CONTROL

It always makes sense before you really understand. How such a thing could happen to someone else and what you could’ve done about it—if you weren’t just as bad and just as wrong as the one who ended up victorious. I only put things in callous terms because that’s how I see it. I can sympathize with the longing, the rejection; the bliss that came from involving yourself with her body to a hitherto unknown and unreached capacity. I know what it’s like to just want it because it’s there, and I know what it’s like to be in love with the notion of being the one who destroyed everything for everyone who comes after.

Sometimes I truly want it to hurt. Foreplay semantics, the boring day-to-day activities couples engage in which are hinged upon you always getting what you want. When you take your clothes off, you’re vulnerable. You’re weak. And even though my clothes are gone as well, my physical body is more powerful than yours. I can manipulate your breasts with tugs and pinches and make you squirm with the promise of a fully hard cock being pressed into you just by teasing the wet lips of your shaved cunt. I get angry every time. It all comes out.

Because this is you, in the bed or on the table or in the backseat of the car. This is the ritual you initiated for other lovers and I’m merely who’s there now. And I’m bending your muscles around me and feeling the shape we make but it’s never enough because I am not the only one. I wasn’t the first to have this supposed ‘privilege.’ And it’s not my fault but it’s nothing I can ever fix or change. Control.

You looked up only when I called you a whore, but not when I plunged your throat down on my cock until you had to push your palms against my thighs to release my grasp. That first night we fucked, when you danced against my groin, your body framed against the brown void of a patternless tapestry that hangs on the wall at the head of the bed. I couldn’t get it up, not watching you like that after knowing you only hours. Some music played but I don’t recall what it was, even though it was more than a thousand times familiar. I don’t remember anything but the look at seemed to fall down your face from your eyes, pricking up the mouth-corners into something like a smile but full of tragedy. Practiced, beautiful, and then you had me. I turned you over for a lousy inaugural fuck because I got off so quickly when you looked defeated. And it became a project. A sick fuck desire to see you crumble only to re-assemble you my way, the right way—what I’ve always really wanted.

You were on the edge, the verge, the brink—and you were falling. And a little more time passed and it got worse. It was higher and higher up before you chanced a fall, in that backwoods fucking skid house on the edge of the local campus, where everyone had tin crow eyes and flames in their feeble, sad, little brains. And later you’d said you never fucked one of them but I can’t believe you, because I know how deep your lies run, as if I could pull gold from the basin of where your teary regrets pool. When you were all cut up and naked and fucked beyond the scope on some kind of clear liquor you still favor, they cleaned you up. Did the astringent burn, linger? Did it kill you to know you could break so easily? It kills me that I wasn’t there then, to temper and taper. Or see you get worse.

You want trust and respect and you deserve it in time, but you beg of these shadows some rape-fantasy, some heroic stupor. You can be so vulgar. When you talk about the man who tossed you I can see why he did. Lazy. College-age tedium with skin and pulse. I love you but only when I’m not wanting to scream an inch from your mouth some words for you to breathe in and take with you.

I’m championing fuckall, my hidden deviance that needs to see you crawl before you walk. That can’t see how you don’t just fall down and over what?

Fail.

REPETITION

I saw the names. Packed the boxes, ensured delivery confirmations and correct addresses. Mostly P.O. Boxes in Midwestern states, some in the same county. Toys, safe-play—something only a kid would know what to do with if he was adventurous, troubled, wanting to be hurt. You could cause trauma, real pain, with these things. Cocks crooked and raw from being worked at with a machine attached to a battery set-up, using the excess uncircumcised skin to attack and shock. Ties for wrists, necks. Masks. I packed the boxes. I know who got them.

It’s all fun. It’s all just playtime, experimentation. I liked the cuffs, the ones with teeth. When I put them on her arms she’d wretch and it’d cut her up a little bit. Nothing a bracelet or a watch couldn’t cover. Deep in the North End, where everything was pleasant and decorated in extravagant washes of wealth and purity, we’d fuck in the $2.2 million house she cleaned on weekends. I’d take my sweaty cock out of her and let it drag on the surfaces of marble countertops and elegant tapestries hanging over fine leather couches. Then it was back to the warehouse, stuffing the boxes—assisting others in their quiet delights, none of which held much interest to me.

Burly fag boss made us rotate cleaning the Court in East Atlanta. Little place, wood everywhere stained black and spray-painted hastily with cartoon pigs’ heads all around. Wear a mask or the stench would never let you through the door. Seventy-five dollars to mop cum and sawdust where some heaving queen dropped his amyl diarrhea all over the floor. Buckets of lubricating grease, thick and white like mayonnaise held the paw prints of at least a dozen pairs of hands. Force the boy down, it’s his first time. Give him drugs to confuse him, make him not feel a thing. No one’s watching. No one knows.

There was a convention in Savannah at an Econolodge with banquet space. They like my tattoos, they like the scruff I’ve tried growing because she likes the way it tickles her bare cunt. I tell them I’m not gay and their leering, predator’s eyes go over to my associates, two loving little queens. The nauseating sound of unlubricated penetration in the men’s toilet—thank god they even made it that far. I take a piss next to the stall and feel a hand creep to my ankle—the little bitch likes to hear me piss. I dribble a little on his hand, and he grabs me tighter until I step on his fingers. He retracts and I see through the slim crack between wall and hell his fingers in his mouth now. I stutter when I’m nervous. At our busy table I can’t even speak.

The owner asked me if I’d ever been fucked to where I felt I’d die. I told him I preferred the other side—fucking until I felt the frame break, something hurt. Put it too deep and watch the scared eyes widen. I like them petite, tight—articulate and stunning. Nothing but tight flesh, white and glowing. She pops her back before she gets into bed, and when I choke her I feel my elbow crushing into her collarbone. She doesn’t give, not a single whimper. She takes it, loves it; and I keep doing it. I can’t cum until I see she’s past having enough. I want to put your steps in a pattern unfit for your posture. I want you to need me to stop, it’s too much. Do you feel like you’ll die if I don’t even do you like this again?

When someone tells you they like to hear you talk, want to read what you write, do you do it more? Do you work to make it better, make yourself sound smarter? Or do you consider everything you do a stroke of favor, flaring the focus? She asked me if it was all right. If it was all right to like it hard, to want to be tied up. This conditioning, against impulses. Tells you you’re wrong. Tells you that men should never do this to you, that you should never like it, ask for it, need it just to make yourself cum. The validation of a climax. You can only get it by manner of a few fingers in your mouth pinching down the tongue. It’s all right, it’s all right—let me be the one to do this to you.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Something’s holding me back. I love you. I’m not a monster, I have to preserve you. Only pieces at a time I’ll pull away, something inconsequential to the sum, the whole. You stay beautiful. No cuts or slashes. No scratches to the face. I won’t fuck you again until the bruises are gone, until the eyes dry up. Don’t break down on me, not because of anyone or anything else. Passions. Little minute details of your speech, your walk—the careful presentation of your best attributes: cunt, breasts, neck, thighs, face, hair, spine, elbows, knees, toes, wrists. What about what’s inside? Can it be drawn out physically? Can I watch you punish yourself? Can I let my hands be clean this time? Can I just watch you cut?

No, don’t. Please. I can’t. Sleep at my place this evening. Let your eyes browse over the books and the records and the plaid pattern of the sheets. Assess the origin of all the dull things I collect: expired film, lenses, flashes. Do you want me to take your picture? You cower from the camera; you don’t believe you’re beautiful. I take my time, get down on the floor and look up your dress as you look down. You wear no panties, I’ve got your eyes and slit perpendicular—both inviting and there’s no caution.

Even the most carefully crafted mask has stitching that breathes, separates—breaks.

Let me just hold you and I promise I won’t say anything.

You need this.

I’m scared to say I do too.

Repetition. The same words, apologies, regrets.

I’ll be better.