Buffing up the Blog: Writing in the Buff

I write erotica naked.
I bought a book on how to do it a couple years ago, and follow its formatting meticulously. Lots of descruption, tons of detail, adjectivs like perky, dripping, flushed, sweaty, etc. It's really quite easy once you have the structure down. Writing from the male gaze is the trickiest; I have trouble seeing the appeal of the sweaty canal of cleavage on a busty high school nurse.
At first my erotica came out stilted, cheesy, childish even - hardly the Anais Nin style I was aspiring to. Then one day, as nearly everything I owned was in the washing machine - I made the astonishing discovery that my erotica writing improved tenfold if I wrote naked.
I sit at my desk with my feet on each knee, yoga style, and turn up the heat. I drink tea from a stained mug and sporatically push my glasses further up my nose. My hair is piled in a greasy bun on top of my head, and my bare ass has red, raised welts on it from the slats of my chair. In short - I am probably the unsexiest sight to behold this side of Chez Pierre. But something about it just clicks. Sensual phrases pour out of me, steamy like my tea, and vivid scenarios that I have never and probably will never experience rise effortlessly from my pen.This stuff is good. I guess it could be my imagination, could be that I've read a lot of erotica, could ven be the formula I follow, but really, I think it's that I'm naked.

Tea Shop Sketch #2 - Cancer Patients

Whenever people come in and say they want green tea in bulk - any flavour, any price; I know they are dying. When people have cancer in later stages, and doctors have given up on chemo and pills, radiation and chemical remedies, they finally turn to the holistic. Just so they can say they’ve really tried everything, so they can pretend there is still some hope left. It’s depressing as hell. The doctors recommend green tea, and they trustingly come flocking to me, wallets out, for verification that this will save them. There are whole websites dedicated to the miracle power of the tea-leaf. I mean, obviously it can’t do any harm – chock full of antioxidants and all that bullshit, but it sure can’t save them. As I’m spewing off statistics and health benefits to them, pointing out our tin sizes and discussing steeping times, I try not to look at their drawn faces. They look at me with child-hope, sadness, and determination.
It’s worst when the cancer patient’s spouse comes in. They know its all bullshit. They know that along with piping hot sencha they’re feeding their loved ones faith and lies. They know, but what is there to do? Nothing. So we lie. We all lie. The doctors, the lovers, the tea-tender and the person themselves. It’s really the only way left to handle anything.

Bone Hold

It was my turn.

I walked up behind you
speaking with soft and even sounds,
as you would
to a spooked horse,
tones and volumes
that wouldn’t cut your ears.

You heard consonants better now,
they said.
Speak loudly,
they said.
Kei-ra,
I crooned
rolling your name over and under my tongue,
soothing your sore bones with saliva and sound.

Kei-ra,
leading my cold sweaty hand
to grip the base of your
bent neck,

freeing your brother
to finally walk away,
even look away.

I shifted my fingers with fear,
careful to always be touching
some part of your ashen skin,
thin as moth wings
and smelling of rot.

It hurt you to shower,
you told me.
The water stung your skin and felt
like that time
we were caught in hail.

We sat so still and silent, that
we heard your mother
chain smoking on the deck
before we smelt it.

click, whoosh, suck, exhale

Then the acrid smell that made you
roll your eyes
and remind her,
your lungs were nearly gone.

I felt drained,
like they said I should,
They said:
Our energy could make her well!

And whatever we did,

NOT to let go.

You called them hacks
and, as if to prove a point,
promptly hacked up what looked like
a bit of lung.

I kissed your brow
as your mother slid her hard hand
under mine.

I kissed you hard,
to taste the sweat
that had crusted into sugar there.

I kissed you for so long
that you flinched away from us

and for a moment –
no hands held you here at all.

Vertigo

My mother is terrified of bridges. When we used to take family bike rides she would walk her bike across every bridge, staring straight ahead with her jaw clenched and her shoulders stiff. She would scream at me if I kept riding, (for my own safety of course ) and make me slow down to walk with her. She would tighten her dry, raspy fingers around my wrist and I would stare at the traffic flashing between the cracks in the boards of the wooden overpass. I would image my fear pulling down cinder blocks and supports, and all of us falling into the stream of cars honking below. We would be blood splotches on asphalt and look like those squished fairies I had in a book at home.
After I had learned where nearly every bridge in the city was, I started to get sick flashes in my stomach when we would ride near one. Eventually I took my Dad's tool box - hammer and all - to my bike, and that put an end to those family bike rides. I still feel nauseous when I cross bridges, and have decided to never have children. I have known for a long time that I, like my mother, cannot pass on any kind of good.


Get off your Bike to Cross the Bridge

My mother’s vertigo was menstrual
she thought fear a phallic fix, felt
cloth that cloaked my callous self
a virgin noosed by vanity

She moaned dire musings in the dark:

bridges are breaking she breathed down my back
edges crumble and darling you’ll stumble

I won’t ever forget or forgive your
leaning low over open air
handing your raw heart to the herons
that circle and cry and keep you convinced
now the craven need never know height.

Cliff Jumping in Lagos, Portugal

I stand on the top of a tall cliff
jutting out over the ocean.
I am very alone here, and
the last glow of sun
has left the oceans skin.

The bats have come out
and are swooping
around my head
and though I like them,
I’m getting afraid.
It was a risky climb
up chains bolted to the cliff face.
Now it’s too dark
to get down, so
I tilt back my head
and watch the blur of brown bat bodies
scar the air
hundreds upon hundreds
of these dark, diving shapes.
A rush of vertigo –
I crouch
and remember that
the way I fight fear
is with more fear.
I back up
to the edge of the plateau
take off my jeans and
stuff my shirt in one pocket
then tie them around my waist
I hold my arms out
and feel air moving strangely,
swirling almost hot
around my naked body.
Then I run so fast
that I can’t stop at the edge
even if I want to.
Suddenly
I am falling through layers
of tears and sandpaper
the wind feels so very
fluid, yet rough.
I tuck my knees to my chest
as I slap the water.
Plunging under
I truly believe
I can stay here forever,
and air is for fools.
Something sharp cuts my foot
and reminds me that yes,
I am a fool
and yes, my foolish body
needs air.
I ride the black waves back to shore
and sit on the empty beach
watching my
goose-pimpled flesh
lose its tan
in the moonlight.
I stretch my clothes out on long flat rocks
and wait for them to dry
while sitting
and lapping the blood off my foot
with a tongue as rough
as those sandpaper winds

Tea Shop Sketch #1 - Biker Bob

I know Bob is about to walk into my tea shop when a beat-up red pickup lurches and skids into the handicapped parking spot in front of the store. Bob, although he walks with a definite stumble, is not handicapped. You can't see it from where I stand behind the counter, but he has a bumper sticker in his rear window that says, If god didn’t want me to eat pussy, he wouldn’t have made it look like a taco. I found it funny, but I think I was one of the few. Bob wears the same blue flannel shirt and stone-washed jeans every time I see him. His handlebar moustache is yellowed at he ends from drooping into a cup of tea – mango vanilla tea to be exact. He never drinks anything else. When Bob walks up to the counter, he winks at me, and shows me the latest message on his gut. He has one of those programmable belts where you can choose your own message to flash across it in blinking red letters. Often it’s a racial slur, or his phone number, today it just said: PUSSY.
“How ya doin’ me darlin’?”
(Bob is not Irish)
“I’m okay, kinda tired…”
“Well guess what I got for your skinny ass,”
“What?”
Bob throws a fruit roll-up above my head, so that I have to jump to catch it. We have a stash of about 20 of them in a drawer under the till, because no one who works here actually likes fruit-roll-ups. None of us have the heart to tell him.
“Thanks, Bob! The usual?”
“Damn straight. No butter on my scone. Butter is for fat-asses and morons… that shit gets in your hearteries and yer fuckin’ done for.”
“Right…”
I bring him his tea, and he drinks it out of the same cup he always does, sitting in the same chair by the furthest window. From this seat he shouts to me across the store whatever thought occurs to him.
“I’m working security for the fuckin’ Queen next month, eh? Right now I’m busy guarding the baby ducks from that oil spill...”
“What oil spill?”
You know, that fuckin’ big one out by that …lake. Hey, did you know I been electrocuted?
“Yeah Bob, you told me… weren’t you working construction when it happened?””Fuck no. I was fucking a model and she got so into it, ya know, that she dropped the vibrator we was playing with into the tub.”
“Oh… I could have sworn it was constructions…aren’t vibrators battery-run?”
“Well what would you know about it, girlie, you’re 13!” (I am 20)
Bob winks at me and chuckles, turning back to his tea, motorcycle boots propped up on a plush couch, mud oozing down the rivets of the fabric.
He slurps his tea extra strong, drinking it out of his own particular black paisley patterned teacup because he says, “it’s the least fruitcakey.”
Bob could be a cartoon character he is so perfectly the same, every time I see him. He is outrageous and predictable, thoroughly disgusting and rude, laughable and lovable.
Soon Bob is joined by his brother Tim. As much as I like Bob, I hate Tim. Tim is a pervert who only tells us we look pretty if we happen to be wearing a tank top or a skirt. Tim comes up behind us when we can’t see him and tries to give us neck rubs, “for making him such good tea…” He leers at our asses or breasts, depending on the way we face him, and makes every girl in the tea-shop feel like her skin is crawling and prickling. When Tim is visually molesting us, Bob looks away.
I haven’t seen Bob in 6 months. I had to file a police report against him when he smashed a rock into the window and told the owner he was going to run her over with his truck. He was banned from the store, and I was almost fired when I said it was a shame.