey, careful with that platter," he says and follows me downstairs. I trip and drop the eggs. “Lick it up,” he says, and I tell him to go to hell. He soothes me by playing ragtime on the old upright piano. I walk over to the pool table and shoot a few back-hand plays.
We’re lying on his mother’s old couch that she can’t part with because it’s from her honeymoon set and maybe she’ll get it reupholstered one day. But meanwhile the patent-leatherette sticks to my skin and pulls my flesh when I try to shift around. Gary kneads my left breast which really hurts, only I don’t want to say anything to break the mood, and he’s kissing me—sort of an elaborate dog lick that tickles at first, but then just gets on my nerves. I start writhing and moaning and digging my fingernails into his back and shaking my head from side as I’m listing my past boyfriends and eleven fucks like counting sheep. Sometimes I forget one or mess up the order and I have to begin all over again. And all the while Gary’s going on and on— “Damn damn damn,” he’s saying.
“Listen Janice, I have to know the woman well before . . . I have to feel relaxed you know. It has to be meaningful.”
“But you’ve known me all your life.”
“Yeah well, maybe I’ve known you too long. Maybe that’s it. Christ, it’s almost incest.”
“Look Gary, it’s OK, maybe some other time. Hey, all you have to do,” I say, kissing him on the nose—the Brown’s have small round noses—“is stand beneath my window and throw a stone at it.” I’m a romantic at heart.
“No Janice, I want to do it now. I mean it. Maybe if you suck me off a bit, I want to make it with you, I really do.”
I’m eyeing the Mrs. White’s pickle jar on the floor while I’m sliding around on top of him. All that writhing and arching is making me sore.
“Hey what the fuck are you doing? You’re crazy, I swear,” he shrieks as I pour pickle juice on his prick.
“You didn’t have champagne,” I say, slurping him up. I take him in my mouth, roll my tongue around and up and down. Meanwhile he’s groaning, “Oh you’re so good, who taught you all this shit, I’m going to come.” No fucking way am I going to let him come in my mouth. So I slide up and slip him into me so fast that he almost starts his “oh damn” litany again. But I ride well. When I was a kid I took riding lessons at Sunset Lodge outside Ste. Agathe. I loved riding those palominos and it shows. I wiggle my ass side to side and up and down and I figure I’ll lose three inches off my twenty-three inch waist. One thing about fucking, when it’s done right, it’s great exercise. Anyhow Gary shudders, comes, and sighs. I get my clothes.
His grandmother, Mrs. Garfield, is sitting in the kitchen sipping tea. “Say hello to your parents for me. You’ve grown up to be a beautiful young woman, hasn’t she Gary?”
Gary smiles. “That’s what I told her.”
“Well, well. Don’t be a stranger, dear.”
“Oh I won’t, Mrs. Garfield.”
Mrs. Garfield wears dresses with floral prints. She has a preference for short sleeves that press out the fat on the back of her upper arms like sausage escaping from its casing. Whenever Gary’s father Eli is in the middle of another bankruptcy, Mrs. Garfield wears her best dresses. For two weeks, as she sips tea at the kitchen table, she turns her head ever so slightly, “Don’t be a stranger, dear.”
In her top floor bedroom that covers the full length of the house, my mother is busy organizing. She’s wearing her brown lace-up oxfords with sturdy high heels. I’m not sure what she’s sorting out. A pale green sheet covers her bed on which she’s placed a worn black daily calendar, copies of the Gazette, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, Time Magazine, and a large pair of scissors with black plastic handles.
“What are you doing, Mum?
“Oh, Janice, I didn’t hear you come upstairs.”
“Are you busy?”
“Well, yes, no—I was just sorting.”
“I’m seeing a lot of Gary and I was thinking I might talk to you. I like him.”
“That’s nice, dear.”
“I mean really. I really like him.”
“I see.”
Her shoulders lift up and down; I know she’s sighing so I spill it out, fast.
“I’m thinking he’s the one, and I want, I’m wondering, but I need your permission, if I could get some birth control. The pill I mean, I want to go on the Pill.”
“I see.”
“I mean I’m coming to you the way I’m supposed to, you know, and— are you keeping these IF Stone Weeklies?”
“I have to sort through them first. I’ll have to talk to your father.” My mother’s eyes dart
from side to side. They do that, get big, with veins snaking through the whites, her pupils dashing about on frenzied patrol.
“But I’m asking you.” I look around her room—at her night table with assorted creams in coloured glass vials, a framed photo with the caption “Florence and Phil, Balmoral, Naussau, 1954” and a neat pile of books with her black reading glasses on top. Her cupboard door is open.
“I have to ask Daddy.”
“You always have to ask Daddy.”
“That’s not fair, Janice. This is a big issue and your father . . .” She brushes the back of her hand across her eyes.
“I know, I know,” I say and walk out.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
c'mon home
when you kiss my
lips an’ fondle the 2
beneath, oh fuck me i smile
with my teeth
fuck me baby hard sendin
me to heaven
in yur back yard, layin
undr th stars i can’t re member
so well, oh jack jackie jack c’mon
honey i wantya so bad, th ferst
smart fuck i evr had. ya don’t have
ta sound high brow t me, cause
i like yur eye lashes, jst
slurp your hand down sayin
baaby mmm an’ kiss
my neck, i’m tired sweet
cock, goin t bed alone, jack come,
c’mon home.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
lips an’ fondle the 2
beneath, oh fuck me i smile
with my teeth
fuck me baby hard sendin
me to heaven
in yur back yard, layin
undr th stars i can’t re member
so well, oh jack jackie jack c’mon
honey i wantya so bad, th ferst
smart fuck i evr had. ya don’t have
ta sound high brow t me, cause
i like yur eye lashes, jst
slurp your hand down sayin
baaby mmm an’ kiss
my neck, i’m tired sweet
cock, goin t bed alone, jack come,
c’mon home.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Saturday, December 6, 2008
jack n' janice
jack, i said, this is janice–i thought
shit such a sexy name jacknjanice
wanting to say jack c’mon over here, catch
the next flight and c’mon over here,
fuck me cause i wanna fuck a literate
dude, i mean he doesn’t have to quote shit,
doesn’t have to whisper words in my ear, although
i’d love a breath of air and if he kisses
my neck i’ll, what the heck, can’t even
deep a cock anymore, fuckin out
of practice too lazy to write words like
he does this and then he doos dat
and then he’s slurpin on my cunt makin
all deese slurpin sloppin noises, he slaps
me on the ass you can hear WHAP! leavin
red fing r prints behind on my
be hind let me shove it behin ya,
I love your beehiny, whatya got baby show
me whatya got–i got what all th other
girls gots 2 tits.1 belly button, 1
cunt with 2 lips, 1 assholes, 2
cheeks, 1 mouth, 1 soul, maybe yours,
1 tongue and with yours makes 2,
1 cunt feelin all anxious and
zippy inside skin on tits raised
for strokin, 2 nipples
elongated from suckin, under
my man’s t-shirt, his on my bare
skin tonight with my cunt on fire
and sizzle spark fizz hum
hummin steady rhythm
stays on motor moanin,
fuck me jack just
find your place on top and
slam bam in, ram
and slam-bam ram, you won’t
get any complaints from me no
upright mission with holy
intentions not me, not this fuck (up)
with the wrecked-up hip and swollen
red beneath my left eye, fuck
me jack maybe I write lousy
poetry but i’m
a good fuck.
Coyright Janice Colman 2008
shit such a sexy name jacknjanice
wanting to say jack c’mon over here, catch
the next flight and c’mon over here,
fuck me cause i wanna fuck a literate
dude, i mean he doesn’t have to quote shit,
doesn’t have to whisper words in my ear, although
i’d love a breath of air and if he kisses
my neck i’ll, what the heck, can’t even
deep a cock anymore, fuckin out
of practice too lazy to write words like
he does this and then he doos dat
and then he’s slurpin on my cunt makin
all deese slurpin sloppin noises, he slaps
me on the ass you can hear WHAP! leavin
red fing r prints behind on my
be hind let me shove it behin ya,
I love your beehiny, whatya got baby show
me whatya got–i got what all th other
girls gots 2 tits.1 belly button, 1
cunt with 2 lips, 1 assholes, 2
cheeks, 1 mouth, 1 soul, maybe yours,
1 tongue and with yours makes 2,
1 cunt feelin all anxious and
zippy inside skin on tits raised
for strokin, 2 nipples
elongated from suckin, under
my man’s t-shirt, his on my bare
skin tonight with my cunt on fire
and sizzle spark fizz hum
hummin steady rhythm
stays on motor moanin,
fuck me jack just
find your place on top and
slam bam in, ram
and slam-bam ram, you won’t
get any complaints from me no
upright mission with holy
intentions not me, not this fuck (up)
with the wrecked-up hip and swollen
red beneath my left eye, fuck
me jack maybe I write lousy
poetry but i’m
a good fuck.
Coyright Janice Colman 2008
Friday, December 5, 2008
Lost in This World
“She’s hyperventilating.”
This is no joy ride. I’m doing all the exercises - relaxing opposite muscle groups, breathing in and out like a dimpled lady dozing off watching her late night show, and saying “lake” just like we planned, so Abie can tell me all about Killarney and the quartz mountains and how Pluto chased the bear and how I was chest high in muddy water. Abie has the time watch he used for sprinting at Wager High. I can’t imagine him sprinting, but then maybe I can. He’s got a lot of spirit and a heaping portion of competitive edge─he’s a hunter, he says.
Abie circles my belly with his fingers. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I say. “Rub my back, it’s my back,” because it feels like a dozen loggers have hauled off my lower back and they have a deadline with cash incentives. The lady across the way is yelling and wildly moaning “Yi yi yi.” “Will you tell her to shut the fuck up?” I say. “I’ve been here for twenty-two fucking hours and the bitch is screaming─” I feel a pulling and twisting: “Lake,” I hiss at Abie and he goes into his schtick which is what he calls his monologue. He says I’m not Jewish because I don’t talk Yinglish and I never set foot into a synagogue until I met him and then I broke out in hives.
“She’s ready.” Our procession speeds forward, nurse on one side, Abie dashing in front with his Minolta and I’m grinning away, giving Abie the finger as he clicks away. I adore fame.
“Sweetheart, my sweetheart, sweet heart,” I say, and I’m hers. From that moment there’s a change of scenery: the set with the husband glides stage left and is forever replaced by mother and child. He brings me yellow daisies and oranges and when I’m afraid to change her diaper, she is so skinny all arms and legs and big blue monkey eyes, he shows me “you see, you just ssslip the diaper under─”
“But it’s just as big as she is," I say. He changes the diaper like a seasoned cowhand and the nurse Dorothy flashes him a smile as bright as her red hair.
She cries all night. I ring for the nurse and still she cries. The nurse rustles in white, starched cool as a lily. “She’s just new in this world, poor little thing,” she says.
My heart ripped that night and never healed. I guess somehow I knew─she’d always be a poor little thing, always lost in this world.
This is no joy ride. I’m doing all the exercises - relaxing opposite muscle groups, breathing in and out like a dimpled lady dozing off watching her late night show, and saying “lake” just like we planned, so Abie can tell me all about Killarney and the quartz mountains and how Pluto chased the bear and how I was chest high in muddy water. Abie has the time watch he used for sprinting at Wager High. I can’t imagine him sprinting, but then maybe I can. He’s got a lot of spirit and a heaping portion of competitive edge─he’s a hunter, he says.
Abie circles my belly with his fingers. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I say. “Rub my back, it’s my back,” because it feels like a dozen loggers have hauled off my lower back and they have a deadline with cash incentives. The lady across the way is yelling and wildly moaning “Yi yi yi.” “Will you tell her to shut the fuck up?” I say. “I’ve been here for twenty-two fucking hours and the bitch is screaming─” I feel a pulling and twisting: “Lake,” I hiss at Abie and he goes into his schtick which is what he calls his monologue. He says I’m not Jewish because I don’t talk Yinglish and I never set foot into a synagogue until I met him and then I broke out in hives.
“She’s ready.” Our procession speeds forward, nurse on one side, Abie dashing in front with his Minolta and I’m grinning away, giving Abie the finger as he clicks away. I adore fame.
“Sweetheart, my sweetheart, sweet heart,” I say, and I’m hers. From that moment there’s a change of scenery: the set with the husband glides stage left and is forever replaced by mother and child. He brings me yellow daisies and oranges and when I’m afraid to change her diaper, she is so skinny all arms and legs and big blue monkey eyes, he shows me “you see, you just ssslip the diaper under─”
“But it’s just as big as she is," I say. He changes the diaper like a seasoned cowhand and the nurse Dorothy flashes him a smile as bright as her red hair.
She cries all night. I ring for the nurse and still she cries. The nurse rustles in white, starched cool as a lily. “She’s just new in this world, poor little thing,” she says.
My heart ripped that night and never healed. I guess somehow I knew─she’d always be a poor little thing, always lost in this world.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Post Script to Fucking and Dead Rabbits
"Eleven Israeli athletes at Olympic Games in Munich are killed after eight members of an Arab terrorist group invade Olympic Village; five guerrillas and one policeman are also killed (Sept. 5)."
“Lisa,” I say, “I wrote today.”
“Oh yeah, what did you write?” she asks.
“Well, not that much. I had trouble writing, but then I listened to music and it’s amazing, music is.” I don’t want to tell her Garth has upset me, angry as he is that I didn’t answer my phone when he called and what does he expect anyhow ─ I’m not on call and he’s so heavy and wide, he blocks out even the winter sun.
“So what did you write?” she asks again. I tell her it has to do with her father and what I’m about to say has no sex in it, because she can’t hear her mother has a breathing cunt.
“About your father and I in Guelph 1972, first in the motel before the townhouse, and then about the farm on highway - what was it?”
“I wasn’t there, remember?” she says, and I look at her because she's right of course. But still I figure she can just reach inside and pull out the right answer like swooping a hand into one of those trainer bras and extracting Kleenex.
“Anyhow they were just vignettes, because I have to flesh out my life. So I wrote about the first step for mankind─ how we were in this motel in Guelph because we didn’t have our place set up and we were watching . . .”
Lisa gets up to bring her dishes to the sink. She comes home tired from teaching ESL and she calls up hello from the front door and eats left-overs while I worry about lean times, this damn recession and the cost of food.
“You’re talking about something that took place in 1969, Mom,” she says.
“I remember it. I was watching with your father in our motel room.”
“Not in ‘72” she says. “You have to be factual when you mention events that actually took place, even in fiction.”
And it is odd, how memories of events merge with years. These days I'm looking at my life scenes on old microfilm when a prop pops out and lures me in. "I can’t stay for long," I say, but I take of my coat anyhow. How does this guilt feel? It casts a chill on my heart, like muscles damp and aching from inclement weather.
It’s odd about memories,” I say to Lisa. I want her to know I’m weaving my way through these sets with their misplaced props, and I land up in a rumpled motel bed watching the moon landing in 1972, while on the 1969 Bourret Street set a TV announcer reports about eight Jewish athletes killed in Munich.
“You have to be accurate,” she says.
“Maybe I should add a footnote," I say.
“Or rewrite,” she says.
“My life?” I say and then I add I don’t really mean that at all and tell her I’m reading Bukwoski and that I laughed out loud in my bed last night.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
“Lisa,” I say, “I wrote today.”
“Oh yeah, what did you write?” she asks.
“Well, not that much. I had trouble writing, but then I listened to music and it’s amazing, music is.” I don’t want to tell her Garth has upset me, angry as he is that I didn’t answer my phone when he called and what does he expect anyhow ─ I’m not on call and he’s so heavy and wide, he blocks out even the winter sun.
“So what did you write?” she asks again. I tell her it has to do with her father and what I’m about to say has no sex in it, because she can’t hear her mother has a breathing cunt.
“About your father and I in Guelph 1972, first in the motel before the townhouse, and then about the farm on highway - what was it?”
“I wasn’t there, remember?” she says, and I look at her because she's right of course. But still I figure she can just reach inside and pull out the right answer like swooping a hand into one of those trainer bras and extracting Kleenex.
“Anyhow they were just vignettes, because I have to flesh out my life. So I wrote about the first step for mankind─ how we were in this motel in Guelph because we didn’t have our place set up and we were watching . . .”
Lisa gets up to bring her dishes to the sink. She comes home tired from teaching ESL and she calls up hello from the front door and eats left-overs while I worry about lean times, this damn recession and the cost of food.
“You’re talking about something that took place in 1969, Mom,” she says.
“I remember it. I was watching with your father in our motel room.”
“Not in ‘72” she says. “You have to be factual when you mention events that actually took place, even in fiction.”
And it is odd, how memories of events merge with years. These days I'm looking at my life scenes on old microfilm when a prop pops out and lures me in. "I can’t stay for long," I say, but I take of my coat anyhow. How does this guilt feel? It casts a chill on my heart, like muscles damp and aching from inclement weather.
It’s odd about memories,” I say to Lisa. I want her to know I’m weaving my way through these sets with their misplaced props, and I land up in a rumpled motel bed watching the moon landing in 1972, while on the 1969 Bourret Street set a TV announcer reports about eight Jewish athletes killed in Munich.
“You have to be accurate,” she says.
“Maybe I should add a footnote," I say.
“Or rewrite,” she says.
“My life?” I say and then I add I don’t really mean that at all and tell her I’m reading Bukwoski and that I laughed out loud in my bed last night.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Something about Fucking and Dead Rabbits
More from Edinburgh Road:
Abie lies under our green Pontiac which is propped up with two steel girders. He’s replacing the transmission with a refurbished model, his legs reminding me of the underbelly of dead fish. “I’m a good man to have around in an emergency,” he calls out and right now I believe him.
“The cats are escaping from their jackets,” Abie says. “You need to add more grommets.”
He’s doing a study on sleep deprivation and he says he’s going to be published and famous in the scientific world. I bring him our maroon book of world maps.
“Show me,” I say. “I’ve got these gaps, you know. So where is it, this scientific world?”
“Don’t be a smart ass,” he says.
But the thing is these cats are hooked up to a treadmill that keeps going and going so they can’t sleep and I’m making canvas straitjackets for them. “Are you sure you should do this?” I say. “This is top level research,” he says, showing me Russian abstracts he’s photocopied. He parades documentation, although he knows I don’t read them, which is maybe why he shows them to me. He takes me to a locked room in the basement of an old university building. The door is grey steel. Inside, lined up against walls and cluttering space between, are moveable stacks of metal shelves loaded with cages containing white mice and sepia shavings. “This one is mine,” he says and lifts off the cover. “Just keep blowing on him and he won’t jump out."
I blow and blow and then I’m screaming, running around the table, “He’s on my head, he’s on my head,” and Abie’s laughing like a wild man.
Guelph 1972
There’s a Red Barn here and a movie drive-in just outside town. We watch one step for mankind from a rumpled bed in our motel room. “This is history,” Abie says, “do you realize what this means?”
“Yes, yes I do,” I say, staring at the moon shimmering blue on TV from our disheveled double bed parked like Parkdale billboard in the centre of the room and at Abie whose name I have never felt comfortable using, opting to use a parade of nicknames that come and go with moods and seasons, sometimes waiting for his eyes to pause on me before finding their way home to the TV screen.
We play with plans ─ moving to a moshav, a commune in Southern Ontario, renting an old farm house and taking care of goats, horses, and cows for the farmer. “I was brought up on a farm until I was seven,” Abie says to the farmer’s son. Abie identifies with “Lord of the Flies” and I can see why.
I don’t know why we left the townhouse. I really liked skimming through the field of corn stalks with Abie and Pluto. Inside I was lonely, I guess. Some people grow fat to keep them company; I was hell bent on growing a baby. Maybe it was just time to move on, so I quit school two full courses before the end of my program. Abie didn’t mind; he’d stopped and started so many courses, and anyhow, he was always ready for a fuck, day or night. We ended up renting an upper duplex at the edge of highway six outside Guelph.
Behind our house there’s fenced in lot which, when I ask him and I ask about lots of things, Abie says is an acre deep and wide for three horses and two goats, and to the right, an old farm house with a verandah and curlicue wood carvings. Abie says it’s a drying-out facility for heroin addicts. We take the house anyway. I sew curtains with big sloppy stitches and make my own bagels with poppy seeds that require boiling before baking, my own challah and one-hundred-percent rye, and also strawberry preserves, and I hold my legs up when Abie fucks me so the sperm meets a wild egg and falls in love. “Maybe you should see a psychiatrist,” the school counselor said when I broke down after telling him how long I’d been trying. “Two months,” I said, “two months.” I didn’t check out another counselor. Instead I went home to Abie who fucked me while I held my legs in the air with a pillow beneath my ass.
“You gotta stay like that for fifteen minutes. So the sperm travels up instead of leaking out,” Abie says.
“Keep me company,” I say.
“Sure thing,” he says, “be right back."
“Is it is time yet?” I call out.
“So?” I call again.
“Now?”
“I thought you were going to keep me company.”
“Hey, you want a piece of challah with butter?” he says. “How about some red wine cheese on the side?
Abie takes a job at the Don Jail and comes home smelling like sweat and urine. Our downstairs neighbours have wild fights─screaming, banging, yelping, slamming doors, breaking glass. “Don’t listen,” Abie says. He doesn’t call the police because I’m alone during the day and sometimes at night. Meron’s arm is in a cast and Wayne hunts rabbits and skins them alive, which Abie says he knows because of the time he went on a truck ride with Wayne and his friends.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” he says, “I thought you’d be too upset.”
You went on a ride and watched them skin rabbits?” I say.
“Live,” he says. And then he tells me how he leaned out the window and threw up, even though his father used to bag kittens in a sack and drown them, there were just too many of them, he says by way of explanation. And Wayne and his friends were so drunk and whooping it up, they didn’t even notice.
“Why didn’t you get out and why the hell didn’t you say something?”
“We were in the woods and they had guns.”
“I know─” I say.
“So they would have thrown me out and left me there, or shot me and thrown me out and left me there.”
I’m so quiet inside I can hear the wind. "You should have heard them screeching,” he says and I think of my dead baby rabbits that first summer. I put my head on the curve of his neck just before his shoulder and he bends his head down to touch mine.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Abie lies under our green Pontiac which is propped up with two steel girders. He’s replacing the transmission with a refurbished model, his legs reminding me of the underbelly of dead fish. “I’m a good man to have around in an emergency,” he calls out and right now I believe him.
“The cats are escaping from their jackets,” Abie says. “You need to add more grommets.”
He’s doing a study on sleep deprivation and he says he’s going to be published and famous in the scientific world. I bring him our maroon book of world maps.
“Show me,” I say. “I’ve got these gaps, you know. So where is it, this scientific world?”
“Don’t be a smart ass,” he says.
But the thing is these cats are hooked up to a treadmill that keeps going and going so they can’t sleep and I’m making canvas straitjackets for them. “Are you sure you should do this?” I say. “This is top level research,” he says, showing me Russian abstracts he’s photocopied. He parades documentation, although he knows I don’t read them, which is maybe why he shows them to me. He takes me to a locked room in the basement of an old university building. The door is grey steel. Inside, lined up against walls and cluttering space between, are moveable stacks of metal shelves loaded with cages containing white mice and sepia shavings. “This one is mine,” he says and lifts off the cover. “Just keep blowing on him and he won’t jump out."
I blow and blow and then I’m screaming, running around the table, “He’s on my head, he’s on my head,” and Abie’s laughing like a wild man.
Guelph 1972
There’s a Red Barn here and a movie drive-in just outside town. We watch one step for mankind from a rumpled bed in our motel room. “This is history,” Abie says, “do you realize what this means?”
“Yes, yes I do,” I say, staring at the moon shimmering blue on TV from our disheveled double bed parked like Parkdale billboard in the centre of the room and at Abie whose name I have never felt comfortable using, opting to use a parade of nicknames that come and go with moods and seasons, sometimes waiting for his eyes to pause on me before finding their way home to the TV screen.
We play with plans ─ moving to a moshav, a commune in Southern Ontario, renting an old farm house and taking care of goats, horses, and cows for the farmer. “I was brought up on a farm until I was seven,” Abie says to the farmer’s son. Abie identifies with “Lord of the Flies” and I can see why.
I don’t know why we left the townhouse. I really liked skimming through the field of corn stalks with Abie and Pluto. Inside I was lonely, I guess. Some people grow fat to keep them company; I was hell bent on growing a baby. Maybe it was just time to move on, so I quit school two full courses before the end of my program. Abie didn’t mind; he’d stopped and started so many courses, and anyhow, he was always ready for a fuck, day or night. We ended up renting an upper duplex at the edge of highway six outside Guelph.
Behind our house there’s fenced in lot which, when I ask him and I ask about lots of things, Abie says is an acre deep and wide for three horses and two goats, and to the right, an old farm house with a verandah and curlicue wood carvings. Abie says it’s a drying-out facility for heroin addicts. We take the house anyway. I sew curtains with big sloppy stitches and make my own bagels with poppy seeds that require boiling before baking, my own challah and one-hundred-percent rye, and also strawberry preserves, and I hold my legs up when Abie fucks me so the sperm meets a wild egg and falls in love. “Maybe you should see a psychiatrist,” the school counselor said when I broke down after telling him how long I’d been trying. “Two months,” I said, “two months.” I didn’t check out another counselor. Instead I went home to Abie who fucked me while I held my legs in the air with a pillow beneath my ass.
“You gotta stay like that for fifteen minutes. So the sperm travels up instead of leaking out,” Abie says.
“Keep me company,” I say.
“Sure thing,” he says, “be right back."
“Is it is time yet?” I call out.
“So?” I call again.
“Now?”
“I thought you were going to keep me company.”
“Hey, you want a piece of challah with butter?” he says. “How about some red wine cheese on the side?
Abie takes a job at the Don Jail and comes home smelling like sweat and urine. Our downstairs neighbours have wild fights─screaming, banging, yelping, slamming doors, breaking glass. “Don’t listen,” Abie says. He doesn’t call the police because I’m alone during the day and sometimes at night. Meron’s arm is in a cast and Wayne hunts rabbits and skins them alive, which Abie says he knows because of the time he went on a truck ride with Wayne and his friends.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” he says, “I thought you’d be too upset.”
You went on a ride and watched them skin rabbits?” I say.
“Live,” he says. And then he tells me how he leaned out the window and threw up, even though his father used to bag kittens in a sack and drown them, there were just too many of them, he says by way of explanation. And Wayne and his friends were so drunk and whooping it up, they didn’t even notice.
“Why didn’t you get out and why the hell didn’t you say something?”
“We were in the woods and they had guns.”
“I know─” I say.
“So they would have thrown me out and left me there, or shot me and thrown me out and left me there.”
I’m so quiet inside I can hear the wind. "You should have heard them screeching,” he says and I think of my dead baby rabbits that first summer. I put my head on the curve of his neck just before his shoulder and he bends his head down to touch mine.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
On Fucking - A Love Poem
Dressed, her clothes sliding silk, she
thinks of his hands skimming
her skin and how
he stands silent startling
all in black. She is naked
before his eyes, a quivering leaf
lacking strength, folding in
at the knees, her cunt turning
over, starting and restarting. She is
a trembling cunt, a throat, the nape
of a tender neck, a mind
where images collide. A seeking tongue
without words, legs apart, tensed,
veins coming tributaries on a raring
downward course, caught
in the net of his glance, her eyes
the wanderings of his soul.
A soul searches for a lifetime, gliding
over land, sinking into oceans silently
soaring, slow dancing over to rest
gently on a disarming prick. And if
he whispers in his low voice,
she will come in the rumblings
of his timbre, lighting upon
his unyielding soul. When a man enters
a woman, his cock leaves
a mark, a memory a measure. Sits
country swinging inside, rocking her
to the heavens and back that she
might sing the only song of “oh and honey
sweetie and yours.” When a man’s heart
finds its point in his prick with its mark
arranged, searing past barriers streaming
through a woman’s cunt flashing
with the speed of light clear through,
in that moment life is what
it is meant to be, has substance,
power, lacks certainty, appearing frail
trembles: a quivering leaf.
The woman arches and aches,
is his, can be taken surging
with swaying motion opening. Again
and again deeper, a midday sun’s burrowing,
heat streaming always summer, yet ever
a shady spot, a wraparound porch with
one of those gliding chair swings. A cunt
is a place to stay in, find repose, gather
music. And this morning with clothes
over, she is naked for him.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
thinks of his hands skimming
her skin and how
he stands silent startling
all in black. She is naked
before his eyes, a quivering leaf
lacking strength, folding in
at the knees, her cunt turning
over, starting and restarting. She is
a trembling cunt, a throat, the nape
of a tender neck, a mind
where images collide. A seeking tongue
without words, legs apart, tensed,
veins coming tributaries on a raring
downward course, caught
in the net of his glance, her eyes
the wanderings of his soul.
A soul searches for a lifetime, gliding
over land, sinking into oceans silently
soaring, slow dancing over to rest
gently on a disarming prick. And if
he whispers in his low voice,
she will come in the rumblings
of his timbre, lighting upon
his unyielding soul. When a man enters
a woman, his cock leaves
a mark, a memory a measure. Sits
country swinging inside, rocking her
to the heavens and back that she
might sing the only song of “oh and honey
sweetie and yours.” When a man’s heart
finds its point in his prick with its mark
arranged, searing past barriers streaming
through a woman’s cunt flashing
with the speed of light clear through,
in that moment life is what
it is meant to be, has substance,
power, lacks certainty, appearing frail
trembles: a quivering leaf.
The woman arches and aches,
is his, can be taken surging
with swaying motion opening. Again
and again deeper, a midday sun’s burrowing,
heat streaming always summer, yet ever
a shady spot, a wraparound porch with
one of those gliding chair swings. A cunt
is a place to stay in, find repose, gather
music. And this morning with clothes
over, she is naked for him.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
Kema from Martinique
If I go I am never coming back, never
again I will set my feet on this earth. I’m
a good boy, not a criminal, not Kema.
I have done nothing wrong.
Not for love? Kema?
Never. That’s it.
So you’re saying pride is more
important than love?
I’m sorry?
Alors. tu penses que, pride, fière, c’est
plus important que l’amour?
I’m a man, a real man, how do you say, not
macho, big tough. I want for you
and your girls, not to be, not to, tomber.
Je nes laisse pas jamais tombé.
Jamais. I will write everyday. I want to know
everything what happens. I need
to know. When I come back only you,
you are the first person
I want to see. No one. Only you
and your girls. I have something
now, plus de musique, I have
a girl. At Content Connection I say, I have
a beautiful girl. I am lucky. Every day
we write. You will not forget
Kema.
When Kema touches my heart at the back
of my throat, he laughs even though
I choke. Maybe it’s because
I have less practice. I’m alone
a lot. I want my hair to fall across
a man’s chest, his fingers
to rub across my lips. I want him to bruise
my lips with his kisses, sweep my hair across
his thighs, his chest his neck his
face his cock. I want to stand
at that scissor-sheered edge, to feel I would
travel to remote territories for this man Kema
from Martinique. That’s all
that I want. Is it asking too much?
Do you think?
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
again I will set my feet on this earth. I’m
a good boy, not a criminal, not Kema.
I have done nothing wrong.
Not for love? Kema?
Never. That’s it.
So you’re saying pride is more
important than love?
I’m sorry?
Alors. tu penses que, pride, fière, c’est
plus important que l’amour?
I’m a man, a real man, how do you say, not
macho, big tough. I want for you
and your girls, not to be, not to, tomber.
Je nes laisse pas jamais tombé.
Jamais. I will write everyday. I want to know
everything what happens. I need
to know. When I come back only you,
you are the first person
I want to see. No one. Only you
and your girls. I have something
now, plus de musique, I have
a girl. At Content Connection I say, I have
a beautiful girl. I am lucky. Every day
we write. You will not forget
Kema.
When Kema touches my heart at the back
of my throat, he laughs even though
I choke. Maybe it’s because
I have less practice. I’m alone
a lot. I want my hair to fall across
a man’s chest, his fingers
to rub across my lips. I want him to bruise
my lips with his kisses, sweep my hair across
his thighs, his chest his neck his
face his cock. I want to stand
at that scissor-sheered edge, to feel I would
travel to remote territories for this man Kema
from Martinique. That’s all
that I want. Is it asking too much?
Do you think?
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Thursday, November 27, 2008
The Forests of Rousseau
His body like a dense shadow broods
over her restless sleep, she shifts
and sighs, within the tide of her sleeping
breath, she worries whether
her heartbeat rivals his sullen resolve,
whether she can sing unscathed within
his seething mass, pulled toward such blazing
light, she has been warned about mirages, the aftermath
of longing defeated. What if
she dresses for rain with galoshes
and an old coat, hoping for eventual sun, perhaps
a sand dune. What if he is all
there is; she is forever thrashing through
his body always murky as sunless
skies prevail. What if she
wanders forever searching upon
disconnected lines and love
taunts grotesquely, her heart
remains weary, she forgets
how daylight feels, its colors
caressing, what love felt like, how
a catch in her throat could steal
her breath away. What if
she grows roots, water flowing darkly
through, and although you might think
she has been replenished, the truth
is that water seeping so far below the earth—
once she cultivated a plant quite alive,
lush even though times were not. Every morning
with great care she watered
the shrub with its random
white bulbs, believing they might
grow old together except
the excess of fluids eventually
drowned the plant which had reminded
her of the forests of Rousseau. She feels
a kinship toward the plant with her daily ritual
of tears and wonders about clichés, the romance
and inevitable truth within, she shifts
aside one sleeve and then another, always
another. He speaks of fallen angels, while
all she sees is the artful dodger with wings
and a cape.
over her restless sleep, she shifts
and sighs, within the tide of her sleeping
breath, she worries whether
her heartbeat rivals his sullen resolve,
whether she can sing unscathed within
his seething mass, pulled toward such blazing
light, she has been warned about mirages, the aftermath
of longing defeated. What if
she dresses for rain with galoshes
and an old coat, hoping for eventual sun, perhaps
a sand dune. What if he is all
there is; she is forever thrashing through
his body always murky as sunless
skies prevail. What if she
wanders forever searching upon
disconnected lines and love
taunts grotesquely, her heart
remains weary, she forgets
how daylight feels, its colors
caressing, what love felt like, how
a catch in her throat could steal
her breath away. What if
she grows roots, water flowing darkly
through, and although you might think
she has been replenished, the truth
is that water seeping so far below the earth—
once she cultivated a plant quite alive,
lush even though times were not. Every morning
with great care she watered
the shrub with its random
white bulbs, believing they might
grow old together except
the excess of fluids eventually
drowned the plant which had reminded
her of the forests of Rousseau. She feels
a kinship toward the plant with her daily ritual
of tears and wonders about clichés, the romance
and inevitable truth within, she shifts
aside one sleeve and then another, always
another. He speaks of fallen angels, while
all she sees is the artful dodger with wings
and a cape.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Garth and his Redwood Cock
I was going to strip and spread my legs, nothing wildly enticing--just pissing out my anger at Garth the investment strategist who has been my lover on and off these past twelve years. So I put on Last-FM to help ease the flow. I wanted to listen to something ragged, maybe Amy Winehouse. And up flounced "Kala," a track by Ali Ibrahim “Farka” Touré to which you can't be fist-flinging angry; instead you settle yourself in a gentle sunny spot with your name sparkling in the sand, and you open your arms, wide wide, embracing even your enemies. Which is not such a bad thing, given the world's political and social climates, and aren't the two intertwined like an old married couple who have been together forever, bickering every waking moment. Winter takes such perverse pleasure in striking out the tropical sway from warm weather lovers.
Damn! Firstly, in all our years together, the man has never fucked me plain old missionary style. And hell, to feel his cock which is redwood thick, but not as long as Jimmy Bob's indigo wonder - there's something about wrapping your legs around a man's back so he can plunge his way to the end of your cunt and beyond, to the heart. I gasp every time in delight and wonder. Thing is Garth weighs 428 pounds. OK, he's 6'3" but when he lies down, his stomach is a low-lying mountain and when he lies on top of me, it feels like there's a solid ocean between us.
Bottom line is he wants to borrow three thousand dollars from me. A man who refuses to part with his comforting girth, who has labeled my mentally-ill daughter "an abomination on God's earth," who sits with his balls sliding out his old flannel shorts as he pictures millions flowing in from his state-of-the-art financial site, whose son knifed him in the shoulder and has yet to apologize, and who was bashed on the head with a metal motorcycle helmet and taken down (not out) by a local pusher pissed off at the same wayward son. The mammoth ex-bouncer with an Artic heart fell to his knees, his measured builder's strut replaced by a game leg that capsizes without warning.
But I've got the sweetest heart. A home to bees and needy folk. Garth wanted to borrow three G's and I said no. I didn't want him to depend on a broad twenty-two years older than he is. There is that entitlement thing in abused children who make it through to become men with pricks and cascading balls, such as Garth's. I'll do it. Spot him three bank-fresh notes. Although I wish he'd wind his way to my part of town once in a while, whirl me around for a night on the music town which I adore, and keep me company when my Caroline sits talking in diagonals or not at all.
He's the center of his universe, Garth is, and he believes he's destined for greatness. And perhaps he is. Life seems to take such detours; it's hard to know what route you're on or where you're headed. And so my only guideline is the old lady rocking and rocking. When you stand before her, she smiles graciously (like the magnificent Katherine Hepburn or maybe Jessica Tandy) at you, her younger self. That's the time - when you're standing there in your bare-and-nakeds and asking her, "What would you do?" and she slips her life-long crochet shawl around your shoulders and tells you. Straight out. You only have to listen.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Damn! Firstly, in all our years together, the man has never fucked me plain old missionary style. And hell, to feel his cock which is redwood thick, but not as long as Jimmy Bob's indigo wonder - there's something about wrapping your legs around a man's back so he can plunge his way to the end of your cunt and beyond, to the heart. I gasp every time in delight and wonder. Thing is Garth weighs 428 pounds. OK, he's 6'3" but when he lies down, his stomach is a low-lying mountain and when he lies on top of me, it feels like there's a solid ocean between us.
Bottom line is he wants to borrow three thousand dollars from me. A man who refuses to part with his comforting girth, who has labeled my mentally-ill daughter "an abomination on God's earth," who sits with his balls sliding out his old flannel shorts as he pictures millions flowing in from his state-of-the-art financial site, whose son knifed him in the shoulder and has yet to apologize, and who was bashed on the head with a metal motorcycle helmet and taken down (not out) by a local pusher pissed off at the same wayward son. The mammoth ex-bouncer with an Artic heart fell to his knees, his measured builder's strut replaced by a game leg that capsizes without warning.
But I've got the sweetest heart. A home to bees and needy folk. Garth wanted to borrow three G's and I said no. I didn't want him to depend on a broad twenty-two years older than he is. There is that entitlement thing in abused children who make it through to become men with pricks and cascading balls, such as Garth's. I'll do it. Spot him three bank-fresh notes. Although I wish he'd wind his way to my part of town once in a while, whirl me around for a night on the music town which I adore, and keep me company when my Caroline sits talking in diagonals or not at all.
He's the center of his universe, Garth is, and he believes he's destined for greatness. And perhaps he is. Life seems to take such detours; it's hard to know what route you're on or where you're headed. And so my only guideline is the old lady rocking and rocking. When you stand before her, she smiles graciously (like the magnificent Katherine Hepburn or maybe Jessica Tandy) at you, her younger self. That's the time - when you're standing there in your bare-and-nakeds and asking her, "What would you do?" and she slips her life-long crochet shawl around your shoulders and tells you. Straight out. You only have to listen.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
Ass Fucking (Naked Words Excerpt)
"Where's Angie?" I asked. Her brother Tommy shook his flat crew cut, "My mom and dad aren't letting her come over anymore cause you pull down her diapers."
"They were falling off, stupid, I was just pulling them up."
"That's not what I saw," Tommy said.
"Get off my land!" I said.
Tommy climbed to the top of the slope and spread out his arms.
I ran to the screen door, "Ma, I told Tommy to get off our land. It's my land, too, isn't it?"
"My father's coming," I said, because Tommy's father had the spikiest crew cut and Tommy was always saying "yessir" and "nosir," and not much else.
"If you set one foot on my land, I'll shoot you," he yelled while he skidaddled down the slope and flagstone path leading to the front.
"And if you set one toe on my land, I'll skin you alive and you know where I'll start. And better not leave your window open at night, neither."
Gary, who the whole time had been sitting his sister's Dale's balcony and practicing his Mississippi John Hurt licks, let out a wild whoop. The truth is I was a freak. Every time Tommy's baby sister climbed the hill in our back yard, I'd be there yanking down her diaper. Then there were those kleenex-up-the-asshole games with his sister Dale and my flashlight "Story of O" daily bedtime reads. No one on my list of eleven premarital fucks ever suggested ass fucking, except Philippe who adored sodomy though not with me. As it happened, I was a bodybuilder and forty-eight and living on Nina Street with Garth in a bachelor basement apartment with a ceiling too low for him to walk around full blown upright, when he first shoved his prick up my asshole. Garth weighed four-hundred-and-twenty pounds and I guess if he were lean, he'd have weighed three-seventy-five. "I've been dreaming about this for twenty-eight years," I told him, as he rammed away. I didn't tell him I'd been practicing since I was five.
First version. I ask him what he might like. I lie naked on my side like one of Matisse's models and chat aimlessly on his new high bed, my arm draped carelessly around him, hoping he'll kiss me. In our beginnings, we used to spend all morning in bed. He would lie, his curly and sometimes shaved head pressing on my stomach, and confide to my belly while I outlined the circles of his hair, clockwise and counter clockwise. These days he’s hell bent on counter clockwise. He wants to talk about the relationship. "It’s not that I don’t love you or that I don’t want you,” he says. “I just don’t like being with you. I don’t like the way we’re heading. Romantically. I think I should tell you this although maybe it means something that I keep trying. My patience is running a bit thin." He says he has these mixed feelings. He can’t tolerate me, but he loves sex with me.
“Why would you choose to share such information when you’re planning on fucking a woman? I mean you have your fucking arm around me for shit’s sake and I’m lying fucking naked.”
“You see, I can’t even talk to you.”
Fuck you fuck you. I hold my index finger in a staunch up-yours while visualizing climbing off that egotistical bed and leaving him there, alone on his raving mattress. But I’m quiet. If I speak, I might cry; there are too many words and recriminations welling up alongside all the tears. Finally I say, my voice tuned tight to stop sad notes spilling, “Well, perhaps we might be fucking friends.” Begging really, which he doesn’t realize. “Perhaps we might just be friends without romantic expectations who fuck.”
I know Garth isn’t good for me. He’s a closed man who cannot hold or wrap tender arms around me. He lies deadpan, all tangled up in my words and emotions. Garth hates constraints. He's like a superhero: tie him up and in the next instant he breaks free. But I figure if he would ass fuck me, I could lock him in.
He tells me to take a shower.
“I have,” I say.
“Now."
He says he won’t ass fuck me if I refuse. It’s for my benefit, he says.
His twelve-year-old son is in the other bedroom. I walk in the dark, my body, maybe an arm or a thigh, banging against a wall, the back of a chair, a doorway. I’m like that. Lacking direction it seems, when actually I am right on.
Next Version
I take a shower. Focus the spray on cunt and ass, using soap on top, and carefully, not in. I comfort myself with feather whispers and turn off the tap. There's no towel, so I put my jeans and shirt back on, returning with my breath just skimming the surface and some self-depreciating thoughts as to who I am and why the fuck I'm playing this. I tiptoe into the room and close the door. Why the fuck doesn’t he have a lock? Thoughts can be great time-fillers. There should be a lock. I take my clothes off and set them down, noting location and order: jeans, shirt on top, right side of the sofa, depending on which way you’re facing and isn’t the world like that.
“On your knees.”
“Where?” I ask, although I know. I lean my elbows against the beige leather love seat he keeps in his room, both for the look and the lack of space in his living room which also serves as his office. He has lube in his hand, some new kind of quick all-purpose moistening lube called "Dew" I bought at the Ex’s soft core, overpopulated sex fair with my drummer Mark in mind. I had him in mind, you see, because he was this new flame and I liked him. He was this moderately cool man who said "Baby!" every time I called, like he'd been waiting all his life to hear from me. So I thought we might fuck; I figured I'd do anything he requested which is always a great thrill for both sides. Now I have this new lube and it’s in the palm of Garth’s giant hand. Life is strange.
The truth is that I brace myself and that I'm afraid. I press my head down, my forehead touching the cool leather of the couch, my teeth grab the flesh on my wrist, leaving a souvenir with my top front teeth angling inward. He squeezes wet lube on my asshole and his middle finger and wiggles two fingers up my ass. I’m cold-hearted scared and that’s the straight dope.
He kneels directly behind me, his cock and balls brushing me, and presses in. The flats of his hands cover each side of my hips. I've written poems and had a few published about his massive hands soft and warm on my hips. When I’m home I think of his hands, the look and feel of his cock, his fuzzy orange pubic hair, and the shape of his eyebrows. One of his calves is the size of my thigh. His leg is a side quarter.
“Relax. That’s it. Relax,” he says. He has a gentle side.
“Rub your clit," he says, which I do, although, shit, I am so stressed out that all the rubbing in the world won’t stop the pain from his cock at its half way mark.
Still he keeps pressing in, talking to me in his low rumbling voice.
“It hurts honey,” I say, “Oh honey, it hurts.”
“Sh,” he says, "sh sh."
He pushes, and rests and whistles, and then he's at it again. At times I say nothing or I gasp softly and then he stops, but stays his ground. “Ssh shhh, almost there. Soon.”
I can feel the end of the earth, the edges of the flat earth, I know I’ll fall off and all I can think about is his cock and my ass and it hurts damn it really does, but I’m doing this for him so I can forget who I am and why I’m here. Ass fucking with existential motives. Finally he reaches that point where there is no crossing over. The line just stops. He’s familiar with the space just beyond that line where I fall in love with him all over again and he feels at home and free. So he settles in, deep, filling me up. Even though I cry out a few times, he stays, adding more pressure until I utter a high flying sound and a sigh, because he's in me, jamming all the way up my ass.
“Stay!” I cry, “don’t move, stay!” and he listens.
“Tell me. How you want it.”
“I said tell me how you want it.”
“Harder. I want it harder,” even though I don’t, not yet.
And then, because I know he's waiting for more, I say quietly, “Hurt me.”
At first it hurts like hell or heaven depending. He grabs my tits, squeezes my nipples between his thumb and index finger, and pulling my hair so my head flings back, rams fucking hard in, but I don’t care; he's screwing me up the ass and I want him and that’s all there is. See, I just want to belong to him─his cunt, his ass, his tits, his mouth. I was a member of Voice of Women when I was eleven, but this is how it is between my Garth and me. I do it because I love him, although sometimes I'm filled with hate so big, it feels like a ball of wire twine stuck at the back of my throat. He says one day he's not going to have to use any lube, that's how wet I get when he slides his finger or cock up my asshole. Except he says penis instead of cock.
Encore:
I take a shower, aiming the water jets downward. There is no towel, so I stay wet, put on my clothes, and tiptoe back to the room. His room is dark. “Kneel against the sofa,” he tells me and leaves the room. I place my clothes on the floor beside the leather sofa: black pants, then black muscle shirt, mismatched socks. I arrange myself on the bed, bending my legs, one hip curved, and an arm flung to the side in a careless pose. I hear the door handle. When I think of Garth, his head touches a sky that's cerulean blue clear through and through. His presence fills the door frame.
I kneel by the leather sofa, my forearms on the pillow seat, and I wait. He brings something over from the bureau, and whistling all the while, he slides a hand along my flank. “Mm,” he says and squeezes cold lube near my asshole. I have bought this lotion, some lubricant with spectacular qualities, and have given it to him. He’s going to enter all holes, he says, and I ask him if he includes nostrils and ears in his plan.
“Of all things,” he says, “I love to fuck you in the ass.”
“Talk to me. Tell me about the first time, how it was the first time I fucked you this way.”
“I was scared,” I say.
"I wanted to belong to you."
“It really hurt.”
Garth presses his cock into my asshole. “Easy, easy now," he says.
He has wonderful, big hands. He slides his palm down my back, along the line of my ass, the outside of my tits.
“Relax,” he says. “Tell me about the first time. Remember what you did. What did you do with your hand? Do you remember?”
“I touched myself."
“Where?” he says and I say "Here."
He asks because he wants me to say it, to hear me talk of sex and fucking. “My clit,” I say. “I rubbed my clit.”
“And are you doing that now?”
“Yes.”
“What?” He presses his cock further into my asshole.
"I'm rubbing my clit," I say.
“Good,” he says, squeezing more lube onto his prick and opening up my asshole with his fingers.
I'm afraid, scared shitless, with his prick at my ass's door, and the thing is I love being afraid and doing it anyway.
Reinvented with spacing, although I cannot breathe . . .
I take a shower. Focus the spray on cunt and ass, use soap, on top not in. In is for later. I close the water. I put my jeans and shirt back on, return with my breath held.
Shit baby doll what the fuck you doing in a dark earth hallway, what the fuck you doing getting your ass ripped wide open? I tiptoe into the bedroom, close the door, wishing for a lock. There is none. Thoughts weave easily through fears, settling a reassuring hand on my forearm. The sky shifts from a grey haze to softly glowing yellow. There should be a lock. I take my clothes off, placing them deliberately: jeans, shirt on top, at the right side of the sofa, depending on which way you are facing. And isn’t the world like that?
“On your knees,” he tells me.
“Where?” although I know. I kneel down and lean my elbows against the sofa. He has the lube in his hand, some new kind of quick all-purpose moistening lube I bought it with him in mind. I had him in mind because even after one decade, I love him. He’s a cool man in his way, so I thought we might fuck and he could do anything he wanted. Now I have this new lube he’s holding.
“Talk to me,” he says, “tell me about the first time I fucked you up your ass.”
“I was scared.”
"And you thought?”
“I thought, I thought I’m yours, you know, belonging to you. I wanted to belong to you. And I thought, that if you ass fucked me, that if you wanted to, anyway you chose, then I would. That’s what I wanted.”
He presses his cock against me.
“Sh, sh,” he says “gently now, just easy.” He places one large hand over my back, pressing me down, and slides his other hand along my back, ass, tits.
“Relax,” he says, “tell me more about the first time. Do you remember what you did with your hand?”
“I touched myself,” I say.
“Where?”
“I rubbed my clit like I am now.”
“Beg,” he says. “If you want it, you have to beg.”
So I say please and please again and thank you. He wants words, scenes in sharp colour, while my scenes are in black and white and the camera’s hand held. He pulls my head back and his cock brushes against my asshole.
“Please hurt me,” I say. “Pull my hair. Hard.”
“Good,” he says, squeezing more lube onto his prick, and using his middle finger, up my ass. He decides not to be gentle.
“It hurts honey,” I say, “oh honey, it hurts.”
His cock stretches and fills my asshole. We’re from two different countries, Garth and I, and he’s pumping away in a language I don’t understand although I nod yes, yes. And then he comes to that border, that halfway mark and barrels right through. I think I’ve come to the end of the earth. I grasp its flat edges and I just know I’ll fall off. And then I stop thinking. Which is what I want. I brace myself oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, press my head down on the seat of the sofa and bite hard into my right forearm. The bottle cap pops and he spreads cold lube around my asshole. He wiggles his finger up my ass. I’m afraid and that’s the truth. He positions the tip of his prick against my asshole, leans his body over mine, and covers my hips with his hands.
“Relax.” he says. “Rub your clit.”
He presses in while he talks to me in his soft rumbling voice and I cry out again “It hurts, honey. Honey, it hurts.” He’s just so cool and even. He stops, stays, pushes his prick in a bit deeper and croons “Soon, soon, almost there.” Which sounds sexy as all hell. I figure I’m at the end of the earth, right at the edge, and you know, if he’d ask me, I would jump clear off, right at that moment because he’s reached that point of no crossing back and the line just stops. Only there's a space past that line, such a sweet place where I fall in love with him all over again and I’m home and free.
I pull my breath up into my throat and heave it out nice and slow because he’s in me, all the way up my ass and I’m fine and loving his being there.
“Stay. Don’t move, stay.”
“Tell me,” he says, “tell me how you want it and I’ll consider it.”
“I want it harder,” I say, even though I don’t, not yet. “Harder, please. Please go hard.”
He starts to move in and out, just a bit at first, and it hurts like hell or heaven depending. He adds more lube and grabs my tits and my hair and he’s ramming real hard. But I don’t mind. He’s fucking me up the ass and I want him so bad. And that’s all there is.
I have to want him first you see, have to belong to him. I am his cunt, his ass, his tits, his mouth. I think when he fucks me hard up the ass that I can’t hold him. But still, I want to. After everything. Still. I am his cunt, his ass, his mouth.
© Janice Colman 2008
"They were falling off, stupid, I was just pulling them up."
"That's not what I saw," Tommy said.
"Get off my land!" I said.
Tommy climbed to the top of the slope and spread out his arms.
I ran to the screen door, "Ma, I told Tommy to get off our land. It's my land, too, isn't it?"
"My father's coming," I said, because Tommy's father had the spikiest crew cut and Tommy was always saying "yessir" and "nosir," and not much else.
"If you set one foot on my land, I'll shoot you," he yelled while he skidaddled down the slope and flagstone path leading to the front.
"And if you set one toe on my land, I'll skin you alive and you know where I'll start. And better not leave your window open at night, neither."
Gary, who the whole time had been sitting his sister's Dale's balcony and practicing his Mississippi John Hurt licks, let out a wild whoop. The truth is I was a freak. Every time Tommy's baby sister climbed the hill in our back yard, I'd be there yanking down her diaper. Then there were those kleenex-up-the-asshole games with his sister Dale and my flashlight "Story of O" daily bedtime reads. No one on my list of eleven premarital fucks ever suggested ass fucking, except Philippe who adored sodomy though not with me. As it happened, I was a bodybuilder and forty-eight and living on Nina Street with Garth in a bachelor basement apartment with a ceiling too low for him to walk around full blown upright, when he first shoved his prick up my asshole. Garth weighed four-hundred-and-twenty pounds and I guess if he were lean, he'd have weighed three-seventy-five. "I've been dreaming about this for twenty-eight years," I told him, as he rammed away. I didn't tell him I'd been practicing since I was five.
First version. I ask him what he might like. I lie naked on my side like one of Matisse's models and chat aimlessly on his new high bed, my arm draped carelessly around him, hoping he'll kiss me. In our beginnings, we used to spend all morning in bed. He would lie, his curly and sometimes shaved head pressing on my stomach, and confide to my belly while I outlined the circles of his hair, clockwise and counter clockwise. These days he’s hell bent on counter clockwise. He wants to talk about the relationship. "It’s not that I don’t love you or that I don’t want you,” he says. “I just don’t like being with you. I don’t like the way we’re heading. Romantically. I think I should tell you this although maybe it means something that I keep trying. My patience is running a bit thin." He says he has these mixed feelings. He can’t tolerate me, but he loves sex with me.
“Why would you choose to share such information when you’re planning on fucking a woman? I mean you have your fucking arm around me for shit’s sake and I’m lying fucking naked.”
“You see, I can’t even talk to you.”
Fuck you fuck you. I hold my index finger in a staunch up-yours while visualizing climbing off that egotistical bed and leaving him there, alone on his raving mattress. But I’m quiet. If I speak, I might cry; there are too many words and recriminations welling up alongside all the tears. Finally I say, my voice tuned tight to stop sad notes spilling, “Well, perhaps we might be fucking friends.” Begging really, which he doesn’t realize. “Perhaps we might just be friends without romantic expectations who fuck.”
I know Garth isn’t good for me. He’s a closed man who cannot hold or wrap tender arms around me. He lies deadpan, all tangled up in my words and emotions. Garth hates constraints. He's like a superhero: tie him up and in the next instant he breaks free. But I figure if he would ass fuck me, I could lock him in.
He tells me to take a shower.
“I have,” I say.
“Now."
He says he won’t ass fuck me if I refuse. It’s for my benefit, he says.
His twelve-year-old son is in the other bedroom. I walk in the dark, my body, maybe an arm or a thigh, banging against a wall, the back of a chair, a doorway. I’m like that. Lacking direction it seems, when actually I am right on.
Next Version
I take a shower. Focus the spray on cunt and ass, using soap on top, and carefully, not in. I comfort myself with feather whispers and turn off the tap. There's no towel, so I put my jeans and shirt back on, returning with my breath just skimming the surface and some self-depreciating thoughts as to who I am and why the fuck I'm playing this. I tiptoe into the room and close the door. Why the fuck doesn’t he have a lock? Thoughts can be great time-fillers. There should be a lock. I take my clothes off and set them down, noting location and order: jeans, shirt on top, right side of the sofa, depending on which way you’re facing and isn’t the world like that.
“On your knees.”
“Where?” I ask, although I know. I lean my elbows against the beige leather love seat he keeps in his room, both for the look and the lack of space in his living room which also serves as his office. He has lube in his hand, some new kind of quick all-purpose moistening lube called "Dew" I bought at the Ex’s soft core, overpopulated sex fair with my drummer Mark in mind. I had him in mind, you see, because he was this new flame and I liked him. He was this moderately cool man who said "Baby!" every time I called, like he'd been waiting all his life to hear from me. So I thought we might fuck; I figured I'd do anything he requested which is always a great thrill for both sides. Now I have this new lube and it’s in the palm of Garth’s giant hand. Life is strange.
The truth is that I brace myself and that I'm afraid. I press my head down, my forehead touching the cool leather of the couch, my teeth grab the flesh on my wrist, leaving a souvenir with my top front teeth angling inward. He squeezes wet lube on my asshole and his middle finger and wiggles two fingers up my ass. I’m cold-hearted scared and that’s the straight dope.
He kneels directly behind me, his cock and balls brushing me, and presses in. The flats of his hands cover each side of my hips. I've written poems and had a few published about his massive hands soft and warm on my hips. When I’m home I think of his hands, the look and feel of his cock, his fuzzy orange pubic hair, and the shape of his eyebrows. One of his calves is the size of my thigh. His leg is a side quarter.
“Relax. That’s it. Relax,” he says. He has a gentle side.
“Rub your clit," he says, which I do, although, shit, I am so stressed out that all the rubbing in the world won’t stop the pain from his cock at its half way mark.
Still he keeps pressing in, talking to me in his low rumbling voice.
“It hurts honey,” I say, “Oh honey, it hurts.”
“Sh,” he says, "sh sh."
He pushes, and rests and whistles, and then he's at it again. At times I say nothing or I gasp softly and then he stops, but stays his ground. “Ssh shhh, almost there. Soon.”
I can feel the end of the earth, the edges of the flat earth, I know I’ll fall off and all I can think about is his cock and my ass and it hurts damn it really does, but I’m doing this for him so I can forget who I am and why I’m here. Ass fucking with existential motives. Finally he reaches that point where there is no crossing over. The line just stops. He’s familiar with the space just beyond that line where I fall in love with him all over again and he feels at home and free. So he settles in, deep, filling me up. Even though I cry out a few times, he stays, adding more pressure until I utter a high flying sound and a sigh, because he's in me, jamming all the way up my ass.
“Stay!” I cry, “don’t move, stay!” and he listens.
“Tell me. How you want it.”
“I said tell me how you want it.”
“Harder. I want it harder,” even though I don’t, not yet.
And then, because I know he's waiting for more, I say quietly, “Hurt me.”
At first it hurts like hell or heaven depending. He grabs my tits, squeezes my nipples between his thumb and index finger, and pulling my hair so my head flings back, rams fucking hard in, but I don’t care; he's screwing me up the ass and I want him and that’s all there is. See, I just want to belong to him─his cunt, his ass, his tits, his mouth. I was a member of Voice of Women when I was eleven, but this is how it is between my Garth and me. I do it because I love him, although sometimes I'm filled with hate so big, it feels like a ball of wire twine stuck at the back of my throat. He says one day he's not going to have to use any lube, that's how wet I get when he slides his finger or cock up my asshole. Except he says penis instead of cock.
Encore:
I take a shower, aiming the water jets downward. There is no towel, so I stay wet, put on my clothes, and tiptoe back to the room. His room is dark. “Kneel against the sofa,” he tells me and leaves the room. I place my clothes on the floor beside the leather sofa: black pants, then black muscle shirt, mismatched socks. I arrange myself on the bed, bending my legs, one hip curved, and an arm flung to the side in a careless pose. I hear the door handle. When I think of Garth, his head touches a sky that's cerulean blue clear through and through. His presence fills the door frame.
I kneel by the leather sofa, my forearms on the pillow seat, and I wait. He brings something over from the bureau, and whistling all the while, he slides a hand along my flank. “Mm,” he says and squeezes cold lube near my asshole. I have bought this lotion, some lubricant with spectacular qualities, and have given it to him. He’s going to enter all holes, he says, and I ask him if he includes nostrils and ears in his plan.
“Of all things,” he says, “I love to fuck you in the ass.”
“Talk to me. Tell me about the first time, how it was the first time I fucked you this way.”
“I was scared,” I say.
"I wanted to belong to you."
“It really hurt.”
Garth presses his cock into my asshole. “Easy, easy now," he says.
He has wonderful, big hands. He slides his palm down my back, along the line of my ass, the outside of my tits.
“Relax,” he says. “Tell me about the first time. Remember what you did. What did you do with your hand? Do you remember?”
“I touched myself."
“Where?” he says and I say "Here."
He asks because he wants me to say it, to hear me talk of sex and fucking. “My clit,” I say. “I rubbed my clit.”
“And are you doing that now?”
“Yes.”
“What?” He presses his cock further into my asshole.
"I'm rubbing my clit," I say.
“Good,” he says, squeezing more lube onto his prick and opening up my asshole with his fingers.
I'm afraid, scared shitless, with his prick at my ass's door, and the thing is I love being afraid and doing it anyway.
Reinvented with spacing, although I cannot breathe . . .
I take a shower. Focus the spray on cunt and ass, use soap, on top not in. In is for later. I close the water. I put my jeans and shirt back on, return with my breath held.
Shit baby doll what the fuck you doing in a dark earth hallway, what the fuck you doing getting your ass ripped wide open? I tiptoe into the bedroom, close the door, wishing for a lock. There is none. Thoughts weave easily through fears, settling a reassuring hand on my forearm. The sky shifts from a grey haze to softly glowing yellow. There should be a lock. I take my clothes off, placing them deliberately: jeans, shirt on top, at the right side of the sofa, depending on which way you are facing. And isn’t the world like that?
“On your knees,” he tells me.
“Where?” although I know. I kneel down and lean my elbows against the sofa. He has the lube in his hand, some new kind of quick all-purpose moistening lube I bought it with him in mind. I had him in mind because even after one decade, I love him. He’s a cool man in his way, so I thought we might fuck and he could do anything he wanted. Now I have this new lube he’s holding.
“Talk to me,” he says, “tell me about the first time I fucked you up your ass.”
“I was scared.”
"And you thought?”
“I thought, I thought I’m yours, you know, belonging to you. I wanted to belong to you. And I thought, that if you ass fucked me, that if you wanted to, anyway you chose, then I would. That’s what I wanted.”
He presses his cock against me.
“Sh, sh,” he says “gently now, just easy.” He places one large hand over my back, pressing me down, and slides his other hand along my back, ass, tits.
“Relax,” he says, “tell me more about the first time. Do you remember what you did with your hand?”
“I touched myself,” I say.
“Where?”
“I rubbed my clit like I am now.”
“Beg,” he says. “If you want it, you have to beg.”
So I say please and please again and thank you. He wants words, scenes in sharp colour, while my scenes are in black and white and the camera’s hand held. He pulls my head back and his cock brushes against my asshole.
“Please hurt me,” I say. “Pull my hair. Hard.”
“Good,” he says, squeezing more lube onto his prick, and using his middle finger, up my ass. He decides not to be gentle.
“It hurts honey,” I say, “oh honey, it hurts.”
His cock stretches and fills my asshole. We’re from two different countries, Garth and I, and he’s pumping away in a language I don’t understand although I nod yes, yes. And then he comes to that border, that halfway mark and barrels right through. I think I’ve come to the end of the earth. I grasp its flat edges and I just know I’ll fall off. And then I stop thinking. Which is what I want. I brace myself oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, press my head down on the seat of the sofa and bite hard into my right forearm. The bottle cap pops and he spreads cold lube around my asshole. He wiggles his finger up my ass. I’m afraid and that’s the truth. He positions the tip of his prick against my asshole, leans his body over mine, and covers my hips with his hands.
“Relax.” he says. “Rub your clit.”
He presses in while he talks to me in his soft rumbling voice and I cry out again “It hurts, honey. Honey, it hurts.” He’s just so cool and even. He stops, stays, pushes his prick in a bit deeper and croons “Soon, soon, almost there.” Which sounds sexy as all hell. I figure I’m at the end of the earth, right at the edge, and you know, if he’d ask me, I would jump clear off, right at that moment because he’s reached that point of no crossing back and the line just stops. Only there's a space past that line, such a sweet place where I fall in love with him all over again and I’m home and free.
I pull my breath up into my throat and heave it out nice and slow because he’s in me, all the way up my ass and I’m fine and loving his being there.
“Stay. Don’t move, stay.”
“Tell me,” he says, “tell me how you want it and I’ll consider it.”
“I want it harder,” I say, even though I don’t, not yet. “Harder, please. Please go hard.”
He starts to move in and out, just a bit at first, and it hurts like hell or heaven depending. He adds more lube and grabs my tits and my hair and he’s ramming real hard. But I don’t mind. He’s fucking me up the ass and I want him so bad. And that’s all there is.
I have to want him first you see, have to belong to him. I am his cunt, his ass, his tits, his mouth. I think when he fucks me hard up the ass that I can’t hold him. But still, I want to. After everything. Still. I am his cunt, his ass, his mouth.
© Janice Colman 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Lists
My mother kept lists. She had three calendars: a week at a glance, two days at a glance, and one day in grand detail. Even when my sister shoved her into the Waldorf straight from the Montreal General where she was treated for pneumonia and where my father had died the year before─“get me out of here you swine” he had screamed over and over until they gave him more morphine. He wasn’t against the morphine, he just wanted to die at home. “It’ll be easier,” my sister said, “trust me, I know her mind inside out. She won’t have to make decisions.” Which is when my sister, her telltale witch’s nose transformed into a sweet young thing, efficiently sorted, carted, and sold off my mother’s stores of her sixty-three-year married life. The only thing left for my old mother was the making of her lists.
In between pages she’d place articles for future review or to mail. Sometimes I’d receive plain brown envelopes in the mail with health tips. Nothing to dash to my bathroom floor and perform a sweetly seething rubbing-off to. Over the years, I’ve stopped and started at least one-hundred-and-twenty daily or weekly calendars. I arrive at this figure by multiplying a minimum of three calendars a year from the age of twenty until my current sixty. At first I’d select a pen with just the right flow and colour to fill in particulars having to do with name, address, phone number, and emergency numbers. And at the back, with the same smooth pen, I’d rewrite contacts and phone numbers.
I don’t want to say I’m a failure in the date book department. My mother was meticulous. Her date books were her memoirs. I always saw her writing lists, her books over-flooded with articles she felt were newsworthy. And I realize now she was my model. My own stash of papers fills a six-by-four-foot closet off my living room writing area. I see my life as an assortment of lists with various headings: houses, lovers, gyms, trainers, training partners, housekeepers, psychiatrists. I organize headings, sub-headings, shuffle, restructure, add, delete, rename. But I think houses will always be the main header. Twenty-one all in all. The subheadings saved me. I could go deep-sea diving in them, plan excursions, and create even further subdivisions, do the breaststroke through them, feeling ripples skim my chest, thighs, ass, the back of my thighs. Those subdivisions often migrated and became headings. I could deep-throat a heading and surface alive and shining.
More from Edinburgh Road:
Abie lies under our green Pontiac which is propped up with two steel girders. He’s replacing the transmission with a refurbished model, his legs reminding me of the underbelly of dead fish. “I’m a good man to have around in an emergency,” he calls out and I believe him.
“The cats are escaping from their jackets,” he says. “You need to add more grommets.” He’s doing a study on sleep deprivation and he’s going to be published and of course, he’ll continue with his masters. And the thing is these cats are hooked up to a treadmill that keeps going and going and they can’t sleep and I’m making canvas straitjackets for them. “Are you sure you should do this?” I say. “This is top level research,” he says and shows me Russian abstracts he’s photocopied. He takes me to a lab where he shows me white mice. “This one is mine,” he says and lifts off the cover. “Just keep blowing on him,” he says, “and he won’t jump out.” I carry and blow and blow and then I’m screaming, running around the table, “He’s on my head, he’s on my head,” and Abie’s laughing like a wild man.
Coyright Janice Colman 2008
Technorati Tags: memoir,Colman,writer's blogs,Wordslut
In between pages she’d place articles for future review or to mail. Sometimes I’d receive plain brown envelopes in the mail with health tips. Nothing to dash to my bathroom floor and perform a sweetly seething rubbing-off to. Over the years, I’ve stopped and started at least one-hundred-and-twenty daily or weekly calendars. I arrive at this figure by multiplying a minimum of three calendars a year from the age of twenty until my current sixty. At first I’d select a pen with just the right flow and colour to fill in particulars having to do with name, address, phone number, and emergency numbers. And at the back, with the same smooth pen, I’d rewrite contacts and phone numbers.
I don’t want to say I’m a failure in the date book department. My mother was meticulous. Her date books were her memoirs. I always saw her writing lists, her books over-flooded with articles she felt were newsworthy. And I realize now she was my model. My own stash of papers fills a six-by-four-foot closet off my living room writing area. I see my life as an assortment of lists with various headings: houses, lovers, gyms, trainers, training partners, housekeepers, psychiatrists. I organize headings, sub-headings, shuffle, restructure, add, delete, rename. But I think houses will always be the main header. Twenty-one all in all. The subheadings saved me. I could go deep-sea diving in them, plan excursions, and create even further subdivisions, do the breaststroke through them, feeling ripples skim my chest, thighs, ass, the back of my thighs. Those subdivisions often migrated and became headings. I could deep-throat a heading and surface alive and shining.
More from Edinburgh Road:
Abie lies under our green Pontiac which is propped up with two steel girders. He’s replacing the transmission with a refurbished model, his legs reminding me of the underbelly of dead fish. “I’m a good man to have around in an emergency,” he calls out and I believe him.
“The cats are escaping from their jackets,” he says. “You need to add more grommets.” He’s doing a study on sleep deprivation and he’s going to be published and of course, he’ll continue with his masters. And the thing is these cats are hooked up to a treadmill that keeps going and going and they can’t sleep and I’m making canvas straitjackets for them. “Are you sure you should do this?” I say. “This is top level research,” he says and shows me Russian abstracts he’s photocopied. He takes me to a lab where he shows me white mice. “This one is mine,” he says and lifts off the cover. “Just keep blowing on him,” he says, “and he won’t jump out.” I carry and blow and blow and then I’m screaming, running around the table, “He’s on my head, he’s on my head,” and Abie’s laughing like a wild man.
Coyright Janice Colman 2008
Technorati Tags: memoir,Colman,writer's blogs,Wordslut
Friday, November 14, 2008
In the morning my heart
breathless beneath the pressed
pillow beside me, eyes
shoved between my big toe and
the next or hiding under my grandmother's
hand-me-down bunion, hands
squarely folded under
a Zeller's white quilt that could
crush any soul except mine, "Hurry hurry " as
pieces grumble, shift and slide, while
my cunt stark out refuses to budge, taking
a non-violent stance - you have to speak
kindly to a cunt lest it snap
open and devour, so I say
please, offer promises of forbidden
delight, possibly Turkish; it lifts
one eyelid and I know I'm on the right
track. A cunt can be lonesome, withdrawn, although
she gets out daily and I translate the world in terms
she can understand so in that dank dark
place where she lives, hope in the form of light
might filter in. A cunt needs
rambling conversation, requires water, some
form of (any) love allowing
it to lay down winter roots and shoot
up in the spring, this thirsty cunt cut down
before winter while still
eager to converse with the sun, I worry
even when all my parts finally
cooperate as I sit sipping
homemade coffee brew, and my heart
swoops down to my cunt, setting down
with her a speck, gently swinging on this late
autumn veranda before which
body parts strut to work. Sometimes
a man smiles or waves, but all the while
I am thinking a cunt without
a heart might be more at peace.
Coyright Colman 2008
breathless beneath the pressed
pillow beside me, eyes
shoved between my big toe and
the next or hiding under my grandmother's
hand-me-down bunion, hands
squarely folded under
a Zeller's white quilt that could
crush any soul except mine, "Hurry hurry " as
pieces grumble, shift and slide, while
my cunt stark out refuses to budge, taking
a non-violent stance - you have to speak
kindly to a cunt lest it snap
open and devour, so I say
please, offer promises of forbidden
delight, possibly Turkish; it lifts
one eyelid and I know I'm on the right
track. A cunt can be lonesome, withdrawn, although
she gets out daily and I translate the world in terms
she can understand so in that dank dark
place where she lives, hope in the form of light
might filter in. A cunt needs
rambling conversation, requires water, some
form of (any) love allowing
it to lay down winter roots and shoot
up in the spring, this thirsty cunt cut down
before winter while still
eager to converse with the sun, I worry
even when all my parts finally
cooperate as I sit sipping
homemade coffee brew, and my heart
swoops down to my cunt, setting down
with her a speck, gently swinging on this late
autumn veranda before which
body parts strut to work. Sometimes
a man smiles or waves, but all the while
I am thinking a cunt without
a heart might be more at peace.
Coyright Colman 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Jimmy Bob and the Kid
I'm not sure whether life clogs up the nostrils, damming them up and slogging in filters, or life and love just open the flow of mucus, green gob all grange and dank. Maybe both. See Jimmy has left me. My Jimmy Bob McFarlin, tall man, walks slightly hunched over, rectangular glasses so chic and cool. He used to say we'd be two rickety old people swinging on a rickety old swing in the country, watching grandchildren, and we'd kind of glance at each other and grinning toothless we'd hobble to the bedroom, fixed over on the first floor.
He comes from that bitch called the US of A─let’s put it all in small letters─the us of a. He’s impatient with anyone whose brain is like pink cotton candy; he despises line-ups and makes comments like “it’s just my luck to be here now." Before Jimmy appears, everything’s all quiet and serene, but when he places his size 15s on the war path, extras materialize from under the front desk, from behind the life-size silver urns, swinging in from the streets─all push in line before Jimmy, who is really coming across like an AMERICAN.
But while Jim, he calls himself Jim and yeah shit he has a right to─seems like every Tom Dick and the H guy have a brother or uncle or pa named Jimmy and then Bob. Jimmy Bob. My Jim thinks he’s different, while he’s wearing his telltale madras shorts and orange baseball cap. Also I think possibly a button-down shirt with short sleeves. Buttons at the points of collars, sneaking in at the back of the collar, buttons in the middle of each front pocket. I figure Americans like lots of buttons that have no function but to stand out looking all ornery.
Meanwhile Jim is saying he loves me. He just zooms right in to my face staring at me goggle-eyed, he’s kinda weird─once Caroline and I took our Jim to High Park's restaurant. You gotta drive no more that 20 m.p.h., so that’s a long time to spend in the car in the company of a loon. I bet he was thinking that about Caroline, as he answered all her questions with pertinent details and a good measure of verbal respect. Like "I beg to differ" and telling her she sings like Ethel Merman when all she wanted was to sing "Over the Rainbow" in her special high voice. Anyhow we’re leaving the restaurant; Jim’s feeling sick to his stomach (it’s his old hate punching him from the inside out). We walk from the back with its server-serves policy to the front pay-at-the-counter section, and I see the small head of a baby in a high chair. The mother is sitting on one side of the table and she’s leaning forward talking and laughing with a man and woman directly opposite.
The baby turns round and I see this is a mongoloid baby. So I look again and I’m thinking there is something wise in the boy’s face, an intelligence in the eyes like an old man. Jim follows me, and I follow Caroline, and then Jim starts laughing his loud ha ha ha, just slamming his laughter, bashing it against those four bodies at the same time
“Why were you laughing?” I stop outside on the bottom step.
“You’re not going to like it,” Jim says.
I walk on ahead. No way am I going to look back, because then I would see his face and forever link it with this moment when he chooses to show his dark side. Because he knows, really he does, that he’s got to set something up so that we leave him, and he says, “I was laughing because the kid was a mongoloid.” I’m about to put one foot down on the stone path and it stops mid-air. Even Caroline hears. “Because he’s different?” she says. “Are you afraid? Like I’m different? Is that funny?”
"I was laughing at my own response," he says to me and not to Caroline.
“Amounts to the same thing,” I say.
And that's when things started to go wrong between Jimmy and me.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
He comes from that bitch called the US of A─let’s put it all in small letters─the us of a. He’s impatient with anyone whose brain is like pink cotton candy; he despises line-ups and makes comments like “it’s just my luck to be here now." Before Jimmy appears, everything’s all quiet and serene, but when he places his size 15s on the war path, extras materialize from under the front desk, from behind the life-size silver urns, swinging in from the streets─all push in line before Jimmy, who is really coming across like an AMERICAN.
But while Jim, he calls himself Jim and yeah shit he has a right to─seems like every Tom Dick and the H guy have a brother or uncle or pa named Jimmy and then Bob. Jimmy Bob. My Jim thinks he’s different, while he’s wearing his telltale madras shorts and orange baseball cap. Also I think possibly a button-down shirt with short sleeves. Buttons at the points of collars, sneaking in at the back of the collar, buttons in the middle of each front pocket. I figure Americans like lots of buttons that have no function but to stand out looking all ornery.
Meanwhile Jim is saying he loves me. He just zooms right in to my face staring at me goggle-eyed, he’s kinda weird─once Caroline and I took our Jim to High Park's restaurant. You gotta drive no more that 20 m.p.h., so that’s a long time to spend in the car in the company of a loon. I bet he was thinking that about Caroline, as he answered all her questions with pertinent details and a good measure of verbal respect. Like "I beg to differ" and telling her she sings like Ethel Merman when all she wanted was to sing "Over the Rainbow" in her special high voice. Anyhow we’re leaving the restaurant; Jim’s feeling sick to his stomach (it’s his old hate punching him from the inside out). We walk from the back with its server-serves policy to the front pay-at-the-counter section, and I see the small head of a baby in a high chair. The mother is sitting on one side of the table and she’s leaning forward talking and laughing with a man and woman directly opposite.
The baby turns round and I see this is a mongoloid baby. So I look again and I’m thinking there is something wise in the boy’s face, an intelligence in the eyes like an old man. Jim follows me, and I follow Caroline, and then Jim starts laughing his loud ha ha ha, just slamming his laughter, bashing it against those four bodies at the same time
“Why were you laughing?” I stop outside on the bottom step.
“You’re not going to like it,” Jim says.
I walk on ahead. No way am I going to look back, because then I would see his face and forever link it with this moment when he chooses to show his dark side. Because he knows, really he does, that he’s got to set something up so that we leave him, and he says, “I was laughing because the kid was a mongoloid.” I’m about to put one foot down on the stone path and it stops mid-air. Even Caroline hears. “Because he’s different?” she says. “Are you afraid? Like I’m different? Is that funny?”
"I was laughing at my own response," he says to me and not to Caroline.
“Amounts to the same thing,” I say.
And that's when things started to go wrong between Jimmy and me.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Interlude with Garth
“I hope you know this is what millions of men fantasize about.”
“I didn’t know that you had a million of men wanting you.”
“Yeah, well now you know. Millions, plural. World wide.”
“I’m honored then.”
“And so you should be.”
Garth’s balls have really shrunk. He’s six feet three inches tall. Over four-hundred pounds. A man that size has big balls. When he lies down, each ball spreads over to the adjacent thigh. Usually I have to open my mouth to its fullest to engulf one ball and then I maneuver in the other. I figure I must look like Louis Armstrong at his most inspired.
Holy shit. In the fucking light, it’s a real turn off.
The night before, “So, you’re sure you’re coming over in the morning.”
Yes.” (I wasn’t sure.)
“Alright then.”
In the morning my back hurt. A stabbing pain shot down to my ankle. He told me to lie on the floor and realign my hips. If I had listened to him and hung upside down, I might be better by now. But what did he know anyway? He phoned back to invite me out to lunch. I accepted which was unusual for me especially at mid-day.
He took me to Swiss Chalet on Bayview Avenue. During the meal he made some comment about Jews.
“What did you say?”
“I said . . .”
“What? You said what with a Jew whom you just happen to fuck sitting right in front of you?”
He said that once again I had ruined both a perfectly good meal and his intentions. We hardly talked as he drove me back to my rented condo. Later, I worried that he might still be angry, so I called him at his office and asked ever so politely if I could come over, it would please and thrill me and so on. Then we had that interlude. Actually I was glad I did it. I was tired of crying. He could feel I was dripping wet right through my jeans. He didn’t even need to use lube which he kept in his top bureau drawer at home anyway. A day later he admitted it had been such a turn-on, although with him you would never know it. He’s such a closed man.
His balls had really shrunk.
After The Interlude
Garth calls at 7:26 a.m. I’m concerned about his balls.
“But how do you know they’ll grow back?”
“They’ll grow back.”
“Yeah, but how do you know?”
“I had a kid, didn’t I?”
“But that doesn’t mean they’ll grow back. Except if you know from past experience.”
“I do.”
“What? They got this small?”
“Smaller.”
“Oh my god, you’re kidding!”
“About the size of raisins.”
“Shit. You must have freaked out. You gotta be kidding.”
“Nope. I was really worried actually.”
“And how long does it take them, to grow back I mean?”
“About a month.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Cause they’re about half size now. Will they get much smaller?”
“Not much. I have only four to six shots left.”
“That’s good to know then.”
“I actually phoned to ask you how you’re feeling today.”
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“Uh huh.”
“Not sore at all?”
“Nope.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Yeah. Well so was I. I sure as hell wasn’t expecting that.”
“To tell you the truth, neither was I. It just happened. Did it feel OK, towards the end?”
“Well, I was scared, you know, because I didn’t think that natural was as effective.”
“You should’ve trusted me. I was watching the whole time, to make sure.”
“Easy for you to say. I thought I was going to be split open like Catherine the Great. You think spit works just as well?”
“Where do you think they imitated the synthetic from?”
“Wow.”
So when did it start to feel good?”
“When you said, 'Stop fighting me.'”
“You were wiggling around so much. I couldn’t aim properly to get it in.”
“It was fucking scary. You used to be proud of how little you had to use, remember. I never thought that you’d be using nothing at all.”
“Neither did I really. So you’re OK?”
“Yeah. Except my throat is sore.”
“Interesting.”
“Damn straight!”
“You sure they won’t get much smaller? I miss them, you know.”
“You’ll have them back. Don’t worry.”
“If you say so.”
“And if you put this in your book, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Garth gets off on ass fucking without lube. I get off on a dare.
“I didn’t know that you had a million of men wanting you.”
“Yeah, well now you know. Millions, plural. World wide.”
“I’m honored then.”
“And so you should be.”
Garth’s balls have really shrunk. He’s six feet three inches tall. Over four-hundred pounds. A man that size has big balls. When he lies down, each ball spreads over to the adjacent thigh. Usually I have to open my mouth to its fullest to engulf one ball and then I maneuver in the other. I figure I must look like Louis Armstrong at his most inspired.
Holy shit. In the fucking light, it’s a real turn off.
The night before, “So, you’re sure you’re coming over in the morning.”
Yes.” (I wasn’t sure.)
“Alright then.”
In the morning my back hurt. A stabbing pain shot down to my ankle. He told me to lie on the floor and realign my hips. If I had listened to him and hung upside down, I might be better by now. But what did he know anyway? He phoned back to invite me out to lunch. I accepted which was unusual for me especially at mid-day.
He took me to Swiss Chalet on Bayview Avenue. During the meal he made some comment about Jews.
“What did you say?”
“I said . . .”
“What? You said what with a Jew whom you just happen to fuck sitting right in front of you?”
He said that once again I had ruined both a perfectly good meal and his intentions. We hardly talked as he drove me back to my rented condo. Later, I worried that he might still be angry, so I called him at his office and asked ever so politely if I could come over, it would please and thrill me and so on. Then we had that interlude. Actually I was glad I did it. I was tired of crying. He could feel I was dripping wet right through my jeans. He didn’t even need to use lube which he kept in his top bureau drawer at home anyway. A day later he admitted it had been such a turn-on, although with him you would never know it. He’s such a closed man.
His balls had really shrunk.
After The Interlude
Garth calls at 7:26 a.m. I’m concerned about his balls.
“But how do you know they’ll grow back?”
“They’ll grow back.”
“Yeah, but how do you know?”
“I had a kid, didn’t I?”
“But that doesn’t mean they’ll grow back. Except if you know from past experience.”
“I do.”
“What? They got this small?”
“Smaller.”
“Oh my god, you’re kidding!”
“About the size of raisins.”
“Shit. You must have freaked out. You gotta be kidding.”
“Nope. I was really worried actually.”
“And how long does it take them, to grow back I mean?”
“About a month.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Cause they’re about half size now. Will they get much smaller?”
“Not much. I have only four to six shots left.”
“That’s good to know then.”
“I actually phoned to ask you how you’re feeling today.”
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“Uh huh.”
“Not sore at all?”
“Nope.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Yeah. Well so was I. I sure as hell wasn’t expecting that.”
“To tell you the truth, neither was I. It just happened. Did it feel OK, towards the end?”
“Well, I was scared, you know, because I didn’t think that natural was as effective.”
“You should’ve trusted me. I was watching the whole time, to make sure.”
“Easy for you to say. I thought I was going to be split open like Catherine the Great. You think spit works just as well?”
“Where do you think they imitated the synthetic from?”
“Wow.”
So when did it start to feel good?”
“When you said, 'Stop fighting me.'”
“You were wiggling around so much. I couldn’t aim properly to get it in.”
“It was fucking scary. You used to be proud of how little you had to use, remember. I never thought that you’d be using nothing at all.”
“Neither did I really. So you’re OK?”
“Yeah. Except my throat is sore.”
“Interesting.”
“Damn straight!”
“You sure they won’t get much smaller? I miss them, you know.”
“You’ll have them back. Don’t worry.”
“If you say so.”
“And if you put this in your book, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Garth gets off on ass fucking without lube. I get off on a dare.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Abie Fucks Me Over
Abie really loves fucking. I like fucking all right but my nervous breakdown has wrestled me to the ground. I look at Abie's shoulders and the way his arms hang out and down, and I think here is a man with solid shoulders who hugs me like a humping dog. Besides I'm starting to like this little house. The first time I sleep over, there are two plump pillows on Abie's single bed. "I told you my parents are cool," he says. We lie down and he starts his vaudeville routine: french kissing, fingering tits, nipple twisting and squeezing (my bald Uncle Charlie used to pinch-and-twist my cheeks and I never liked that much either), then he Frenchy kisses me, I Frenchy kiss back, he rubs my crotch, I sway in time. It's like dancing - he leads left foot forward, I respond right foot back, only this time his cock leads which is less complicated since I'm not much of a dancer.
"Wait, I say, "I have to tell you something."
"Go ahead," he says reaching into my panties and twitching my clit like a hyperactive kid fiddling with a light switch.
"Stop," I say, but he keeps on rubbing and squeezing and pressing himself against me.
"I said goddamn it stop, get your goddamn hands off me."
"O.K. O.K.," he says. "Easy now."
"I just want you to know it's all an act."
"What's an act?"
"This. It doesn't feel good, I can't come."
"But I feel you inside."
"You feel yourself inside. Damn you, I said I can't come. I mean who the fuck are you? It's a dribble that's all, just a fucking dribble."
Abie sits up and looks at me, his low brow wrinkling. " But I'm in the top two percent," he says, because he comes, wakes up in the middle of the night for a second helping, building up for thirds and fourths by early morning. I think the workers topping his semen supply are overworked - no union there. I'm a union organizer's daughter setting up a picket line where it counts.
"Hey, it's like anything else, it takes practice," he says. He lies on top of me and kisses my neck below my left then right ear, “I love you, you know that, love you.” I know he means it, but like any mama's boy, he listens to his cock.
I'm listening with my eyelids forced shut to ease the passage of his words. I figure I can transport the essence of his message directly from his mouth to my cunt, no stop-overs, no detours. I'm trying to focus, clenching my eyes shut like I’m constipated and trying to take a shit when I catch sight of my mother.
"Oh my god Abie, I see her." I grab his solid shoulders. "I see her up there. She's coming at me. Hold me. She's coming down! Oh god I can't stop her! She's coming for me."
"Who's coming? Janice, who is it? Tell me who it is."
"It's a witch. Holy shit, the witch, it's Mummy. Her nails, she's going to rip at me with her nails. Cover me, lie quickly on me, she's coming closer, oh no, I can't, she's laughing. Oh Abie, her nails!"
I'm clutching on to the bony knuckles at the back of Abie's shoulders, and he spreads himself over me, offering up full-body protection. He soothes me with his kisses and sings soft songs into my hair.
"I can't breathe," I say, twisting my head out from his turtle shell.
Meanwhile, his prick is poking around like a divining rod. "Listen, my sweet, there's no witch, no mummy, only you and me. Only you and me. Let me come inside you."
"You think it’ll help?”
“Yes,” he says, “definitely.
All night he stays inside, sometimes just his cock’s cold tip slips in, other times the whole damn thing grabs space like a kid hogging the blanket, as I cringe from my mother and the witches. Even when I tell him how I hate him and bite his shoulders, he holds me. Then I lie and say I love you too, and I rub against him grinding my hips which he takes as an invitation and zooms right on in. And all the while I'm thinking─in the end you'll go like the rest of them, you'll speed off in your Daddy's Pontiac and maybe I'm at the door waving and smiling my after-sex smile or I'm out there running after you, dust circling my ankles, my bathrobe coattails flying. "Stay," I'm calling, "stay, just one more,” and I lean against the doorway with your salt still on my tongue. The fuck was on me. On the house. But the next time you gotta pay. Next time. Although you know you'll never see me again. I won't be the same next time. Hold me, hold me close. I don't know where I'm going. Let me look at you. Kiss me, oh kiss me again.
Coyright Janice Colman 2008
"Wait, I say, "I have to tell you something."
"Go ahead," he says reaching into my panties and twitching my clit like a hyperactive kid fiddling with a light switch.
"Stop," I say, but he keeps on rubbing and squeezing and pressing himself against me.
"I said goddamn it stop, get your goddamn hands off me."
"O.K. O.K.," he says. "Easy now."
"I just want you to know it's all an act."
"What's an act?"
"This. It doesn't feel good, I can't come."
"But I feel you inside."
"You feel yourself inside. Damn you, I said I can't come. I mean who the fuck are you? It's a dribble that's all, just a fucking dribble."
Abie sits up and looks at me, his low brow wrinkling. " But I'm in the top two percent," he says, because he comes, wakes up in the middle of the night for a second helping, building up for thirds and fourths by early morning. I think the workers topping his semen supply are overworked - no union there. I'm a union organizer's daughter setting up a picket line where it counts.
"Hey, it's like anything else, it takes practice," he says. He lies on top of me and kisses my neck below my left then right ear, “I love you, you know that, love you.” I know he means it, but like any mama's boy, he listens to his cock.
I'm listening with my eyelids forced shut to ease the passage of his words. I figure I can transport the essence of his message directly from his mouth to my cunt, no stop-overs, no detours. I'm trying to focus, clenching my eyes shut like I’m constipated and trying to take a shit when I catch sight of my mother.
"Oh my god Abie, I see her." I grab his solid shoulders. "I see her up there. She's coming at me. Hold me. She's coming down! Oh god I can't stop her! She's coming for me."
"Who's coming? Janice, who is it? Tell me who it is."
"It's a witch. Holy shit, the witch, it's Mummy. Her nails, she's going to rip at me with her nails. Cover me, lie quickly on me, she's coming closer, oh no, I can't, she's laughing. Oh Abie, her nails!"
I'm clutching on to the bony knuckles at the back of Abie's shoulders, and he spreads himself over me, offering up full-body protection. He soothes me with his kisses and sings soft songs into my hair.
"I can't breathe," I say, twisting my head out from his turtle shell.
Meanwhile, his prick is poking around like a divining rod. "Listen, my sweet, there's no witch, no mummy, only you and me. Only you and me. Let me come inside you."
"You think it’ll help?”
“Yes,” he says, “definitely.
All night he stays inside, sometimes just his cock’s cold tip slips in, other times the whole damn thing grabs space like a kid hogging the blanket, as I cringe from my mother and the witches. Even when I tell him how I hate him and bite his shoulders, he holds me. Then I lie and say I love you too, and I rub against him grinding my hips which he takes as an invitation and zooms right on in. And all the while I'm thinking─in the end you'll go like the rest of them, you'll speed off in your Daddy's Pontiac and maybe I'm at the door waving and smiling my after-sex smile or I'm out there running after you, dust circling my ankles, my bathrobe coattails flying. "Stay," I'm calling, "stay, just one more,” and I lean against the doorway with your salt still on my tongue. The fuck was on me. On the house. But the next time you gotta pay. Next time. Although you know you'll never see me again. I won't be the same next time. Hold me, hold me close. I don't know where I'm going. Let me look at you. Kiss me, oh kiss me again.
Coyright Janice Colman 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
She Held Me in Her Eyes
I tossed and turned all night:
The baby is sleeping on his back in the garage, the garage door full open. The floor is concrete, fresh white and so clean you could spread out a Sunday lunchtime tablecloth on it. "Janice," I say, "call me if he cries, will you?" He is sleeping after all.
He flips over like a leaf, summer to autumn to winter to spring, never lingering on one season. I tuck the edges of the blue blanket under the carriage mattress, so the blanket lies smooth and tight, and with my tip of my saddle shoe, I slip up the brake. The carriage is driving on its own─one two three down the driveway. Four five─ a head as small as a doll’s takes wing toward Van Horne Avenue, soft white shoes disappear under black rubber wheels, fingers flattened like Thursday’s dough under my mother’s wood rolling pin. I open my mouth to scream, but my heart freezes over like the deepest lake in the coldest winter. I walk to where the head lies, to the hands lying flat and still on the pavement, the feet sitting side by side, and I turn the baby onto his back as he had been before the carriage decided to make a break for it─away from that house and the sad lady in it. I fix the head so it sits like a pumpkin on his body, fix the feet so the toes point out ever so slightly, and set the hands just beyond the line of the his wrists, curving each finger just a little. Then I take a deep breath of air as crisp as fresh sheets flying on the line, and I walk, one double-bowed shoe in front of the other, into the house.
His head lies tilted like a mournful question. I reset it neat and square. I smooth out each finger and tie the bows of the little shoes. Then I scream and scream and scream.
I can't recognize him when they carry him out. He looks like a boy doll with a proper boy's haircut and little boy bangs. "Where's the neck?" I ask because all I see is a pocket of extra skin where a neck should be, but I hold him close anyway.
I set the bowl on my head and cut my hair right up to the rim. I used to sit on the living room stool while my mother turned each strand of hair round and round, a bobby pin like Cupid's arrow through each curl. “Why, why?” she says, but the ice around my heart is so slippery, the answers can't stay upright; they just fall and slip away. I watch lines grow like weeds between her eyebrows, her hair lying all limp and helpless like cut grass, and I sit down right close beside her. “I will never cut my hair again or push a baby carriage into the street,” I say. After supper I walk straight into my room. I pick up the doll with the red striped dress that snaps and ties in the back, and I cut her hair short short. “Smokey, Smokey," I call in my morning corn syrup voice and dress my cat in Julian’s baby t-shirt, laying him all safe and harassed up on his back in the shiny carriage my grandfather gave me and parade him down Wilder Avenue to Rockland Park. One day I whisper “tch tch tch” as I lift up my bedskirt, peer on tiptoes behind closet shelves, behind books, under my dresses, inside my mother’s hatboxes. I don't cry when I can't find him. On my maple bureau, there's a picture of me on my grandfather’s lap and Smokey on mine.
The phone is ringing. I pick up the receiver even though I know I'm in the middle of a dream and it’s not polite to walk out on company. Abie is calling from Russia. “I’m in Russia,” he says on his voice mail. Actually he’s in Moscow, staying at his Russian girfriend’s three-room apartment. Her daughter and ex-mother-in- law also live there. The apartment has no living room. Abie figures he’s completing a deal, so he’s gone over to Russia. Ninety days ago the manager of his apartment building gave him notice. But he kept thinking his deal was going to close and of course it didn’t, so now he’s in Moscow at Anya’s. “I don’t want movers touching my suits,” he says, “or my menorah or my photos.” I tell him, “I only wish I’d had that choice.”
When Abie talks, I shut my eyes. He gives my heart arthritis, I’m sure. It must be damp in there from so much sadness and crying. It aches; it really does─the left side at the top. Even when he stops talking my chest is still shuddering. Is it possible he’s damaged my heart? “Breathe in,” I tell myself, “nice and deep, breathe.” There was a car I once had that refused to start when the wheel was turned too far to the right; the key would not turn in the ignition. The only way to get that car going was to gently shake the wheel left, right, left, and bring the handle all the down. All the wrangling and cajoling, and the car might start. Might. I need someone to rock my heart. I close my eyes. It’s not that I want to get back to the dream, but I think maybe there’s something significant tucked away in a drawer and if I can sift through dressers and cupboard . . . A butterfly comes to rest on my eyelids and I close my eyes.
There’s no one in the house, no friend to call “hey, would you come over.” No one pops by and I like it that way. It’s only the second day after washing my hair and already it’s oily. I have to wait four days until I can wash it again. And then there are things to organize. I have a list in my pocket. The baby is in his carriage and I think, if I go inside to make one call, leave a message─one minute, maybe less, so I call “Janice, will you watch Julian for five minutes?”
One thing. There’s a man, big, huge actually. Doesn’t talk much. Doesn’t trap me with vile words neither. I watch him cradling my baby in one of his big arms and how Janice tags beside him, her arm raised so she could slip her small hand is his immense warm one. I peek through the hospital venetians. He stands in the middle of the parking lot, looks up and waves which is kind of funny coming from such a large man─the wave of a visiting dignitary. Later when a doctor in white walks in to talk to me, I stand sideways in front of the window. The large man is gone. There is no car in front of the yellow barrier, nor do I see the retreating back of a tall, wide man in a navy blue raincoat.
I was everything to her. Not my sister who was born without a heart. Something kept her alive, but it wasn’t her heart. I think she was just plain mean and staying alive for spite. My mother held me in her eyes until my brother was born. His soft blue blanket with shining borders lay folded in my lap. I held the soft wool to my face and breathed in its sweet country air. And then there it was, all round and full on my mother’s lap while I sat still and quiet in the back.
Ladies bustle from the boy baby’s room to the kitchen. The water pops before the bottles are lowered into the silver pot. I love the bottles and the round flat caps and the way the rubber nipples hide underneath, their tips just kissing the milk.
She rolls down the window and waves. She just slides into her brown velevt coat and goes and when she comes back, she lies in bed in her nightdress. I tiptoe into the room. “Janice,” she says. She’s so quiet, she almost whispers. She never twirls my hair again. She gets tired when she talks to me. Sometimes I’m mean and she gets sadder and sadder. I think she’s like one of the flowers outside, wilted and falling before winter. But when she opens her eyes wide, I hear rich full music streaming from them - voices and instuments twirling. Her eyes are clear and sweet as heaven. I hold my breath to keep the air from rustling. "Ma," I say, "Ma." And her eyes skim the room like bees in a desert.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
The baby is sleeping on his back in the garage, the garage door full open. The floor is concrete, fresh white and so clean you could spread out a Sunday lunchtime tablecloth on it. "Janice," I say, "call me if he cries, will you?" He is sleeping after all.
He flips over like a leaf, summer to autumn to winter to spring, never lingering on one season. I tuck the edges of the blue blanket under the carriage mattress, so the blanket lies smooth and tight, and with my tip of my saddle shoe, I slip up the brake. The carriage is driving on its own─one two three down the driveway. Four five─ a head as small as a doll’s takes wing toward Van Horne Avenue, soft white shoes disappear under black rubber wheels, fingers flattened like Thursday’s dough under my mother’s wood rolling pin. I open my mouth to scream, but my heart freezes over like the deepest lake in the coldest winter. I walk to where the head lies, to the hands lying flat and still on the pavement, the feet sitting side by side, and I turn the baby onto his back as he had been before the carriage decided to make a break for it─away from that house and the sad lady in it. I fix the head so it sits like a pumpkin on his body, fix the feet so the toes point out ever so slightly, and set the hands just beyond the line of the his wrists, curving each finger just a little. Then I take a deep breath of air as crisp as fresh sheets flying on the line, and I walk, one double-bowed shoe in front of the other, into the house.
His head lies tilted like a mournful question. I reset it neat and square. I smooth out each finger and tie the bows of the little shoes. Then I scream and scream and scream.
I can't recognize him when they carry him out. He looks like a boy doll with a proper boy's haircut and little boy bangs. "Where's the neck?" I ask because all I see is a pocket of extra skin where a neck should be, but I hold him close anyway.
I set the bowl on my head and cut my hair right up to the rim. I used to sit on the living room stool while my mother turned each strand of hair round and round, a bobby pin like Cupid's arrow through each curl. “Why, why?” she says, but the ice around my heart is so slippery, the answers can't stay upright; they just fall and slip away. I watch lines grow like weeds between her eyebrows, her hair lying all limp and helpless like cut grass, and I sit down right close beside her. “I will never cut my hair again or push a baby carriage into the street,” I say. After supper I walk straight into my room. I pick up the doll with the red striped dress that snaps and ties in the back, and I cut her hair short short. “Smokey, Smokey," I call in my morning corn syrup voice and dress my cat in Julian’s baby t-shirt, laying him all safe and harassed up on his back in the shiny carriage my grandfather gave me and parade him down Wilder Avenue to Rockland Park. One day I whisper “tch tch tch” as I lift up my bedskirt, peer on tiptoes behind closet shelves, behind books, under my dresses, inside my mother’s hatboxes. I don't cry when I can't find him. On my maple bureau, there's a picture of me on my grandfather’s lap and Smokey on mine.
The phone is ringing. I pick up the receiver even though I know I'm in the middle of a dream and it’s not polite to walk out on company. Abie is calling from Russia. “I’m in Russia,” he says on his voice mail. Actually he’s in Moscow, staying at his Russian girfriend’s three-room apartment. Her daughter and ex-mother-in- law also live there. The apartment has no living room. Abie figures he’s completing a deal, so he’s gone over to Russia. Ninety days ago the manager of his apartment building gave him notice. But he kept thinking his deal was going to close and of course it didn’t, so now he’s in Moscow at Anya’s. “I don’t want movers touching my suits,” he says, “or my menorah or my photos.” I tell him, “I only wish I’d had that choice.”
When Abie talks, I shut my eyes. He gives my heart arthritis, I’m sure. It must be damp in there from so much sadness and crying. It aches; it really does─the left side at the top. Even when he stops talking my chest is still shuddering. Is it possible he’s damaged my heart? “Breathe in,” I tell myself, “nice and deep, breathe.” There was a car I once had that refused to start when the wheel was turned too far to the right; the key would not turn in the ignition. The only way to get that car going was to gently shake the wheel left, right, left, and bring the handle all the down. All the wrangling and cajoling, and the car might start. Might. I need someone to rock my heart. I close my eyes. It’s not that I want to get back to the dream, but I think maybe there’s something significant tucked away in a drawer and if I can sift through dressers and cupboard . . . A butterfly comes to rest on my eyelids and I close my eyes.
There’s no one in the house, no friend to call “hey, would you come over.” No one pops by and I like it that way. It’s only the second day after washing my hair and already it’s oily. I have to wait four days until I can wash it again. And then there are things to organize. I have a list in my pocket. The baby is in his carriage and I think, if I go inside to make one call, leave a message─one minute, maybe less, so I call “Janice, will you watch Julian for five minutes?”
One thing. There’s a man, big, huge actually. Doesn’t talk much. Doesn’t trap me with vile words neither. I watch him cradling my baby in one of his big arms and how Janice tags beside him, her arm raised so she could slip her small hand is his immense warm one. I peek through the hospital venetians. He stands in the middle of the parking lot, looks up and waves which is kind of funny coming from such a large man─the wave of a visiting dignitary. Later when a doctor in white walks in to talk to me, I stand sideways in front of the window. The large man is gone. There is no car in front of the yellow barrier, nor do I see the retreating back of a tall, wide man in a navy blue raincoat.
I was everything to her. Not my sister who was born without a heart. Something kept her alive, but it wasn’t her heart. I think she was just plain mean and staying alive for spite. My mother held me in her eyes until my brother was born. His soft blue blanket with shining borders lay folded in my lap. I held the soft wool to my face and breathed in its sweet country air. And then there it was, all round and full on my mother’s lap while I sat still and quiet in the back.
Ladies bustle from the boy baby’s room to the kitchen. The water pops before the bottles are lowered into the silver pot. I love the bottles and the round flat caps and the way the rubber nipples hide underneath, their tips just kissing the milk.
She rolls down the window and waves. She just slides into her brown velevt coat and goes and when she comes back, she lies in bed in her nightdress. I tiptoe into the room. “Janice,” she says. She’s so quiet, she almost whispers. She never twirls my hair again. She gets tired when she talks to me. Sometimes I’m mean and she gets sadder and sadder. I think she’s like one of the flowers outside, wilted and falling before winter. But when she opens her eyes wide, I hear rich full music streaming from them - voices and instuments twirling. Her eyes are clear and sweet as heaven. I hold my breath to keep the air from rustling. "Ma," I say, "Ma." And her eyes skim the room like bees in a desert.
Copyright Janice Colman 2008
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