Napasking

First thing I've written in a bit. Came out different.

This day is slow, sleep heavy, nap asking. A day of cancelled plans and long open spaces. 

I strip roadkill venison from the bone. Chew. Half heat, slow fire - has cooked it tender and charred. Just like my teeth desire. Onions sit hot on the far side, untouched and unknown. Potatoes crisp when I forget to stir.

I scroll through erotic visions - paintings, aching into a lip, or the corner of a jaw. My erogenous mind fills in unspokens and exults in them. I am once empty and still full of need that my body cannot yet refract - but emptying only makes space for desire, each iteration filling with an ache that bends my whole body.

I am alive.

Before me Magic sprawls, iterations of infinites - played out as carded wool, unteased, but not untested. How do I bring this life to the infinite. Is it this? 

Bone gnawed, lust gnawed, sleep heavy and unplanned I sit wondering. Yesterday was a straight day. The river water moving in its directed channels, patterns playing out as they were directed. Tomorrow will be the same. Today we are dreamweaving, a basket sits before me made of moonvine, unfinished. My dream sits yet unwritten, misty in my mind. I sit lusting, the ache of want worrying like the smell of flowers on a cold cold cold day.  

I wonder why the venison is never like this when woman is here. When she moves through, I cook on high heat, not this slow meandering, single meal eaten in pieces, teeth aching, gnawing on deer bones, lusting for meat. When she is here I become straight-shot arrow boned, wanting, yes, but focussed too. 

Where is my woman, I wonder, Who gnaws deer bones with me on days like today? Is it this one, is it another? Does it matter? 

On days like today, as my mind wanders through the web of images that make up my desire - remembering the patterns put there as a young boy - old vintage photographs and the edge of breast - and paintings, always in color, never backdropped, I find that it is woman who stokes my desire, not any single woman.

It is I who change.

If I am to invite a mate into my slowness, yes she will have to know me. She will have to slow down and let her toes sink into mud, squishing like toothpaste into the spaces it’s hard to clean. She will have to let me be unclear, speaking the dream-tongue, animal lipped wondering not yet risen to the surface of the pond. She must listen to words as music, musing without arrow ends, and understand without knowing, letting the unknown cascade down her back and across the moon of her butt, leaving crystals of light-drops glistening to light my way. 

But I must do more. I must not abandon myself at the doorstep of her. I must not slosh water over my feet scrubbing at the mud that aches there, expecting her and expanding my assumptions into what she wants. Ear to her heart I hear the prince singing, white uncreased shirt, clean bright man. Confidence marking his way as he whisks her off her feet. He is in my heart too, in a thousand times Mama speaking. What would she say?

“If you want a girlfriend you will have to learn to . . . ” A mother's civilizing principle. I made a prince in civilian's clothing charm women's hearts away. He is in my heart too. My voice. My eyes. It is he who steps soul sworn, laughing, laughing, sun struck, laughing laughing. To earn a woman you must brush your teeth and wash your face. Your clothes must be laundered and your hair cut. Girlfriends are drawn by dates and charm. Good food, clever minds, laughing laughing.

Good, I have learned to dance. I can play that game and get whatever woman I desire. But the woman doesn’t matter, not really. She is made of skin, that presses against your skin, and lights it afire from the inside. She has bones under it and they stick out here and there, and then inside her is one bone you must slip under, structure around softness. You will gnaw at that bone.

Between skin and bones there are other things, and they mean something too. There are muscles that let her carry you sometimes, so that you will thrill at her strength. There is a personality that will not always fit with the way you were told women are, and this will delight you. There are organs that let her brew inside that belly like an alchemists array, coiling and bubbling until she will refine all you give her into herself and then squat to poop out what wasn’t worth the effort. This is good. I say all sorts of things not worth taking on.

They are all the same, women, and I am all the same with them. Maybe one day I will slow down and they will not understand me and I will clench my teeth and make my way to making things up, for at least they understand lies where half-thoughts half-eaten are not half-understood.

I will never find a woman who knows my dream wanderings when I am only walking the well known trails when she comes to my door. I will not find a woman who lets me be myself when I won’t. She will not gnaw at my bones, cooked on a slow fire, if I will not cook them. I have not wandered my own pace with a woman beside me, never sunk into the mud of myself and grounded in my own life dreaming - I have only watched the disgust on her lips as she takes off my clean shoes and laundered socks and finds the little muddy spot I could not get to. I cannot blame her for being unwelcome to the out of context inkling of that which I will not bring forward. 

The other night I grew angry at my rest disturbed, as woman stood between me and my sleep I barred my teeth and growled at her to move. My sleep, and the dreaming paths it takes my mind, I seemed to say, Are not yours. Move aside from this realm where I do not welcome you.

What would it take to welcome a woman into my slowness? I don’t know the path of it, but maybe because there is no path. I long for it, gnawing on my roadkill deer bones, here in my kitchen alone. Any woman will take my thoughts of creation and in the alchemy of her body, distill human life. Any woman will meet my lips with her own and breathe my breath in bright right pleasure. Any woman will bring me erect into the confidence of my place in the world - pushing to make my place inside her own. 

But only one version of myself can share a napasking slow day with one of womankind.

Where is he?