Noah (edited)

I remember the nights when you held me in the darkness. Now I lie alone, the straw smelling of sweat and semen. But I know that you have not lost it with me, this life-force, and then you complain of feeling depleted. Wash your hands, you pervert, and take a shower! Your skin smells of horse-shit, and you no longer let me run my fingers through you hair. Thunder peels down the sky, but I can not see the lightning, stuck here in the wooden box that floats. I turn over, praying the straw will smell better on your side of the mattress. It doesn't. I lay awake listening to the chatter of monkeys and the lonely cries of the nightingales, wishing you could hear my silence.

*********************************************************************************************

"Camels are so not sexy", you said to me, when I came to your house for the first time. All the other suitors had horses. But over time, our lives became steady like the camel, you and I, long and drawn, safe and not needing much water. I always feared the day you would long for the swiftness of camels. Then the flood came, and I was releived - we were the only ones left now, you and I, in this wooden floating tomb.

But I have seen the way that your eyes turn down when I walk into our cabin, so I have chosen only to return once your eyes are closed. Are you lying there tonight, dreaming? Or are you thinking of the many men you could have chosen, and the freshness of their cold corpses? I rub my hand against the camel's fur; my palm slowly crawls into the spot where you hands once dwelt, and when it is over, the white stain on the wood is small. I will clean it up tomorrow, with the camel droppings. I will drop both into the waters that have learned to drown our silence, and it is only the rustling of the straw between us that reminds me you are real. I have replaced your kisses with a bucket of camel droppings.

Couldn't it at least have been horse-shit? Camels are so not sexy.

Scene

"It's a prose poem", she said.
"I don't know B. I'm a simple guy. Something's poetry, or it's prose. I don't like the in betweens".
'Sure you do.", she said, smiling. "You're in between me all the time", she said, playing with his fingers.
He laughed. "Yes, but that's a different kind of in between entirely", he said, drawing her closer.
She smiled, and their kiss tasted of the cherries they had had for breakfast that morning.
"Have I told you today that I love you?"
She shook her head.
"Well I do."
She laughed. "Thanks." she said, "I know."
He laughed. "Whatever happened to I love you to?"
"It gets boring."
He smiled. "You're so silly" he said.
She scoffed. "Silly is a word you use to describe puppies."
He groaned. The entire morning would be about appeasing her now. At least it meant they would spend the morning in bed.
"Your lips tasted of cherries" she said.
He looked at her.
"Just now", she explained, "did my lips taste of cherry too?"
He grinned. "Well that depends - do you like cherry?"
"I want an honest answer". She elbowed him, but he could tell she was growing softer. "I am melting her like a marshmallow before the flame" he thought, "and our relationship is one gigantic bonfire."
His kiss was slower this time, "more like cherry cordial because it leaves an after-taste", she thought, "God I hope I don't get hungover."

The morning was measured in suspended breaths and sunlight melding in and out of shadows that played on white sheets - and the rustling of thighs.

"Anytime you write about love it should involve the rustling of thighs", she said.
"Yes, you do like thighs", he teased.
"Why not?" she smiled. "Thighs are a perfectly respectable part of the body."
He laughed. "Maybe", he said, "but I also like lips and neck, and breasts...." and his hands were winding their way through her body.
"You're such a pervert", she teased.
"I'm a pervert! You're the one who writes porn for a living."
"But at least I'm good at it", she said.
He laughed. 'There's no denying that.", he said.
She smiled. "I see you're working on giving me new material", she teased.
He did not answer; his lips were pressed against her collarbone.

The night was meaured in the shifting of shadows and moonlight, the crumpling of sheets and the rustling of thighs.

Tonight, Walking Home from the Bus Stop

I am writing to write tonight, I think. I envision Argentinian soccer players, but that's not very poetic, even though one day someone will write a paean to their bodies -even though I have no idea what a paean is.

I wish I were more poetic, but how can I be when I no longer read poetry? I have been isolated from my sea of books, set apart to run adrift in a world of endless procrastination, when I would so much rather immerse myself in the pleasures of your body.

It's funny, the way I thought of you tonight, after so long. I didn't miss you, exactly - if you were here now, I would probably reject your advances. Maybe I'd even cry - did I ever let you see my tears? I don't remember - our relationship has become no more than a string of images:

The two of us sitting on a wooden bench, on a concrete block overlooking dying flowers.

The tree where you first told me that you love me.

Holding hands in an abandoned building, presenting you with a blue dente to match your t-shirt and the color of your eyes; fingering the necklace against your chest as we lie on my couch, your brown hair against the pink sheets of my bed, your glasses.

I even remember your eyes. That's odd - I don't usually remember men's eyes. I can remember other body parts, but the eyes always elude me. But your eyes pulled and tugged like a chain, and that morning, when I left your house, leaving my backpack behind like the ancient Israelites who forgot to bake bread on their way out of Egypt, it was the knowledge that I would not have to see your eyes that propelled me to lock the door behind me.

Did you call me then? I remember crying in a glass lobby, and falling asleep on the train. Or was it the next night? The days all blend together. But like Moses promising Pharaoh that he will no longer see his face, I kept my promise to myself that I would not see those blue torture-chambers that dot the space beneath your eyebrows. No wonder you thought it funny when I spoke of S&M, or the drunken readings of the Marquis De Sade that took place in my apartment.

I always preffered the works of Leopold Von Saccer Massoch - his name has an elegant ring to it, and the last line of "Venus in Furs" is devoted to gender equality. I bet they never bothered to read it - those people who haunt the BDSM clubs of Southern Tel Aviv, who drink semen and leather the way I drink coffee.

If only quitting coffee were as easy as quitting you - maybe then I would not have head-aches on the Day of Atonement - only tears.

Noah

I remember the nights when you held me in the darkness. Now I lie alone, the straw smelling of sweat and semen. But I know that you have not lost it with me, this life-force, and then you complain of feeling depleted. Wash your hands, you pervert, and take a shower! Your skin smells of horse-shit, and you no longer let me run my fingers through you hair. Thunder peels down the sky, but I can not see the lightning, stuck here in the wooden box that floats. I turn over, praying the straw will smell better on your side of the mattress. It doesn't. I lay awake listening to the chatter of monkeys and the lonely cries of the nightingales, wishing you could hear my silence.

*********************************************************************************************

"Camels are so not sexy", you said to me, when I came to your house for the first time. All the other suitors had horses. But over time, our lives became steady like the camel, you and I, long and drawn, safe and not needing much water. I always feared the day you would long for the swiftness of camels, and when the flood came, I was releived - we were the only ones left now, you and I, in this wooden floating tomb.

But I have seen the way that your eyes turn down when I walk into our cabin, so I have chosen only to return once your eyes are closed. Are you lying there tonight, dreaming? Or are you thinking of the many men you could have chosen, and the freshness of their cold corpses? I rub my hand against the camels fur, feel the knobs of his humps, hard and comforting. My palm slowly crawls into the spot where you hands once dwelt, and when it is over, the white stain on the wood is small. I will clean it up tomorrow, with the camel droppings. I will drop both into the waters that have learned to drown our silence, and it is only the rustling of the straw between us that reminds me that you are real, that once your body proved to me the reality of my body. I have replaced your kisses with a bucket of camel droppings.

Couldn't it at least have been horse-shit? Camels are so not sexy.

Battle

"What do you write?" she asked.
The red of the wine was reflected in the garnets that dotted her pale wrist.
"I write porn", he said.
She laughed, her hips swaying slightly, and in her smile he felt the undulations of purple waters.
"What do you write?" he asked.
"I write about sex", she said.
He laughed. She found the sounds too staccato for her taste.
"What's the difference?" he said.
"You write about body parts. I write about how people use sex to cover the loneliness inside them", she replied, and he saw her, sitting naked, crying, on an old floral couch by an abandoned guitar, as moonlight poured in from a white terrace. He pitied her then. She saw the pity, and put down the wine glass slowly. He remembered the day his mother sat him down when he was 13. "Pity is so unsexy", she said, right before giving him a slap. (God, even today, he shuddered at the oedipal implications - "Damn Freud", he'd always say, because it made the girls giggle.)

"I'm sorry", he said, as she pulled her seat apart from the table.
She shrugged. "For what?" she said, "You didn't do anything wrong."

Her shoulders reminded him of the second part of his mother's lecture: "All girls are liars", she had said, stirring the hot chocolate.

But by now he had learned to mix different kinds of drinks.

"I like you", he said, putting his arm on her white arm.

She laughed. "Am I supposed to find that flattering?"

"Yes", he said, and the look in her eyes changed for a moment.

He was reminded of the unsharpening of knives. He did not know, that at thirteen, her mother had sat her down, too. "All boys are liars", she had said, stirring sugar into the hot coffee, "but in bed they can be conquered."

She had grown to doubt the wisdom of this tale - too many nights had ended in tears - but in the tipsy vision of a piano-ed evening full of black satin ties, the little girl sharpened her battle knives.

Jeremiah 9

If my arms were larger, you could sleep in their shade, or rest in the dell between my thighs.

"It's not good to be too available", she said, the cigarette hanging out between her clenched teeth, slowly distending over her bottom lip. "Jesus. When you smoke your entire mouth looks like a vagina", I said. She laughed, and the cigarette moved slightly down. "A monster vagina with one enormous clitoris.", I said. "Attack of the monster vagina!", she cried, trying to balance the cigarette in her mouth as she chased me around the couch.

Your tears smelled of desire.

I learned to wrap myself around the stem of your body like those strings used to tie bouquets of dying flowers, and grew sick of the raspberry taste of your kisses. "I would turn my lips into peaches if it would make you stay", you said. "I just don't love you", I said, waiting for your fingers to slowly unravel from mine. The words were not smooth; they hurt around the edges, and I knew you were waiting for me to cry.

But the fall has passed; rotten wheat chafes at my mountains, my petals grow dry, and I too, have learned to forget the desire that comes with the touch of thighs.

Holiday

"Blanche Dubois always depeneded on the kindness of strangers. Well I guess I have always depended on the kindness of friends", she said, laughing.

Her laughter scared him, in a way that the scars on her thigh did not. "Papa always said I laughed like the devil", she had told him on the first date, but he had found her charming then, the diamonds had glistened against her wrists that fit into the palms of his hands, and then she quoted Shakespeare when he touched her thighs, and he thought, "This is it" in that moment, but time has a habit of shattering like glass, and we are left with the dregs of memories, the sour taste of slightly stale wine slipping down our tongues, the tightening of the larynx as the alcohol sears through our throats - I could never drink wine. I told you that on the first day, but you did not beleive me, until I was curled up on your bathroom floor, and somehow we were both in your bathtub, and I was naked. My head was in your lap, and your hands were combing my hair.

''You always had gentle fingers", she said, "They almost reminded me of a violin, and when you played my back, I felt that we were making music."

He laughed. "God, that might be the corniest thing you have ever said to me."

She laughed to, but now it was different in tone - nervous.

Laughter turns grapes into wine, and wine into vinegar.

They were drunk on the dissapointment that comes with broken love; its shards are so enticing, its scent so pure. You breathe it in like incense, and worship at the Temple of Loneliness, where Preists of Anger burn flowers long into the night, and thighs forget the feel of lover's breaths.

Breathe my child, for when the morning touches her lips to night's chest, there will be no sigh.