Borderless Erotic Geography

Borderless Erotic Geography

I've crossed deserts and valleys, passed over hardcore rocks and softcore steppes, seen sundowns and moondowns, followed the earth to primitive ends to discover: you're the one for my movie. I've sung slack-jawed out the window, the beatnicking wind riding auteur, to call your name, and you came, you came, to my dirty pool film set. So hello, welcome, make yourself at home! We've hired a professional caterer, even on this low budget, to accommodate your taste for salmon. He's a cheap molecular gastronomist who dishes Coca Cola caviar and cream cheese foam.

The premise of this movie is just you & I fucking eternally. We have hired a team of desperate stagehands and long-living bacterial spores in case we go severely overtime. The film begins with me lounging by my pool and you saunter in after a long, difficult day at the office, wishing aloud for someone to just ravish you for the rest of time. You then look at me in a way that reads to the audience, "Fuck me forever." Beautiful, baby, camera-closeup: look at me that way again and I'll love you as long as I last.

We ran a dummy reel for test audiences who agreed an unending session of lovemaking is a satisfactory way to spend the remainder of our days. They did not sympathize with the blow-up anime doll I so tenderly screwed, and voiced a preference for a buxom blonde babe like yourself. Gorgeous, you are the real thing, and audiences crave you. 

Desired eternal scenarios included an ouroborosian 69 at the pyramids of Giza, blowjobs in the Elysian Fields, yogic anal sex in the temples of Tibet, and sisyphean doggystyle up a great hill in which no matter how hard you try you end up falling back upon my rock-hard member. We'll do it all and more — everywhere, forever.

Filming begins as soon as you say "Yes," 'yes' being the password to paradise. You want to think it over? Sure! Take your time. I have all of mine to hear back from you. We'll be here eating deconstructed blini and essence of Caesar salad. Call me, babe. You're my one and only, always. Let's get it on. 

Ruinology

Ruinology

"Everything is a gate," you once said to me, and your words are some of the few things I have managed to hold onto.

In all my walks I could not ever recall seeing your gallery until that January evening. I do not know how I could have overlooked it. You were in there at your reception desk, reading a book, with a large mauve sun hat and a drapery of long black hair. I surveyed the collection of newly made antiques, the new paintings of old myths and the nostalgic pottery. I complimented your collection and left.

I began to visit regularly. I told you it was a sure sign of my old age that I spent my after-work walks seriously perusing a gallery of expensive imitations and Southwestern-themed niceties. You laughed then beckoned me to the backroom with your bejeweled fingers. You had a secret to share, you said.

You presented a dusty painting of a "magic ring," a painting, you insisted, that was authentically old. This was your most valuable possession, you said, and for whatever reason you passed it into my hands and insisted I go home with it. "With this, you will have access to every entrance in the city, and you will leave no trace of your break-ins," you said. "You will become invisible."

On my next walk I decided to test your forewarning in the hopes of joking about it on my next visit. To my surprise, my first attempt, the locked Joey's Barber Shop, gave way, and I stood flabbergasted amongst the unwatched combs and hair gels. I felt very alarmed and ensured I left everything as I had found it. Could this work everywhere? I wondered.

My curiosity got the best of me and I went on a night-time prowl with my newfound power. I learned the contents of private storage spaces; I tiptoed through countless apartments; I toured the gemstones exhibit at the natural history museum. I was entirely unaccounted for. I had access to a secret world. I began to know the innards of a city that, until now, I only saw from the outside. Now I was deep within.

I expected my mischief would catch up to me. I awaited police phone calls or security team apprehensions, but no matter how many cameras saw me, no matter how many alarm systems I ghostily passed through, I heard nothing. As you said, I had become invisible.

Inspired, I lived out an early childhood fantasy and made slight disturbances across the city. I skipped work to restyle and reconfigure mannequins in the Macys storefront. I missed appointments to move cars. I stole the finest wines. No matter how much I altered, I was neither seen nor stopped. In daylight and under moonlight, I may as well have been thin air.

The city took on the feel of a ruin: open and accessible, marked by inhabitance but mine to explore without witness or admonition. I was the chartered tourist of distant lives.

After my intrusion bender, I returned to your gallery to talk but could not get in. The door was locked. You were in there talking with a new customer. I saw you presenting to her the most terrifying thing: an ancient portrait of a man who looked very much like myself. I knocked loudly on the glass, shouting and questioning. You turned your gaze to mine, smiled, and then resumed your conversation.

I returned to my apartment for the first time in days, and was locked out of my own home, too. I made every attempt to enter, and called every contact I could — landlord, neighbors, police — to no answer. I realized, then, what you had done to me: in granting me access to every door, you shut me out from my life. In letting me plumb the worlds within our world, I had ceased to exist as I was.

To this day, I remain shut away from my old life. The unsold painting stands in your window. My likeness mocks me from behind glass.

I have lost interest in breaking indoors. I kick up dust in alley ways and look at the lives still lived, defined by what they can and cannot access, as I slink between gates and barriers, the bottom feeder of a common abyss.

Love Song of the Involute Shell

Love Song of the Involute Shell

"Our love was written long ago, my dear," said the captain to his mermaid lass, but speaking to the horizon, "in the shells and chambers of the deep." 

He puffed his pipe. "As a young skipper upon these waters, I used to fear the churning sea. She seemed to me unending in her heartlessness and indifference — the dull repetition of wave after wave! She would swallow us and we, too, would be reduced to nothingness, another temporary speck in the mighty blue. The older I have grown, however, the more I see in her the patterns of love. Yes, my dear, love! A love as deep as the ocean herself." 

He gazed out at the setting sun. "Imagine, if you will, life in prehistoric times. Imagine a terrifying abyss of chaos — amoebae splitting and mutating without order, currents without continents to curb them. Pure chaos! A world in constant upheaval!" 

He glared, with great purpose, at the repeating waves. "But formlessness needs form to guide it, else it shall continue to mutate without end. And so, out of necessity, came shells! Protective shapes to shape the shapeless, outer bones to bind the boneless! Beginning at the smallest point, a core of simplicity, began a shell, a shell which through maturation birthed additional septa. So grew this shell, logarithmically, towards a living chamber, and hence the cephalopod. Life is built in simple steps, you see."

He puffed again on his pipe. "It has seemed to me that life is written by a single rule: reproduction. That is why the waves give birth to waves, and why our time upon this blue beast in so small a wooden craft will one day, to our children's children, be a footnote; we are mere ancestors already." 

He smiled to a flock of seagulls flying in sync overhead. "But, Captain — you must be thinking — is not this the same meaninglessness you so feared? Is not this unending reproduction but sister to the ocean's monotony? Perhaps — but I prefer to think of it differently. For does this pattern not manifest itself in so infinite a variety of shapes? The world is not monotonous, but a complexity of endlessly beautiful variations on a single principle! And that principle, my dear, is love. Love, the ever-beating heart of the whole; love, the common factor between opposites; love, the simple origin point that births the world!"

He outstretched his arms to the horizon. "For is it not love between man and woman that creates each and everyone one of us? Was it not with love that God created out of shapeless sand the first human upon this earth? Is it not love that connects contraries, love that warms us in the harsh winter, love that seems, by my reckoning, to be the final conclusion of every creed, belief, and wish?"

He put his arm around his mermaid lass. "And so like the nautilus, my dear, we are formed from the beginning by this simple rule, and no matter how long and windy our road, however complicated our union, you shall trace in our stages the same lovely pattern, and you shall arrive, after so many revolutions, at a single starting point: love. What say you, my fair maiden?"

The mermaid shrugged. "You're weird," she said, and dove into the sea.