SEX

With the wrong partner Sex can fuck up the head and become over important LOL ... I know what ya saying Boni ... Jayne

I quite like your in-the-face approach here (and it's a little like sex in our modern world, I think, jumping out at you from advertisements, TV screens etc.). Sex can be arbitrary - the act forestalled, punctuated by “The Other’s” desire, prompted by another’s call Those lines stuck out for me here (in a positive sense). Maybe it is something that happens to women more often than to men? Yours, ~Nina P.S. check for typos again, please (peremptory?)

I saw that you were online and quickly chose to come and look for your latest posting. Can't hardly miss a title like "Sex". I must say I was pleased with both the title and the content. You are pushing yourself into places of discomfort, which is an artist's ambition. Bravo, I say! I think our hearts are somehow widened with that artistic intention. And it leaks into the rest of our lives in quite glorious ways. You have chosen as your theme, sex as power, which is, very much, autobiographical and, concurrently, universal. I am not suppose to be so forward as to name that, but I think you are owed at least so much by your effort. For once one is left the skin of sex as power, there are so many more skins to swim inside. That may seem condescending but it is not at all my intent. There is huge power in sex which can, and usually does, warp the loveliness of touch, that acknowledgment of existence, need, gentility, safety, and worthiness for affection. Perhaps that is the greatest power of sex, to use or abuse the very power of the tactile, the very power of the intimate. Maybe that is what George Lucas was writing about in his metaphors about the dark side of the force. Is that where the tactile is about domination as a revenge for disappointment? It seems that that is often the subject of sex. And your poem drips anger over it. There are some very wonderful, if at first blush, saddening lines: "engorge our lust on her". That line alone fully explains the whole of our previous dance around the topic of the erotic. It is laden with the un-intimate and the grief of decapitated expectations. As such, it is a very powerful rejoinder. And yet it is not truly saddening, for you have past that place by the very evoking of it and that is both extremely impressive, pleasing to me and, I hope, universally very comforting (although I acknowledge that most will be hung up on the appearances for different lengths of time, some to infinity). This is the first "speaking". You have done such a service. I expect you know. For of all, you know what it took to show oneself, the wounds still open, and the uncertainty remaining. We are forever fearful of showing our weaknesses. It is a very un-Christian habit in our inherently Christian if veneered western cultures. For acknowledged weakness is no weakness at all. It is leadership. And is a little terrifying because one knows what it took and that one will likely lead oneself again. Brian

I like the way you've given "sex" its due, for sometimes it does feel like its own entity, a need that must be pleased at all costs. Boiling over into the act of pleasing it. Richard