"To the Devil in You"

Worship my cock.
Crucify it in your cunt.
Resurrect it with your mouth

What is Sensuality?

.....an aliveness, an openness, a curiosity to life and love and eros...a generosity of spirit, a caring touch, the arousal of all the senses, an embrace of art and beauty...an attunement to the rhythms of life, its music, its poetry...a capacity to sense the soul through the body, the spirit through the flesh, and desire in a look, a caress, a kiss....it's listening with sensitivity to words, the body, our moods....it's reading each other's mind and needs and desires through the simplest, slightest expressions....it's being in a flow....attuned to nature...and responsive to each other mentally, emotionally, physically....it's being graceful and gracious...it's a heightened receptivity of the senses....it's a parting of lips to the kisses of the world

The Labial Kiss of the Upper Lips

From Diane Ackerman's essay on "Kissing" in A Natural History of Love:

"According to the anthropologists, the lips remind us of the labia, because they flush red and swell when aroused, which is the conscious or subconscious reason women have always made them look even redder with lipstick."

"Kissing, we share on breath, open the sealed fortress of our body to our lover. We shelter under a warm net of kisses....Setting out on a caravan of the other's body, we map the new terrain with our fingertips and lips, pausing at the oasis of a nipple, the hillock of a thigh, the backbone meandering riverbed. It is a kind of pilgrimage of touch, which leads to the temple of our desire...."

"So, anthropologically at least, a kiss on the mouth, especially with all the plunging of tongues and the exchanging of saliva, is another form of intercourse. No surprise that it makes the mind and body surge with gorgeous sensations."

Given the similitude between a woman's upper and lower lips, it's fun to play with this likeness in a kiss (or a sequence of kisses).

Here's my suggestion for a type of sensual kissing: a labial kiss of the upper lips.

Let the man pretend that the upper lips are the labial lips, and let him kiss these lips slowly, very slowly, as if his tongue and kisses are making the lower lips of a woman petal-open and honeyed-up.

The tongue, in this labial kiss, can be very teasing, just touching and tantalizing one lip at a time, sliding with grace and a bit of poignant pressure, back and forth along the upper lips, before descending to do the same for the lower lip....and before sliding the tongue deeper into the mouth.

It can be most fun if the woman pretends to be a bit coy, as if defending the castle or inner sanctum of her most womanly self, with something of a moat: the lips can be very wet and moist, but the drawbridge remains up, resisting entry...for a time.

The labial kissing can be very mind-blowing or mind altering: The upper lips are horizontal, not vertical, but if the analogy is felt by both partners, heads can be adjusted by 90 degrees, so the upper lips can be approached vertically as well, in closer simulacrum to cunnilingus.

The erotic imagination can be so powerful: The labial lip kiss can become even more exciting and playful if the man imagines that in the corner of the lips, right where top and bottom lips merge together, there is located an imaginary clitoris that can be taken and teased by the tip of the tongue.

I daresay that 15-20 minutes of beautiful kissing in this labial style...with a man taking time to part open the upper lips and then to tango slowly and beautifully inside with the woman's tongue once entrance has been secured will shorten the time necessary to part open the lower lips of a woman.

Indeed, when the upper lips have been taken beautifully, the lower ones will be begging as much for the touch that opens them up as a garden flower desires the morning rays of sun.

The above description is for the man on top position and the woman the bottom, but it can be very hot--and instructive--for a switch to occur: Let the woman take the man's lips and kiss his lips in a way that reveals how she loves to be taken by the tongue down below.

Yes, women, if you've ever wanted to gently instruct a man how to pleasure you down below, just take his upper lips by finger and tongue the same way you love to be taken down below, doing unto his upper lips what you love done unto your lower lips.

And don't be shy about using a finger as an instructional pointer, parting open and entering and then trusting into his mouth as you love to be taken by finger and cock down below

Paean to Logos & Eros

(An update on Langston Hughes' "Advice" in ten words or less for each stanza)

Behold

The reciprocity
between
verbal and
sexual
intercourse...
and partake

Be crushed by

logos
and
eros

and kiss back


Be wanton

with words
cocks
cunts

Write/Fuck/Love
w/inspiration


Get mused with

Sappho
bosoms
Petrarch
pussy
Donne
dicks
Neruda


Fuck with

lubricant
imagination
vibrators
music
champagne
fantasies
fingers
abandon


Love with

openness
listening
confessions
acceptance
forgiveness
caritas
cooking
abandon


Enjoy

metaphor
cities
libraries
love
sex
poetry
gardens
peace
oceans
blogspot

Gallehault?

On a bookstore prowl, I come across, leather bound, a rare book, the object of many early quests, and a very rare woman, the object (she must be) of many men's quest.

The initial object of my desire: an 18th century edition of the Old French Romance, Lancelot du Lac. The new provocation: A beautiful woman bound in black leather pants with a purple silk blouse, as alluring to me as the jacarandas in Los Angeles when they bloom in late April.

Can you judge a book by its cover? Sometimes. I am thus amused and not startled when I overhear her ask a clerk for Tobsha Learner's Quivers and a collection of contemporary erotica and love poetry.

Can you judge a book by its binding? A better bet than the cover. Just look down the spine. Contemporary publishers often deceive us: they give us a hard back cover but paste the pages to the spine, the same as a paperback book. The leather bound and hand sewn quality of this woman seems to be no delusion.

I run into the Black Leather Woman a second time, waiting at the elevator. We enter and punch up different floors. While ascending, I make her an offhand suggestion. "If you are looking for interesting erotica, especially poetry, don't forget the classics."

She looks at me a bit quizzically, then asks, "What do you have in mind specifically?"

I mention a few authors and titles. She thanks me for the suggestions, and gets off, the doors opening for her floor.

We meet again later in the classics section, a small room off on the fourth floor. We smile in recognition, and she asks me again for my recommendations.

I suggest Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Catullus, Ovid, Theocritus, the King James version of "The Song of Solomon," and, first and foremost, Sappho.

I find her a copy, and she reads: "I confess....I love that which caresses me....My tongue is broken...a thin flame runs under my skin...I drip with sweat...trembling shakes my body...I turn paler than dry grass....If you will come...I shall put out new pillows for you to rest on..."

Her eyes glint, her lips purse, her limbs loosen, she exhales, then remarks, "This is beautiful...it's remarkable... The words pierce me and curl inside. When I was 14, 18 this stuff always seemed so dry. What else is good? Do you have time to talk?"

Yes, I did have time, but Sappho proved no Gallehault. We just read and talked more and more that day.

We left the bookstore, several new books in her hands, and went for an espresso at a French bistro next door, and we kept talking, through the evening (as the espressos gave way to dinner) about literature, language, words, my career as as a professor of literature, her interests in writing, fiction, film, life.

And for months, we kept talking, just talking and conversing: through letters, emails, meetings for lunch, about logos and eros, language and the sensual. She had her lovers, female as well as male. I had my wife and three children. The conversations about all of them except my kids were relatively flat, straight, and short--mostly Hemingway prose, simple nouns and adjectives: fine, the same, ok, some pleasure, frustration, hope, some interest, a possibility, a lie.

The conversations about the literature, however, were bliss, the pleasures of the text: something of a menage a trois of Virginia Woolf, Tom Stoppard, and Octavio Paz talking, debating, pronouncing, condemning, celebrating, taking joy, giving pleasure.

Almost a year after our first meeting, she calls, thrilled, and asks me to meet her at the restauarant again next to our bookstore. She's dressed more formally than usual--a black silk dress with sheer black lace stockings. She orders my favorite dishes for us to share: an avocado and melon salad with a lime and cayenne pepper dressing and Coquilles St. Jacques.

After dinner, she asks for the best champagne and presents me with a gift: a copy of a literary journal containing her first story in print. The title: "The New Paradiso, Canto V." The epigraph is from Sappho: "I confess...I love that which caresses me." We exult, we toast, we kiss, and we toast again and again.

"What's it about?," I ask.

"Oh, it's rather unbelievable. A literature professor in California and an English woman seduce each other through the internet; he introduces her to Sappho, she has a muse of fire, and they light up the screen."

"How does it end," I ask.

"It's more a Hollywood than an Alina Reyes ending. No mystification. When they finally meet, they make words flesh in the classics section of a London bookstore."

Silly story, I think to myself. We almost finish the bottle of champagne, and she leaves me to read the story as she must go off for a date.

I read the story with pleasure, noting my favorite lines, the ones that hit first the spine and rush up it, as if we have a wick inside us that can be lit up at the top into a flame by words: "My cover opened, my pages turned, my spine inspected, leather bound....The erotic must unfold slowly, like petals opening before the morning sun....Men are wonderful at listening to themselves talk; woman at listening to others....I am just so coquettish with you--a nymph dancing in your mind....Having bitten the apple you will remain in paradise."

At the end of the story, she has inscribed a note. "If you want me to thank you the proper way, I'm yours in the classic section. Take me. (I never wear anything underneath a black silk dress)."

The Paradiso is the story of incarnation: The word made flesh. Life must imitate art. Let the word be made flesh. He entered the bookstore. They read no more that night.


Footnote 1. Here is the ending of Dante, The Inferno, Canto V, the story of Paolo and Francesca:
"One day for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, suspecting nothing. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet and took the color from our faces, but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, this one, who never shall be parted from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. A Gallehault was the book and he who wrote; that day we read no farther in it."

Footnote 2. Gallehault was one of the characters in the Old French roman, Lancelot du Lac. During Gallehault's residence at King Arthur's court a warm friendship developed between him and Lancelot, who confided his love for Queen Guinevere. Gallehault arranged for the two to meet. In the course of this interview, Gallehault urged the queen to kiss Lancelot--and so began the adulterous passion between those two. From the part he played on this occasion, the name of Gallehault, like that of Pandarus, became a synonym for 'go-between.'

Grammatical Erotica: Tips for Sexing Up Prose

I come not to correct grammar, but to offer four basic points of advice for invigorating prose--a quadruple dose of verbal Viagra.

Here, now, for those who slept through Composition 101, let me offer some advice on writing that will never show up in a high school classroom.

Note: Each of the following four points will be developed in a subsequent post.

I. To write sexy, potent, thong-dropping prose, deploy strong verbs.

II. Become master of all the forms of punctuation.

III. To allure in prose, create original metaphors, as metaphor is to literal language what eroticism is to sex.

IV. Our writing style should vary according to mood, context, and subject just as our style of lovemaking should vary.

Grammatical Erotica, Part 1

To write sexy, potent, thong-dropping prose, deploy strong verbs.

At a moment of passion, the writer of limp prose declares, "Sexual pleasure is the most wonderful thing in life." It's true, but the phrasing is pathetic: The writer turns to the weakest of verbs, "is," to make this declaration. The writer has to pump up his prose at this point.

"To be" verbs just deflate a sentence. It would be ok to use "is" in a sentence to make a more tepid point. For instance, "Like masturbation, reading The New York Review of Books is a wonderful pleasure." But to use "is" in a sentence where you are describing the wonderful pleasures of sex conveys all the enthusiasm for sex that as a couple married for twenty years in an amiable relationship might summon up as they are about to make love on Saturday night from 11:20--11:35 pm.

The only way I would allow a writer to get by using "is" in such a sentence about sex is if the writer declared, "Sex is fucking great. Nothing beats it. Not even reading The New York Review of Books naked in a bath by candlelight."

A writer needs to insert some added emphasis--some vibration, if you will--into a sentence if he is going to use "is": For example, "I feel that sexual pleasure, heightened by eroticism or love, is the most wonderful thing in life."

Or the writer could be at once more romantic and more eloquent and more humorous if he or she wrote, "I feel that sexual pleasure surpasses all other wonders of life; yet too often we let opportunity for this joy pass us by, constrained as we are by a host of social conventions."

Here's another phrase that needs some verbal Viagra: "My desire is to have sex with you tonight." Instead, try "I want to make you sweat," or, more concise, "I want to fuck you," or, be more suggestive, "I want to make love to you all night long."

The best choice of words depends, very much, on the audience and the occasion, so that there are certainly times when "My desire is to make love to you" is the appropriate phrase, but other times, when the straight, bold, emphatic "Take me" (or "Fuck me") works best, and, yes, at times, you can and should be wordy, so that to get the point across repetition or verbosity is not a bad idea, as in, "Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me....yes, Yes. YES."