The Violence of Desire

    The Violence of Desire

    "Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an
     animal's skin or its flexibility in motion."

         - Marianne Moore
           From Quotable Women of the 20th Century

    "The nights were palpable and fierce, razors, outlined so
     clearly as to be luminous. A different country, its land-
     scape and currency plain: heat, fear, cold, pleasure, hunger,
     glut, pain, desire, overwhelming lust."

         - Elizabeth McNeill
           Nine and a Half Weeks

    "What makes a man or woman sexual? Is it a question of scent?
     Of pheromones? Or is it a question of evoking yearning?"

         - Unknown

    "...because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time
     they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return
     to the source. There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no
     yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a
     single soul, oh total being..."

         - Octavio Paz
           Sunstone

    * * * * *

    The day before September 11, 2001, I was in a hospital
    cardiac cath lab having three titanium metal stents placed
    in the coronary arteries of my heart.

    I was 42.

    On December 12, 2001, my body having defeated the titanium
    springs keeping my arteries open, I had quadruple coronary
    bypass surgery.

    For four months after the surgery I was battling an
    infection in the leg where they harvested the vein grafts
    for the bypasses.

    The infection is gone but because of my immobility during
    the infection my heart is "deconditioned" and I get winded
    easily. It is rapidly approaching the one year anniversary
    of my heart problems. In that year I may have made love with
    my wife once.

    Between the kids in the house, our schedules, my health,
    my wife's fear of causing something bad to happen to me -
    all these things have conspired to make our life together
    rather sexless.

    And yet.

    As I lay in bed at night and watch my wife, my lover, I am
    stunned by the beauty of her skin.

    Laying on her side in an old T-shirt, cotton panties and
    athletic socks, her face void of makeup and her hair toussled
    in sleep, I know the pleasure, the glut, the desire, the
    overwhelming lust that Elizabeth McNeill writes of in her
    book "Nine and a Half Weeks."

    She evokes a yearning in me that at times, especially deep in
    the night, can wake me. Overwhelm me. Quite literally make
    my dreams feverish with passion.

    In those moments I live in Octavio Paz's world: Invulnerable.
    I am at the source with her. There is no tomorrow, no yester-
    day. No names. I am consumed with desire, overwhelming lust.

    I may not have been physically intimate with my wife over the
    last year but in my mind, in my spirit, in the root of my
    soul, I have been with her daily.

    I see her face contort in pleasure as she cums.

    I hear her moans.

    I hear the obscenities she whispers as I fuck her in my mind.

    I smell her scent.

    I can taste the saltiness of her sex.

    I can recall the softness of her breasts and the way her
    nipples distend when she is aroused.

    I can feel the tightness of her anal ring as my finger
    invades and I suck her tongue into my mouth - urgently,
    roughly.

    Violently.

    I imagine her with all manner of men and women in all manner
    of circumstances; an extension of my sexuality, playing the
    whore, the virgin, the submissive, the dominant. And then,
    when the passion subsides somewhat and my head clears, I
    write stories and post them on the Internet.

    The feedback I receive is mostly positive but there are those
    who are put off by the violence in my stories. My wife calls
    most of my stories dark and rough.

    I have been chastised by anonymous critics for using so much
    profanity in certain stories.

    Certainly there are times in our bed where the lovemaking is
    slow and tender. Funny, on occasion. The banter - between
    moans and gasps - is light. When I slowly drink in her
    beauty, her scent, her body in toto.

    But there are times when we want to go to the source, to
    reach the place of no tomorrows and no yesterdays. To be
    fully and completely in the moment and let the heat of our
    blood possess us.

    And to be possessed by the heat of another.

    In those moments words like "fuck," "cunt," "cock,"
    "bitch," "whore," "slut," "cum," are the prelude to the
    grunts, gasps, moans, shrieks of passion that come with
    one person seeking to possess the other and to be possessed.

    They are holy words in the divine passion of desire.

    They are the preludes and the intermezzos as two bodies
    urgently, violently entwine and wrestle with each other in
    their mutual desire.

    In the violence of their desire.

    It is true that the greatest pleasure is to give pleasure.

    It is true that the giving and receiving of pleasure is
    both a need and an ecstasy.

    And the pleasure, the need, the ecstasy is deeper than the
    deepest part of the oceans.

    Within our hearts, our very beings it is:

         primal,

         intense,

         violent.

    And, of course, it is always consensual.