not a dream, a memory…

Dear Gentle Sir,

We met again in my dream last night. (It’s been some time.) Pressed tightly together, wrapped safely in your arms, we kissed. Your lips and tongue caressed mine with a passion so sweet I wanted to cry.

I realized long after waking, while walking with tender thots of you, that our dream-kiss was an echo, a memory of where we once were together: a first time of a certain kind that awakened a hunger in me I have yet to satisfy.

Beautiful man, sweetest of lovers, you make me sigh.

Dreaming Awake,

Lola xo

the darning needle…

your love is downy soft
a gentle brush ‘gainst lashes closed
a fist wrapped tight ’round rosemary and mint
it beats like a drum in the basement
it’s echo a pillow plumped in sheet forts built long ago
each crinkle of your smile
a constant call that does not rest
that will not abide the loss of what can be won
sweet determination
sufferance of fools
and saviour to none
your love blossoms under full moons
in the spaces between words on pages
and gasps of air ‘tween laughter that rings true
this is your fullness
the light you shine on a world living for itself
you pause when you used to run
you doubt despite assurances you are right
you speak without apology
into a mic made of bone and air
dear one
hold the hand that reaches for you
but let it go, let it be
and float
float
and float
here among the clouds of your heart’s home
hear the beat calling your own name from within
the sky that holds all that love
that is you

— Lola Moi —

when time is spent…

Once, I met a man and I very nearly came the first time he entered me. I rode this man but I didn’t love him; I loved how his cock made me feel. He filled me beyond anything I’d ever known before.

A bird sits on my windowsill.
It fluffs its feathers and waits for others to arrive.
It doesn’t look up at the sun.
It sees me through my window and it simply serenades.

Many times, I made a man I (once) loved cum. I looked into his eyes as we filled one another; I looked because I saw him for who he was and still found joy. His lies filled me beyond anything I’d ever known before.

Sometimes we sleepwalk
Daylight fluffs its nighttime wings and whispers.
Someone traces secrets in the air that we cannot quite hear.
We blind ourselves – as one with the deaf and dumb.

I cry your name in deepest pleasure. I pull you close and feel impossibly new.  The breath I once thought my own, rides the wind over water, through trees of cedar, under bark. I sit and see truth.

In life we are undone.
In waking-dreams we are made new.
With the right person, healing happens
But first, we must awaken.

 

the encounter…

(enchanted by this strange proximity)

Longing, and mystery, and delight…
as if from the swaying blackness
of some slow-motion masquerade
onto the dim bridge you came.

And night flowed, and silent there floated
into its satin streams
that black mask’s wolf-like profile
and those tender lips of yours.

And under the chestnuts, along the canal
you passed, luring me askance.
What did my heart discern in you,
how did you move me so?

In your momentary tenderness,
or in the changing contour of your shoulders,
did I experience a dim sketch
of other — irrevocable — encounters?

Perhaps romantic pity
led you to understand
what had set trembling that arrow
now piercing through my verse?

I know nothing. Strangely
the verse vibrates, and in it, an arrow…
Perhaps you, still nameless, were
the genuine, the awaited one?

But sorrow not yet quite cried out
perturbed our starry hour.
Into the night returned the double fissure
of your eyes, eyes not yet illumed.

For long? For ever? Far off
I wander, and strain to hear
the movement of the stars above our encounter
and what if you are to be my fate…

Longing, and mystery, and delight,
and like a distant supplication…
My heart must travel on.
But if you are to be my fate…

— Vladimir Nabokov —
translated by Olga Voronina

on lies, secrets, and silence…

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

— Adrienne Rich —