 
### meWE

An exploration of the erotic fullness of human person

Francis X. Kroncke

Copyright 2015, Francis X. Kroncke

# Preparation

_me_ : - think it's easy; if you're thinking, at least during the preparation, not that thinking is what it's about, but it is this "me" that you're given, immediately taking it from them, those who say "we" – as even I do when preparation is over and the we-ing begins, so let's begin, this preparation, this is me, moving beyond just these thoughts, reflecting, meditating, sitting with my own self, taking some time and space, hearing my favorite music, yeah, why can't I be me without all this other stuff? not just them, but the stuff: like what we do with little babes, surround them with stuff, right from the start, this a hint about preparation, that's how we were first told, told about being babes in cribs and babes in arms and about what it meant to our parents when they put clothes upon us, not just covering, not like draping a cloth over something, but a message, yeah, to me but mostly to themselves, right there, so they taught us, these first acts, preparing acts, preparing the babe to emerge from what it, if it could speak – but speaking is the first act of distinction itself – _Ah!_ it's incredible that we can even speak!, but that's not for now .... right then, with the first cloths selected, this was a preparation, so we are taught, nothing is without intent, not for a while anyways, this for us to grasp, which as we grasp it so we begin to see, see before we speak, I think, that it is a feeling first, the parents feeling not thinking, feeling the presence of me, which is a presence of them – something to reflect upon, but let's get back to the preparation ... Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Gregorian chant, music without words or words which are musical, mostly for preparing, colors, a tear of flowers from a bush, poisonous yellows, harmless purples, a scent of rosemary, placing them floating them in a copper bowl, as I meditate these work, what is my "background" but it is really my skin, for music is a way of feeling down the ages, again, they told us, parents humming and cooing, as I do now with the little babes, so in preparing I refine my senses, tune them, set myself strumming, this is why the candles, sometimes many, sometimes a single, but it is the flame, not just warmth, though it is that, but the gutsy humor of it all, this little inferno, which could be just the flame which endlessly hungers to consume the world! imagine that, I like to imagine that, then settle down into just the finery of it, like silk or silky water or, well, the flame flows, flows through the air, see, it's my breath, no doubt about it, the music and the flame, sound and sight, both which tap so many emotions, least of all fear, I have no pretense here, I strip naked so that I can have all, yeah, the capital All, wanting to be like the sound and the flame, consuming, they consume my ears, my heart, my imagination ... so I slake my thirst with water, it's comforting, maybe falsely, maybe humorously, that I could douse the fire – Ha! douse the fire, isn't that the absolutely most clear confirmation that I'm "me" – that I could even think that: dousing, as if "we" were not a conflagration unending, but I am comforted, for like Thales, there is something within me which relates to the water without me, in whatever form, so I anoint myself with water, a droplet, a splash on my face or a splish onto my chest, if I'm there by now, a drizzle onto my pubis – I love to see the steam rise!

_you_ : - what kind of "me" am I when you look at me or beckon or I just float into the time and space where I am a "you" – want a question there, hmmm ... jazzy tunes, always on such low volume, it's the other side of "me" so you've told me, you who are not me as you are me, isn't that the _sine qua non_ of preparation, ha – upbeat jazz, not my interest, but I like you when you're there, it vibrates well with you, is a skin I can share, sit down, brought a candle of mine, this time, a tiny one, votive, like the pun, but it's me, this time, right now, you've your fine Chinese banners, indecipherable but pleasant, hung around to cordon off the air, the time, slipping us into history, you so like historical moments ... but it is the preparation, my dear one, come in your nakedness, to "me" as I whisper this word which is both of us, "we" – laughing, for it is a laugh-line, this simple word, a sound, several letters, a linkage of me's such is so obvious, maybe it has taken these years to make it seem so obvious, who knows, back when it first defined us, taking hands, our first dance, teeny boppers, so much into me, having prepared with all the earnestness possible, having chosen candles and sounds and sighs and smells – will we ever get beyond sandalwood; something in me so loves verbena, maybe some day, verbena? ... you are all that I have forgotten about myself: with jewels being shamed by your desire my flesh begins to part, as it is when I am "you" and you are "you" each of us setting down the me: setting before you my flesh, my breath, my water as tears, hurting as this water is tearing, tearing inside me, boiling, steaming up my breathing, I as fire: becoming fiery ... approach: gaze, listen, sniff, inhale: stirring, all now for the stirring, what else is preparation but that which is this moment to be stirred.

_we_ : - what sight or sound or smell, what thought or feeling or imagining, what of any what is not that of which we are or are becoming or became, not just a question nor an exclamation, don't we laugh at it all now, so smoothly moving about in the plane of likeness, that of simile, me and you and we: similies ... like me, like me?, like me! (like me) ... preparing for metaphoring, how else but a butchered violation of grammar, indeed, how else: nakedness is, like, as ... Ah, so stirring!

.....................................

Another cycle is about to begin. It could be named anything by anyone. It is named, herein, in weekly terms, weakly that is, of those who have borrowed it, kleptomaniacally for sure, and so it has not rhyme nor reason just a facticity which is appropriated at this moment of preparing: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Preparing: for no one "begins" or "starts" but catches, is caught, creates a point which describes, however impotently, where me found you and imagined we – or any other way round, back or forward – so it is that the preparation had a moment of initial mark: which for this start is Monday.

# Monday

_Kissing_. The heart-beat shared ever so; pulse; pulsating – how a one becomes human as a two each becomes ever so tantalizingly one-as-embracing, lipped, and then the thump of hearts, microscopic, macroscopic, cosmic and infinitesimally present: throbbing ... thoughtless, not even quickened by a desire, yet engaged, hooked by an attractiveness initiating between them, molding, forming, worked upon day in and day out, perennially, not remembering, not needing to remember, just that it is: wakening.

She liked to linger in that half-awakefulness which allows her to enjoy the leadenness of herself, of her arms, unable to lift them so she hears them say, She is unable to lift them, and her legs, she sees them like logs barely afloat, almost drowning in the placid lake – no one about, she laughs, the evilness of it all she thinks, death, feeling the dying which she could be, it is thick, she is thick, hard, wooden, like trees in the depth of winter, leafless, oh, will he come?! ... _kiss_ : as if startled, flushed like a nesting bush bird, wakefulness comes to him ever so abruptly, a click and his eyes are open, slumbering spots, the chaos of light seeking full disclosure in the morning's darkness, it is his hands which rub his eyes, his breath which heaves a sigh, fingers thump his chest, pull at his cheeks, ah, another day, but it is not a thought as it is simply awareness, rushing at him quickly, fast train, more light propelling out from within him as is outside of him, feet and attachments assume the geometry of daily life, sitting, pushing on his slippers, stretching, moving, it is him floating, lifting like a kite, no a big fat balloon!, now zipping down, wobbling a bit, teetering like a daredevil barn-storming airplane, his target, like arrow fated for her so is his, and he is arrow, tenting his bend slightly, somewhat shy or is _it_ simply still in the heat of dreamland, but, no matter, knowing that she is so often just there, barely there, behind her own face as if behind a mist: the tangled mist, the black thorns, upon which still reside, curdled and curled, ghastly tokens of his many forays, bold as they are: pieces of his own flesh – does she wear them as totems? – yet, how else can I? ... _kissing_ : leaning down, gently caressing her cheek with one fingertip, drawing the sign which he leaves each day, the sign of his awareness of her, of his welcoming of her into his wakefulness, this sign: ouroboric, so he has reflected upon, even discussed with her at fuller moments, it is a sign magical, transports him into the magical world: he now her knight, approaching sleeping beauty – ah, she is ever beauty! – leaning down, bending, realizing that it is but a snatch from her witch's maw, that magical moment of terror, bending in reverence, obeisance, in homage: all is with him as their lips touch ... the day yawns and stretches.

This first day, moon-day: that such Monday which needs no numerical citation; it is from kiss to embrace, she, this moment, lifting her arms: dead lead now spirited, pulsating gold – oh, arms like sunrays! – and fingers alight, waltz, more a minuet upon his neck, cheek, face, ears, like jack and the beanstalk, she laughs, what if it had been a jill? and he is now the sky: sunlight from his eyes, the heated rays of his inner desire, oh, she has basked in these before: pilfering his face, the fluffiness of his cheeks she makes clouds, the firmness of his brow she sets as firmament, swinging upward using his earlobes she launches herself onto his presence, somewhat suppressing a giggle, knowing that it is herself as surprise each morning: she the mystery of the morning, for she has reveled in being the night, moon, the queen of heaven and as he is the dream-setter, the sunsetter, so she knows that dreaming is her adventure, where he follows, and now it is him here waiting for her report: how did it go? where were you? how are we? She the dream-rememberer, and so for an instant she knows that she is Liar, that it is her darkening shade which tempts her to trick him, betray herself, set him about on a dizzying day, all out of sorts, off his rocker, she laughs: landing, she splashes into his eyes, dives in with a strong kiss, a pull your face off lip sucking kiss with wicked tongue ... he gasps! pulls back by ancient instinct but between the thought which is not formed and the warning which is not heeded he is falling over her, ontop her, into her ....

It is, then, to be in its fullness a _moonday_. The blankets are splashed away. Their kissing drawing them upright and into a locked embrace, not hungry at the moment, but awakening, clarion, a calling forth from within each's self: "Moon Day!" "Moon Day!"

Standing they kiss again, kiss and holding one another, pause, peer into the other's eyes: an affirmation, a confirming that this is such a moment ... moving apart to prepare: pulling the drapes to ensure that it stays daybreak and not full light, lighting the Moon Day candle: fatted and rotund, more like a small boulder than a candle, fitted out with several wicks, each burning towards the center, each lighted at different times, either from the top or the side, a curious candle which reveals itself as it consumes itself: this a vision they had received, a message delivered to themselves one day in a random shopping moment, not knowing why, just entering the candle shop, finding this – _What?_ was first on their common lips: it didn't seem like it would work, that it could burn, _From the side?_ ... but so it has, this moment is from the side, coring towards a deep cavern from the left, so they start this one from the right: a monument to magical coloration, for it not only burns but it glows, light almost translucent, vaporous colors, grays and blues with sparkles of red, more like crimson but not so much royal blood as royal lust: the glow throbs in this phase, a short pulse but a definite thump from the loins ... he lifts off her nightgown: unadorned gingham, somewhat coarse, for last night had been a mere Sunday, a Day of Rest; she lifts and pulls-over his mid-thigh smock, as peasant as hers: a quick, practiced movement without hesitation for it is the mystery of their flesh which is for this moonday's adventure.

_Kissing._ Again, but then not: for it is lips but simply as salutation, a mere tap on the door, a moment's pause to breathe together, the slightest of distance lips parted and the breathing one into the other, slightly, a humble gift: gift of her nightly smell, dreamland smell, slightly sour but relished by him, this intimate knowledge of her transformations however slight, this delights him as a Lover's Secret; and he, it is the subdued steadiness of such a waiting breath, for she knows him as Thief, ever so are Sol's Sons! – What Mother whispered that one day long ago? she laughs, likes the taste of this slow breathing, ever so close to his first breath, anticipating it as his last: oh, a renegade lemony waft of her verbena soap almost steals this breath – How clever she is! booms down a Fatherly warning; yet, it is these slightest bonds, of lingering odors, of barely defined essences of self which draw them closer: for it is towards the fuller breathing that they are about to launch, he in an instant blessed with this launching, feeling the rush up from his toes shooting upward through every muscle and out his head, himself a sputtering rocket, flames of desire blast from his head and so is he gone: gone from the Monday of time-mark and calendar: onto this moonday is he lead by the script of her skin: enchantress script, holy, sacral: kissing to gain knowledge, to uncover direction: upon her neck the sweet swoop of her neck, it is the flight of her neck, her flesh which is curve, which is falling, he falls along the line of her neck, delights in the twisting call of her response, a response which beckons him deeper, unfurls hidden curves, caves of falling which he is excited to discover, kissing with the water of his desire, a mere dampness from the tip of his tongue, water tracing, leaving a trace – mighty Fear is moonday virtue! – tracking down her neck, upon her shoulder, forming out her shoulder, softness of her upper arm, fingers pressing, palming her upper arms, she standing so tall, not in stature but in desire, his pillar of desire, he is all adoration upon her, adoring her in every touch of softness, in every tonguing of his probing desire: for he is now fired, from the pit of his stomach he feels the seething conflagration, pit-fire into bonfire: there are parts of him fragmented now into homunculi, little hims, these dancing about and tending the raging, throwing fuel upon it, others tempering it, restraining it, trying to contain it, readying it, yet sparks fly savage and screaming upon the air: he is all fiery breath! ...bed afire, upon it they combust: across the first swell of her breasts, washing his scorching face, his glowing cheeks, back and forth, across her chest, sliding down, reverentially yet intensely: lava waterfall upon her breasts, this moon mound, then that one: each, both, all: falling full face into her, onto her, latching slightly upon her teat, sucking her, tongue tenderly suckling, circling, rising teat to welcoming hardness, pausing that ever so momentary pause of fear – Witch's curse? Doom and damnation? Eternal Fire? – but this instant is the blessing, the leaking, her depthless soul leaking: the sweetness of her, cool, fresh water dipped from her morning lake: his hands cup her, both hands, and he bounds upward, flies, at first swooping like the eagle, from the air of his fiery breathing upon the maddening beauty of her watery moon-glow, her breasts like the twin goddesses of the night: sisters in love with him, lowly earthman that he is: drawn from the dirt by their sirenic desire for him to be their link: to be air, breath between earth and sky: so is his passion, his mouth is as if two mouths, flying now more like the hawk, clutching, pulling forth from each breast its hidden blessing, its sundering desire for him: oh, it is enraging desire which blasts through him as he is suckled, draining her dreamy milk as quickly as he can, swallowing hard upon her swallowing breasts: gobbling, for he is being swallowed up, gobbled – he is aware, he almost knows, he heedlessly commits himself to total gulp! ... flesh over him, her breasts like womb accepting him back: nesting him, nestling, she is delirious with his desire to once again settle within her, she fights against the shade which his sunflesh draws across her moon: against the awakening eclipse: her hands upon his head, fingers twisting strands, hands grappling ears, she wants to haul up and cast him down into her milk pools: but he is ever quick, eluding her, like the hummingbird now, fantastic fluttering, kisses all about: her moons now like cudgels banging against his head, cracking his skull – How foolish! she laughs as he is smashed open and she sucks him dry of brain and marrow and blood and bone .... _Kissing_ down her side, licking now with large, full tongued slurps: making slurping sounds, laughing to himself, he knows she is frenzied, that she is fighting not to surrender to him, to remain ever dawn, that she wants more than surrender just this moment, that she wants full submission or it is he who wants submission? sensing that he has no thinking capacity now not a distance in sight or smell or sound certainly not soul-force or any other power within him which keeps him outside of her all that he is, is just the reverberation of both, echoes, so what he is, is also what she is: slurping, licking, sucking up her belly flesh, wanting to tickle her, wanting to be wakefully playful, hands pushing her belly up and spreading it out, lightly rolling a forearm across her, she fighting the slings of discomfort to better spy his game: she knows his play upon the prairie, knows the artfulness of his misdirection: pausing to draw-up and bend full down before her, bowing, setting her as idol: oh, he wants her to fall into consuming self-immersion, this she knows: knows that he wants to call her _here_ so that he can go _there_ : treasure hunting: the Mother Lode: she does not have to reach down to know that his cock is at the ready, that is has been whimpering, muttering to itself, cursing and blaming her: Bitch! Cunt! Whore! Oh, she has no self-delusion cloaking her here ... kneeling and bowed in adoration: offering every muscle in his body up to her, fingertips communicating his absolute adoration of her flesh, so tenderly tending to her thighs, stroking her legs, fully from thigh crest to ankle round, stroking her, rolling his hands aside her ass, gracefully casting his hands like silky nets out into the air, catching the line of her waist, the fullness of her duff, the slendering from thigh to calf to the capture, the ringing of her ankles, oh, he is all eyes upward at her: eyes of the babe, so clever is he! eyes of the attentive lover, the dedicated spouse, but ever eyes of mystery and excitement, wonder and awe, darkly numinous eyes which are their own tongues, seeking to peer, to pierce through her flesh and find ... ah, he kisses her feet: all around, ankles across the crown each toe pressing his tongue ever so slightly against the arch of her foot, rising up and down upon a press: of flesh, a cheek, a fingertip, his palm, now, up and up, as if stroking up a stream, rhythmically advancing, fearlessly shifting, riding up the waterfall current, readying for the rapids, so she spreads like the shadow magisterially bowing when the sun appears: glance and shadow kin, dancers, kissers ... welcoming: the dawn cave unveiled: _welcoming_ _Moonday's Kiss._

It is the single chirp of one of her slighter beasties, an intrusive sounding which one of his minds detains with the recollection that the dream-time music is always on endless loop and that it is her "Voices of Nature" selection, now, a single bird chirping ever so paced, ever so programmed with a program which his other mind totally fears, having been enchanted before, struck by her moonbeams, struck by so many of her creatures: sounds slight and heavy, bodyguard scents which have knocked him about and out, Cronish whispers which have beguiled him and seduced him so virginally ... yet, he adores her: and she is worthy of his adoration, not, again, a thought nor even a feeling but a presence: it is now that which is fuller than each, this presence which is filling every crevice and corner of their existence, it is this presence which they are about: with which a Monday is defined, described, yet so poorly defined, so inadequately described, but what else can we say, they say when it is over, but now it is not over, just commencing ... her southern cave is wherein lies the treasure, so he knows, so she knows, and it is for him to venture within, risk blind groping, and pray for her blessing of shady sight: this what Moon Day is about, that all which is flesh and light, all which is their common sense and senses shared, all which is Sun but comes within the Moon: herein, so he ventures, and she venturing with him, no passive capture of castle or tower, no iron-cell holds her, no, she is alive with him, for it is as him that she now becomes, this as he enters her, fingertips stealthily pacing upon her breach, poised upon her mound, playfully exciting himself to move forward, calling up all the pleasures past found and future hoped, it is as finger than he enters, having long ago transformed himself into serpentine windings, every appendage, even sight, into her, boring into her as he slithers inside her – Beware the Snake! he chortles, loving, savoring every moment of pleasure in deepest dread and deepening lust, for he is lust, lust is his safeguard, his weapon, that with which he can lasso her, tie her up, hold her as captive, for she wants to be captivated by his lust – he chortles, again; presses his tongue to her outside as he proceeds inside, is pacing by heart-beat, is transmitting images of his worship of her by telepathy, all being astral delight and astral flight – Ah! – the wateriness of her, the fluidity of her lust: she leaks, she wets him, she seeks to drown him as she quenches him, hurriedly casts water upon his rapidly radiating fire, yes, radiates, within her as without her, and she radiating, all of her bodily parts are glowing, breasts brimming with milky glower, thighs of glistening sweat, small droplets, like pearls, slightly subdued, upon her belly the radiation trembles, like a dew-drop mist at field's edge – Ah! – so pervasive is the pleasure, his finger, fuck-finger, cock-finger, All Finger: setting about to rush around within her, first slowly paced, touching every part, setting quivers loose, shudderings small and sighs large, thumb pressing clitoris, his tongue, too, tongue and thumb in practiced motion, gleefully moving her step by step, chess king and chess queen, ploy by ruse, watery softness of sigh by hard cutting suck of his fiercely shuddering lips, he quavers, he is like a note, she hears him, a clear note, deep bass, and then a chatter of sounds, almost a clatter, she knows that he cannot contain himself, her clitoris is piercing him, she images him, there, prostrate before her, face uplifting in fully pressed mouth suck, hand working like a bank-thief clicking, feeling, full body attuned to every clink and tink, to discern that rewarding clunk and latch unlocking: ah, his tongue is fully within, and so she pulls him in, grasps him and heaves him, links to his heart, a chain to every part of his auraed being not just his body, glowing flesh that it is, beacon: this is her desire, so she wraps him around her, it is herself, legs pressed, hands upon his head, breasts plunging down seeking to shade him, protect him, his tongue is her tongue: they are present: presence: no longer two, not one, too: _kissing._

Such is the sunrise kissing which is Moon Day. A kissing which sets them about and prepared for the other Days. On this Day there are many varied celebrations of the Moon. For once the Sun is found, not just its rays, not just its light, not just the pulling up of the shade, no, its source: the crystal fire: that which eternally rages within, and without which there is no burning, no conflagration of an End Time: this is played with them in many creative ways. There is often the copulation. A wildly thrashed out fucking of all that they can gather from each other and from within themselves. All day long this can go on. They eat breakfast, and each morsel is a tear and a bite from the other's soul; nips at the flesh. Tasty. Rushing back at noon to find each other and hump. Pull up the dress, latch off the pants: copulate. For the Moon Day's Sun is a fire which is not easily contained by flesh. The night is, as so often it is, a headlong, heedless jump and plunge into sensuality: often dinner is eaten upon the tablets of flesh: bellies, arms, shoulders, cheeks, so many fingers: food items becoming them, slather and cream in the coffee and all that. Moon Day begins so calmly yet so often ends in another exact calmness, yet one deceptive for it is as much exhaustion as at the beginning of the Day it had been unplumbed, unstirred vitality: moonrising and the dream-setting kiss.

_Kissing_ : it is their way of being, then, of being present. Most often, and without fail, actually, once inside her cave, it is she who turns the world inside-out. Rests down upon the bed having him deeply within and begins to suck; suck him in so that he is sucked inside-out; meets him at her maypole of merriment, tongue to tongue, and whips him about, dancing so fast, whirling, twirling, till he is butter, all butter, she slathers across her being: she now him and he her: he the mystery of outsideness: having upon his mound the phallic shaft which links sky and earth: this, now, her quest, plotting her moves, casting spells and chanting songs which protect her and guide her, she is upon his land like the wind, her hair whisking across his body: NSEW: every strand striking a lightening stroke of pleasure, she moves and he is strummed chords and a flutter of flute, fully fluid, having him inside her cave always transforms him into such malleable stuff: stuffing air, earth, fire, water – Ah! Fooled again! he snickers within, unashamed of anything once shameful: anticipating with astral delight the draining of his well, the insemination of her soul; a shared madness, now, her fingers, her breasts swaying so as to tingle the tip of his rock hard fons, that face of him with tiny yearning mouth, unashamed to be coenobitic hole: an eyeless face, she sardonically observes, but one so ravenous, so unquenchable, so god-dammed she knows that he is frenzied to suck her inside himself: she floats down upon his cock, images the embrace of clitoris and phallus: blowing the reed, lofting musical notes, washing over him, abluting with her tongue, now no longer tongue but her soul, her presence: swallowing him, ingesting him, rocking hips and shivering thighs, all accompaniments to her rapture: for as he had delighted upon his blind-sight of her so he here exposed is her astral sight: what she is within, so he is without: Moonlight Sunshade: this their quest, their shared image, sacramental word, incantation and conjuration: she eats him, smears her body with the fruits of their labor: hang bones about her neck, his boner now hers ... all this just _Kissing_.

Kissing is Monday.

# TUESDAY

_Embracing_. It requires an absolute, somewhat insane, driven madness, that which erupts from within one's self, there discovering, celebrating, being exploded out from inside one's self of the other, your Beloved. Such is a Tuesday.

Its morning is – what can be said? – "cut-out." There is a foreignness about it. A peculiar, strange slap which can be, truth being told, often alienating. She has woken only after her second cup of coffee. To that point it had been the drippings of the dreaming, a lifting of a strand of sleep's laziness, here a finger-latch onto a twist of her hair: Do I always look this frightful? and the washing away of the tokens half-consciously stolen from the adventures of last night, wherein she had both bolted awake terrified at some ghastly _thing_ safely away from which she had tried to pull herself using her own locks – hmmm a humble _let down your hair!_ , what was her name? ... the feeling of being dirty but only having slept, clearly, "vigorously" as he often says of my dream-gymnastics, but it is a shower and a brush and a setting about of the normal things, putting them in their places, folding the morning paper, quartering the paper for his word-play on the crossword; his coffee, mine; two small plates for jam; the remnant shells of hard-boiled eggs; so it goes, she thinks; he more than likely thinking the same; they having discussed such things, such morning thinking, what they call driving through the fog without headlights on; it's a threat to her being, one which had no words nor images, just the sweat on her palms, why else would her hair be so matted as it makes them laugh when they talk about this part of the day, which accounts for most days, but then comes a Tuesday.

He was finishing his third cup; no longer indicting himself for this caffeinated vice: the last drop, lifting up and he sees it roll down, pure blackness, no sugar, no cream, just this substance, liquid darkness and it explodes as it lands upon his tongue into liquid dreaming, just like that, he turns his eyes towards her, she is setting their dishes in the washer, he eyes closely the line of her bend, fingering it with his glance, glancing down down from the crown of her head over the rise of her back plunging to the brief perpendicular of her feet: this abruptness of foot, a line which seems too small, too tiny to hold leverage upon the longer, somewhat parabolic arch which she is: he looses a small laugh, nothing which she can hear, and it is all marvel at her: how she has defied all mathematics of geometry to be able to so bend and not fall, tip-over; no doubt that it is she who created gravity and she who is creating as she so bends the harmony of the astounding intricacy of bone and muscle, tendons and tissues, nervous system ... _it must be Tuesday_ : deep within himself the acknowledgment rises ... she stands upright, sighs, not a sigh to be heard with meaning, just a release, and it is as she turns, a pivot almost ballet like, one unnoticed by herself, unintended that it begins for him: the sight of her, the line of her, she being "there" and he being "here"; the hide and seek darkness of her hair, long tresses, how many years? they were long when they met, then with the first child she cut it oh so severely, he hadn't liked it, but he hadn't said; adjusted; spousal grin and bear; now, with the theft of some grays she plays hide and seek from herself, but it is the movement of her hair, the play of softness which he is spying, remembering and hoping at the same time, all the times he has lost himself in her hair, pressed himself in darkness of slumber, cast his face in fit of orgasmic exhaustion, closed his eyes as he hugs her from behind falling into her net, her flocking, that of her which extrudes and searches the air – Searches for what? for me of course, what else? he laughs at himself; hearing her laugh at him with a certain bemused disdain if he had vocalized that thought; her hair ever so in harmony with her eyes, if she had ever consciously prepared a trap for him, so he has often testified, said more than once with the boys at poker, if such a trap it was her hair and the rhythm it has with her eyes, common browns, but it was this movement, he was totally baffled, is now, has always been, has watched her in the morning with plain-face, exposed by soap, every blemish, seen her now thrice in the last throes of labor, sodden with hormones, face angelic, face beaten by the tornado of birth's lust – whatever! – it is, again, this moment, the gaze and the being-gazed upon: her hair he gazes upon and her eyes which gaze upon him, a huntress' magic, he has no doubt, took him years to figure out this trap, but even then – Oh, should I stand on the street corner and indict myself? plead guilty, guilty, guilty! – _ha_ – but she need but turn towards him and it happens: that it is a curious music, this he marvels about, for her movements are musical, watching her walk: she has a sound, not just her clothes and the air, that, yes, but the resonance and the dissonance with all others, him included; he watches her take just a simple step away from him, halting, full-twisting back to pick up his cup and saucer to complete her loading of the dishwasher, this movement ever so pedestrian and yet it is like so many of her movements: on the beach, a ballad sung with the sun, how else to phrase it? – her way of walking in the bright light, how the light seems to float around her, she never burns, just a lifting of one arm and there is a flutter, like a fast movement across a xylophone, he has marveled at this ever so often, and her splash into the water, her kicks and flails, her swimming strokes, there is but jazz in his ears, a quickening of his heart responding to her watery drum-beats ... she picks up the cup, bends, nips his cheek: a peck, a devious bite: _Witch!_ : tokens and talismans, oh, her magic is potent! - she leaves the singular line of her graceful movement wrapped with a shy bow of her morning smell, dishsoap but oh so clever is she, he knows; his stomach rumbles, there is movement down south! ... such will be with him all day; he will carry her charming smell in his top pocket, keep it close to his heart, slip it out at treasured moments, sniff a whiff, and with just that not just the thought but her actually present: she is there with him ... _ah, Tuesday!_

She knows that it has been happening, long ago not caring _who started it first?_ just reveling in it – well, it is an intrusion, who can deny that? one which always sits around pouting like a spoiled child, but she has come to adjust, manage it, integrate it, for it is so well rewarded by day's end – Do Tuesday's really end? she laughs, chiding herself, knowing that Monday's kiss is ever fulfilled by Tuesday's embracing.

As has happened before, so now, it is when he has left for work that she feels his gaze. Is walking into the living room when his picture on the wall – them at a festive event, Was it Easter back in Minnesota, when? almost ten years, wow; his gaze, eyes which are photographed but a gaze which can never be, yet settled there on the astral plane, and so she walks towards his gaze, enters into it with him: remote-sighting him now as she gazes: at work, of no great physical distinctiveness, average height, average face, average hands but yet his presence, she has – well, like Lovers do, they talked about the first time, and she had to admit: You're not an Adonis, but it was the beer talking so she apologized, yet, how to tell this, he took that as truth, That's true, he said and with that a mask fell from his face and his gaze fell upon her and she fell into his gaze, there seeing her as he saw her for he talked about presence, not just her beauty, _beautiful_ does he call her every day – Should I mistrust him now as I age? but she lets that slide; he was seeing her in such minute detail that she felt naked in a way which made her want to run and find some place to hide; she who had never shied away from bare skin, was as happy with the shape of her breasts, the size of her waistline, her complexion when lightly touched – yet, he had talked about her fingers, not the color of her nails or the artistry of her matching accessories, no, simply her fingers: Your pinky, it is slightly bowed, and he had picked it up with those words and kissed it, sure, it had seemed crazy, kissing a pinky and in a semi-public booth, but it was the tenderness, the caress of his lips, she feeling the vulnerability of his lips, their exposure, the frankness of their salutation, he was, indeed, Happy to meet you, happy in that madcap way that kicked her a bit off her balance; yes, dizzy, what better word? He gazed at me and I became dizzy ... learning to gaze, he talked about that a lot, to look at each other, how many hours have we spent? going over each other .....?

During the work-day he kept seeing her every where. Not that other women were like her, no, rather that they were not. It was a "No, that's not her" flow to the day, each woman, on the street as he drove through downtown, in the parking lot, the elevator, later at lunch, the waitress, hairs of bounty and poverty, eyes which dazzled, seduced, scorned him, legs which drew past him like a fisherman's hook, baited with a curve, a display of sheer stocking, it went that way, _not_ her breasts, _not_ her hands, _not_ her sweet ass; as such the day was littered with female forms and energy, at times he felt like he was walking through a city just bombed to smithereens, everything was as he remembers – they are women – but everyone is not her: his Love: his Beloved.

As she folded the laundry she began to piece him together. Had been at this jigsaw puzzle before: the arm bone's connected to the ... a ditty which amuses her: his shirts and pants hanging in the closet, she touches a dress coat: it is him as coat, having slung this coat across her shoulders, it becoming what he is inside, protector, warrior, healer, he always wanted to shield her – and she knows it is her, not any other woman, oh, she flashes on the other women, the images from college dances, the drunken lips which tried to suck him away from her on that cruise, even the doctor's wife, was she really unaware of her embarrassing crush on him? What should I say to her: his hands are my cups, I need no brassiere, but would someone like her understand? ... a stack of jock socks: she can feel his feet, a bit too long for him, as if he could never be tipped over, but strong feet, runner's feet, battered toes; she presses the socks to her cheek, it is him jogging after her on the beach, she knowing that he would jog slowly simply to watch her from behind, to gaze upon her, how crazed about her sweet ass as he called it when in ecstasy SWEET ASS she could accept that, did, had no problem with it: it was a Tuesday verity, each part of her being her, every part the whole, the whole in every part; she checks the bedside clock; decides to prepare dinner.

He could hardly keep his eyes focused on the road. His cock was playing havoc with time and space; memory, hope. Laughing at his reckless chase, for he was chasing her, she ever elusive, spectral, driving a bit madly, a careen there, a bolt through the yellow light; he felt his own breathing, how it picked up; oh, he knows, I'm a stick shift! and he laughs again, audibly, alone in the car, but she is there: she is the driver, kicking in the clutch and shifting him! Homehomehomehome ....

When it is Tuesday they know what each has been doing during the day. During the first years they had to talk about it; there had been a lot of talking on Tuesday. A lot of what does this mean to you, how do you see that, meaning interpret it; what are we imagining? Now, he knows that she has spent the day creating him; knows her delight in the mechanical playfulness, once he even brought home a skeleton as a gift, plastic, something from a medical supply shop, she festooned it with feathers, poked a cigar into its sacrum, hung some old glasses on the skull ... yeah, she is creating me; he now feeling it in the way he has come to learn is his Tuesday way, that, oddly, he is birthing her; maybe he had wanted it this way and so made it happen, maybe it is part of himself, that part of the male which is female, shit, he doesn't care, for when it began to happen, he just grew with it, let it take him over: she on every other day is out there, quite aware that she is female and separate, Maybe, okay, I'll admit it, it had to have started with the births, the kids, how many times have I told the story, watching her body become silly-putty, I know that's stupid, the image not the sensation, like water flowing into a cove, rushing up onto the beach and depositing something from ocean's depth, that something so strange, almost weird, now once left there but which had been so intimate; intimacy, that's the objectivity I'm feeling, that I get when I look at other women on Tuesday, that they are not me but not me like I'm not them but with her it's like I'm not me like the kids aren't her, somehow I've become intimate with her, that's my distinctiveness ... hmmm, that type of talk didn't get us too far, but it was an image; so when I started wearing some of her clothes she laughed, had a mild shock, she couldn't hide that, but, it was clear to both of us: only intimates are other.

So many meals have become playful rituals for them that Tuesday's stand out sharply. How often do we feed each other? Share a common glass of wine? Tear a piece of bread, dip it into a sauce, feed the other? How often have we lounged about licking ice cream off body parts? Dribbled honey or warm chocolate syrup up and down and in and out and gone into gobble, feast, slobber and get down into that basic sameness we share? ... _not_ : Tuesday dinners are like medieval gardens: parterres: all geometrical, architectural, everything in its place, precise, trimmed, knotted; this path is yours, this is mine – he eats only what is on his plate, she on hers; she does not ask for him to pass her the salt or worchestshire sauce, nor she him, each is on their own: my half, your half; my meal, your meal; my body, not your body .... Ha. Pride. Arrogance. Even spitefulness. "I am me." (Not you!)

Tuesday's eve normally follows morning and afternoon, but it doesn't have to be that way, yet it is tonight. The eve arrives upon intensity. A sharpness in the air which cuts, snips, trims. What has been steadily, inexorably building is their appreciation for the uniqueness of the other through a delight in the strange distinctness of the other into almost a painful, awkward, fear-drilled gasp at the presence of the other, a presence so much "there" that it is terrible, and each has trembled at times; the mere weight of the image, of the totality of the other, it nearly unbalances their mental courage and strength, they look out and realize that they are alone, each one is alone, so alone ... yet, strangely, be is said: queerly alone only and fully because of their gazing.

It happens as the evening arrives; it is the evening arriving, they by some magical fact are naked in bed together. But he over there and she over there on the other side. Sensing the uncollapsable gulf between them: unmeasurable, of an intensity which tends to deny the other one existence: Can she really be there? Is he around? ... yet – "Happy Misfortune!" - they are about each other: touching, it begins with touching, this night, he at her feet, with an aware finger, a finger as detecting as an eye, as knowing as a tongue, finding itself up against her, the sole of her foot, a slender foot, one with a pleasant arch, almost soothing, as he slides along her arch so does he begin to glide, lift up in mind and soul and following the tracing of her physicality, here, her toes, counting each one, little piggies, half muttering the childish ditty, it is a message he first sends her, that he has found her – "Oh, blessed Accident by Design!" - and that he is delighted, that he loves her toes, caresses them with thumb and finger, tugs, slips between one, then another, accepting her boniness, the fatty pout of the nubs of these wigglies, laughing inside that they could grow leaves: only I know that scar there, third toe, cut on glass in Hawaii, had kissed it, healed it, sucked her blood, it is my scar, only mine!; each toe, each sector of her foot, the history of them, the uniqueness of her, what Lovers share, more! only I can identify the body: This is my Beloved! whose right-heel-with-slight-bone-spur I have massaged so often, worked tenderly with my hands, prayed that its pain be my pain: who knows her problems in selecting shoes! ... `he moves, is moved, for this first attention of his is her first attention of him, she is accepting him, allowing him to come in, she calls him by name, his magical name: their Beloved name, whispered only between them, not even words, no, words can be overheard, sometimes by angels, but by gaze and touch, body code which taps soul code which announces and conjures: My Beloved, how do you find me? and he, Beloved, I find you as me you are. .... Progression by Minute Attending and Intense Intending: hours and hours, uncounted duration of minutes, seconds: from ankle cup and lift to stroke her calf, to press of palms along her thighs, being caught upon stubborn stubble of artful shave, but only knowing her oddity, hairless on the top quarter, left flank of thigh, then feeling the weight of her, kneeling above her, her legs between his, with fingers-linked picking up, lifting a thigh, jostling it, juggling it, wanting to feel the sway of her, the water inside her which is blood of ocean tides; he hears the crash of waves, spies her rising from the foamy tide, head glistening with sea shells and starfish and seaweed glitter; ah, there is no one like her! – no one, for his weighing is memory of her at first youth, again later, of her in post-partum depression of fat, cellulite, My god my mother's varicose veins! ah, her weight is his, only his!... she, sensing him as he senses her, in this way receiving his celebration of her individuality; her sole beauty – attested and proclaimed; her sole blemishes – cherished and secreted in his heart ... that he is the other and that the other has found her to be, and in her being he is joying, celebrating, feasting ... upon her belly he is sniff and hunt, the roundness of her fitting her age and her motherhood, yet no other belly-button has he found to be so amazing, so beguiling in its turns and twists; tongue tickling it, tongue running, dragging a wet towel behind, she giggles, a slight pleasured grunt, oh, the fullness of her belly, even when first met, he had been shocked by how much he liked to press his hands upon her belly, how he always found a way to embrace her from behind, sneaking up and slipping his arms between hers and placing his hands upon her midriff, slipping in, under her panty to feel the soft roundness, a slight sweet-butter-fatness of her skin, now, always moving her by some request or dodge or trickery to be mounted from behind, not simply relishing the play of her ass, oh, has told her "Delicious!" shouted it grunted it cursed himself with it but it is true he finds her mounds pressed against him to be delicious, they fit, brim over a bit these last years, into his own crotch in such a way that his cock free floats within her, all this, but even more he bends over and finger-licks her belly, lower, upper, there is a fire there, a warmth, a fascinating rumble which thrills back through him when he stealthily strokes her; so many moles, he almost spotless, It must be my Irish genes, she said almost in despair; but he has at one time or another on more than one Tuesday taken inventory of her moles, of other blemishes, taken them into count and summed them up as distinctions of her which only he knows, If it weren't for these moles and blemishes how would you know it was me your Beloved? ... how many times have these fingers washed across his back, wiped the dribble from the mouth of the children she has gifted him with? oh, he knows them around his cock, knows them as dancers and runners and seducers, has felt them probe him, his mouth, his ears, she has played his ass with such expertise that he has come to feel his cock's primal root; kissing her fingers, lovingly noting the cut of her nails, one now bandaged, last Saturday in the garden; he smells her fingers, spends time, it is time which counts, so he counts them, as many as toes! Ha, should he give her a report? ... Which breast is larger, ah, so tactful, which one droops more, only I would know that, only I, your Beloved, has worshipped each breast with slavish detail, exclaimed in poem and other painfully tortured verse my desires, lustful, sure, always lustful, all my images, words, thoughts, but to pet you, stroke your breasts, hold them, lick them, so I count the rises on your nipples, only I have studied the geometry of your knockers, know them in every word and phrase: milk jugs, teats, rocks, your rack, stack, jack and jill, bazoomies, ah, who else is keeping such inventory? ... her arms, he beholds their hidden strength, calls its forth, celebrates it; arms which have held him as a babe, for what was she birthing other than me, so she has made him know, with each child at suck so has she weaned him; protected, who else has protected me so, knows the safe refuge of these arms? ... face: there is no deterrence of semi-darkness; their room candle-lit, incensed, waterfall sounds, a fragrance of flowers masked by shadows; it is her face which he so blindly knows, and this is Tuesday's claim, for anyone can know in detail, by profile, from report, eyesight, the gossip of friends and enemies, but who knows blindly? Only I, your Beloved, he shouts, shouts as he quietly presses a cheek to one of her cheeks, for it is her warmth he knows, yes, her fire, her anger, her sputtering irritation, but only her private warmth, intimacy is what he wants: the shameless warmth of her blush ... he kisses her eyes, her eyebrows, presses and breathes into her sacred eye: hands cupping her face, he falls into a kiss and with that kiss is propelled up into space, hovering above her, she reaching up, grasping him by ears, playfully shaking him out like her childhood's precious "blankey", and he falls, floats, crumples down upon her: full body embrace.

_Embracing_ : but not yet. Merely his half: top or bottom, it didn't matter: echo or counter-echo; suck or blow; swallow or pitch-out: nothing of matter. He has been half in so many ways; so many imaginative ways: there were times when he talked her body: discoursed even – historical perspectives, quite intelligent: "Breasts weren't always moons..." and he'd be off; sometimes she'd go with him, most times; even when he jabbered, she laughed at his intoxication, for what else is it when one fully grasps, apprehends, confronts and imagines the other so distinctly, with all one's memory, the details, the events, the chronology – Ah! the flesh as sacred script; revelatory.

She now becoming half: drawing out in him what she is not; but then what she is: for she has the advantage of motherhood, until which they had floundered, sketched, stroked bodies for mere pleasure and for the profoundest of pleasures: wherein they had felt their distinctness as the other shuddered and as each one – Oh, wondrous aloneness! – shuddered: so queerly. Like the gushing forth of the babe, all this was so simply amazing, but like a rock: stunned, rocks being beings who are stunned by all the Beauty – and the Horror! – they had seen that, too, in the babe: what is within the numinous, all which is Beauty and Horror, Ugliness and Delight, Order and Chaos, Flame and Void ... but so had he been transformed, he who received her babes of flesh and swallowed them within his embrace of spirit ... Ha! it is always Ha! and Aha! as she lays her hands upon him like the blind detective seeing where the clues are hidden: Aha! and she is off, always at his top: his hair, grasping them in handfuls, then letting them quickly flee through her fingers; she once told him, You are leaking! and showed him the renegade follicles; so it is his leaking she works with, lathers herself with what is lessening as the years move on, but feeling his hair, as if tentacles from his soul: only she, Beloved as she is, knows the count of the hairs upon his head ... each child she has rubbed, wondering, not only at the regeneration but wondering to whom each babe's astral feelers was reaching out? ... hair and palms cupping down his cheeks, beard stubble scrapping, wanting to scrap off and leave cellular detriti as messages to others who would transgress: He's mine!, as such she was always irked that he shaved, as if it were betrayal: Grow a beard!, but she has stopped hounding him: Ever will he love me some day and become my goat-king?

A nose sliding fingertips, his eyes closed, murky grays, ones which adored her but as if from behind a veil of incense, oh, she knows he loves her blindly, so blindly she loves, trusts, tips and toes across his lips, she kisses, she presses, and salutes his ears, scolding them affectionately for all they do not hear, bad-boys that they are, adolescent ears, These he has, she laughs, sighs, alights kisses, not too many, a patchwork, forehead, cheeks, grazing his lips onto his neck, there to feel the carotid thump, veins close to his skin, she wants to savage his neck, vampire gash, and suck him dry: Oh! he has been sucking her dry forever! A wickedness she now wants to return. Yet, she knows of greater treasure, so she slyly demurs, rolls her eyes into his blinded eyes, eying him astrally as she is he, oh, he has read her rightly today! for she is across his chest like the wind, kissing and nipping, kicking up erotic dust, a tongue seduction of his hardening nipples, tugging, sucking, tricking him – Dare he be mother! but she knows he does so dare, and it is this which hard-drives her on, for this is his distinctness, his individual grace, that he is magic: The curse of pregnancy! she might have yelled, did, actually once, in a far-away hotel room, alone: for when she was full, so did she know that she had been embraced; more, that he was inside her, cellularly embracing her: soul lock upon fleshly embrace ... oh, how intimate, yet in this intimacy how distinct, how other: he had imagined himself within her and so he was - Where am I? she had lamented to herself; then to a sister; her mother; womanly friends: he answered, You are pregnant; as if, Duh, you're pregnant, but she heard his tongueless paean of worship: You're inside me!

She felt like pounding her head against rocks: oh, the bitter tang of his belly, the horrifying scent of his growling maleness: Don't I know any better? but her only answer is her free fall dive in between his legs; forehead upon his pubis, pressing her astral eye: reading the soundings from his well: deep down, gurgling cauldron fire: she strokes the inside of his thighs with the lengths of her fingers, just downward and out, not up, just downward, her invocation of his fire to fall as rain; draw him away from himself, draw down the storm and drench his legs, fully from hips to toes, and so she does: tenderly massaging him, pressing him where she knows he is tense, only she with the password to the pain at the top of his calves, both, a peculiarity of him, found only after years of his tightening, his warding her off, there she presses: first her lips, a leg upon her shoulder, strumming like the harp, and leaning sideward to kiss, then tingle with the tip of her tongue, small circles, ever so lightly, ever so small, and he dissembles, falls apart, it is like the crash of waves, more, a platform of thudding bricks: inside him, he is yielding, he is submitting, he is surrendering himself to her, brute that he is, mass of masculine bone and flesh, hot bed of hormones still raging: his cock, she does not even have to look, is pleading with her, imploring her, offering her royal sacrifice: he will give her anything, even his soul – so she kisses, so she circles, so she shifts from left to right; what more is to know about this man, this male, for he is in no way, no fashion or form anything like her: as stupid as he had been, is, to think himself flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone – Ah! she laughs, audibly, but he is deaf, so she knows: deaf, blind and dumb, for there is no cognition, only ignition: he but a wick, a torch, a log to be burned, and she does burn him: approaching his mound with ancient chant, a humming from her own bowels, she in her mind is stalking him, though all he is, is pillar, stone idol, the flame in solid form, all of him in his cock, waiting for her to birth him: as he had gone into her, so now she draws him into her: the movement is his queering distinction, is his strange, peculiar, full queered individuality: he is to be consumed, to be drunk, to be sucked dry ... and she sprinkles her scent about, tips her fingers into her baptismal delta and wafts the air, streamlets of her sacred odor, the deep, dank, musty odor of the ancient grove, from her roots to his: tipping droplets from her lips, this her sacred water, brought up from deep within her in its profound symbolism: the water of her life, from her spring, font, she is drawing from the wellspring and blessing him, sprinkling about his mound: water of her which he eagerly permits to soak into him, no barrier from her, no cloak of flesh, he is her babe, breaking upon her water ... she laughs; kicks up a giddy dance, there is that shady sprite who is always with her, that of her which is not somber, which gleefully darts here and there, with eyes like the doe, sad, doleful, almost weeping, but it is all dodge, all farce, for she knows that all he wants to do is blow! spout up; gush; be geyser, and she is about to uncork this vial of pleasure when a sacred cloud rises up again like mist: this her mastering, conjuring desire, now she no longer flesh, she no longer imaging in her mind, rather all is magical fall and rise, a misting which is mental and spiritual, more, it is incarnating, she is misting about him, descending as a cloud upon the mountaintop: cunny lips around his fons, greeting, hailing, and it is ground-blast from within him, pluming, pillowing, streaming upward: the taste, all is taste, her of him, taste and feel, feeling within her the steam of his fire, spurt and splatter and drip and splash down inside her, sliding down, and he tasting her, soulful, so totally other: every sense of his finds her distinctly: he hears her inexplicable quietness, what he has seen upon the birthing bed, the first time he so heard; and she with every sensate impulse is awareness that he is there, not just here with her, not just them together, but there: in that spot which is eternal, the eternality of individuality: what only Lovers know, sense, feel, comprehend, share as total bafflement: numinosity – the presence of which issues forth in their Belovedness.

_Embracing_ : the singular, specific, act of Beloveds: that which is and defines what Beloveds are: individuals; others.

One can hug; only others can Embrace. They had often hugged and lost the face of the other; seen only the emptiness, the void which was hunting the other, catching up to them; and they had trembled, knowing themselves as this hunter, minion of a great Daimon: negative, negation, obliteration, termination, extermination, exhaustment; seeing not even shadow, and so they hugged until the other was pierced through by dagger cock and cast into the oven of cunny fire ... Yet, Tuesday first came in magical embrace: fully spent yet still linked; he inside her but as if she inside him, his cock was her cock, her cunny, his, yet neither, like standing at the other side of a bridge, bridge over deep chasm, that of the we, but so it had happened, they laid there for eons, they hugged and hugged until "we" Embraced: not just enlaced and kissing, not just awareness, but the full queering sight bequeathed by the eyes behind one's head, which is that of astral eye, magical eye, cross-eyed, blind-eye: seeing their distinct, odd, strange, peculiar individuality made them Full. Robust. A Greater Body. Children of their own Children. Parents of their own Parents.

It is their distinct and peculiar, strange individuality which is that which Embraces. That which separates them as Beloveds as it links them as bridges each unto the other and so unto the queering "we."

As only Beloveds do: they call-out each other's name, living, enfleshing, ensouling, emboweling every syllable, every subtle pause which gives meaning, every aspect of sound: without words they call-forth the name: become the name: queerly "we."

Embracing is Tuesday.

# WEDNESDAY

_Conversing_. At first and for years, decades, it has been so replaceable, displaceable by converting. They were early told that being Lovers was a difficult road; they had been prepared by all about: family, friends, sages, passing acquaintances, even listened to the movie moguls, such a joke between them now, but that's not for conversation at the moment, rather, talking, letting it flow into discussion, debate even argument, several times they had received the received wisdom, "Arguing just validates that you're hot for one another!" – naturally, this was couched in variant dialects, diverse languages, and other mind-boggling means of communication, such as the oxymoronic "War of the Sexes!" ... but they followed that path, strategically retreated when The Enemy was gaining ground, bolstering old bulwarks against new incursions, creative strategies; each took to jest, she among hers and he among hims, till they came to an abrupt halt one day – when, I love you, ceased to mean anything.

In that it had come to mean so many things; too many. It was the fault, as they did seek to find fault, of conversing: We talk too much. He wanted an exclamation. She was irked by her need to latch on a question mark, not as lock but as key. But this was, in itself, just another validation of the strangle of conversing: words, images, sounds, gestures, feints, pretense, etc., etc.

What had they been talking about all these years? To outsiders, if they had looked in, as to themselves, they thought that they had a rich life, a vital linkage, a pulsating dialogue ... Oh, crap! ... they had begun with words, the spoken kind, those of the Engaged, or before that of those Dating; the spoken, externalized tokens of internal desire, of unrequited longing longing to be requited; so, they wrote, almost simultaneously, little notes to each other, neither being given, at the start, to long wind, yet, these puffy sails were sufficient to afford them launch, and so they did, into poems of inflated youth, crinkled with purple prose, aspiring to imitate the Romantics, pressing words, mostly a glut of adjectives and adverbs, pressing these into small offerings, votives, with their most swelled intentions, gems.

Talk and talk. Finding it necessary, almost a compulsion, to say, state, affirm, testify, recriminate, I love you, even as the words made them uneasy, yet with each uneasiness the culmination, the termination, the exploding of the words with intercourse, round-house fucking, itself filled with swearing, Goddam, I love you, and pledges, Oh, darling, I will love you forever; this the way in which words kept them together, like an addiction, a craving, uttering the words so that they felt obligated, even sentenced, to bed down and have inter-course, playing on the double entendre, substituting for conversing, though they knew it was everything but that, that it was a door shut, an interpretation ignored, a passion distracted.

But they had to talk. Felt silences were golden, but only golden drops, not chains, not necklaces. There was fear, but that was not discussed. There was anger, that was. Exasperation. Dissatisfaction. Sure. But each was readily substituted by talking, more, by talking about the talk: Talk to me about your day; Talk to me about your feelings; Talk to me about what you want us to do.

It's a rough road, but they were talkative, conversing Lovers.

Then, that first slip into the talklessness. When the nesting begins. Not at, I missed this month! but before: when she begins to think it, and he begins to accept it without even knowing that his body has said to her, Sure! ... Then, that first wrinkle in time when she stands before the mirror, stands tiptoe to see down the fullness the mirror is hiding, seeing with piercing eyes to the metaphor of her flesh, knowing that he has spoken, stretching, almost tottering, wanting to spy the word or the words or the verse – Oh, she hopes for a poem, even now really wanting a short story, his rendition of How Down Through The Ages, yes, like that, they the mythic parents, from whom the whole world becomes; this moment was her first, but she senses that he must have known, maybe not him in his conscious rational mind, but deep inside: Wouldn't he have had to unlock the treasure chest? to herself she says Yes, for she can't help but feel that this is gift, not something she said, not her demanding or her directing him, not him yielding after a tedious night of political argument, nothing like that, no, he has gifted her, from that somewhere within him which is the key to her own body; it was then that she began to speak with her body, know that her womb was – _What? Transcendental. Hmmm._ – yes, transcendental, but in a way only flesh can describe, that as she walks she is no longer only herself, with name, address, phone number, e-identity, rather, more, fuller, that she is Life Itself making itself a presence, and a presence which is, indeed spoken, she says, Life Says, "I am with child," and he weeps, she knows this, hears it, weeps because he knows that of Death inside himself, had spoken more than once about the billion sperms and the clutch of eggs, about the Waste Which Is Male, so that now he is looking at her with graveside eyes, it would be horrifying if he spoke, if this was sounded into the cosmos, it suffices that, now, she can read his flesh, read it as it has read hers, has read her as gift.

It was on a Wednesday. It was what made, what makes Wednesday.

They began. It was like her body was a shout; he makes it a capital, Shout. Mostly with an exclamation, Shout! For it was deafening; Did she have to tell me? for he knew without their knowing. That same night he came home with white roses: four, for there was to be four; he had listened to her deep-talking; conversing.

She put the flowers in a vase. Dinner was just about ready. They sat down. For the first time they did not pray aloud. It seemed unnecessary; redundant, more, somewhat sacrilegious, but they didn't talk about that. He moves his chair from directly across from her to beside her; never to move it again. From there he places his left palm upon her womb. Nothing stirred; except themselves.

What was ever left to be common from this moment? What speechless? What to be designated as trivial? Or forbidden? Or stupid? Or other than to be explored, plumbed, searched, translated for its evocations of meaning?

All at once, just like that, a fillip, the clap of the hands, the bursting into a laugh, just like that: how deaf had they been? even blind? But, again, not for talking.

Theirs is a simple fare. Potatoes. A cut of medium priced meat. Frozen vegetables. Water. Milk for her. Not menu items. Prosaically flavored: salt, pepper, butter, a flick of chives, some meat sauce ... it could go on, for it was exactly that, for everything around them could go on and on and on, for the plate welcomed them, opened itself to receive them, to serve them: Are you not plates like me? lifting her plate, filling it with food, it was in the lifting that all was said, I am your servant, and as she poured him from the pitcher of water, clunking three ice-cubes as was his like, I am your servant; plates and glasses, did they have to pick up knives and forks, cut and feed each other, such was not the message, such had been for the courting and the pursuit, the Romantic Evenings, now, it was in the translation, that everything about was them, for them to discover the other; he lifting a slice of carrot to his lips, What of her is here gifted to me? she, a cut of meatloaf, What of him is here gifted to me? For there was in this conversation nothing such as a simile or metaphor, for all that is, simply is and was, had been and would be: if they had to attest they might have said, It's all simply amusing.

The world about was speaking to them, through them, even at times, in spite of them. There were more days then they dared discuss where Wednesday never came; oh, it butted its head in, but, nothing came of it. They'd go to garden, and it would be simple work. Grunts and groans, scratches, oaths of torture and merciless death cast down upon devil insects, grubs, arachnids, and whatever crawled or flew where they had posted No Trespassing signs; such days, at meal it was clinking and clattering, a scratching of plate, a not too subdued gulp, a forgetful swipe of the lips, clean napkins; ah, yet deep inside they knew these as conversations, just ones they didn't want to deal with, wanted but to pass by, like prisoners not counting days, just doing time; a blankness, they wanted blank notepads, more, no notepads at all!

_Wednesday_. When it came, it seemed like it would never stop. The chatter all about them: the stove's claim to mechanized innocence was once and for all exposed for what it was: their feral link to the heart's heat, for around it rose images of campfires eons gone cold, the twisting of the knob to raise the heat but a Throw On A Log chatter, they could see that the warmth which seeped through the pots and then through the food and then through them was simply heat moving from stove to stove, they being stove for one another; it was there that they so often lost it, meaning lost the moment, dropped out of time, she reaches across to lightly smack his hand – wanting to say, How many times have I told you not to lift the lid? – when it is such a smack which draws his attention, his harsh attention to her, she as the earthen oven from which all life arises, just like that, the stove shouts, _Fire in the Hole_! and he is over her like the splatter of a bubbling sauce, fingers like spots, streaking, drawing back her face to snare the desire behind her eyes, pressing back her head to plunge into the wicked betrayal of her tongue; oh, the fire jumps, spark to sparks all over each other; it is upon the floor, a conflagration like spilled boiling oil, all through the house, the house in on fire, the drapes flare up, for as they boil and steam, as they poke and churn, so does the house, so does the air burn intensely, for they are stealing every breath from every plant from every living thing, even non-living, stealing the oxygen molecules from the stones and rocks, from color and scent, for they are now the unspoken, the unarticulated, the nonverbal presence of all: they making everything human heartfire.

How many times; how many rooms; how many events – need it be watching TV? Watching the outside world and all of a sudden becoming that outside world. They conversing, analyzing, imagining and so traveling in time with historical shows, finding themselves as pioneers and as astronauts and as poor farmers fleeing a natural catastrophe. What once seemed so other, is just them. As this outside world talks, so are they talking to one another. Finding in their common watching, in the simple act of looking and hearing, turning but a moment's nod and as such deep into the feelings of the fuller body: compassion, regret, crying at a child's death, warding off the fear of the gun, escaping into a comedic farce, the dullness of the weather ... so much which they have become, are becoming; yet, it has come after so much practice, so much, If this is us, then who are we?

Again, that moment of the fuller body, of pregnancy, when the conversation was not about them nor about anyone else but was about everyone in every time, so no one in no time. They had, for decades, so conversed. Their bodies had conversed with rocks, had exploded with plant laughter, had migrated to most imaginative planes with morsels of food, the washing of a back with bath soap, the disappearance into the presence of the house's being: and so it went on, that conversing which they simply assumed all Lovers had, but which only Lovers shared: for Wednesday is a Lovers' day.

But then it was not. It was more. Not that they were looking for more, for they thought they had already found it. What was more joyful than playing with the kids, playing a ball game, a pitch and a toss, a catch, a run after you trying to tag you, something so energetic that they were transported out of time, out of the mundane, ran around and around, giggling, shouting, sweating up a storm, just to plunk down at blanket side and picnic, realizing that they were tasting Olympian fruits, Olympian delights, forever out of time, forever together: a time together which would never end. But then it was not.

Wednesday was the only day which was not itself. Its fullness was an emptiness which was alone, by itself, as other within itself as anything could be: speechless, rather, tongueless, no tongues of flesh nor fire nor imagination, for it was Eternal, yes, their conversing slipped into eternality, foreverness, timelessness on Wednesday; everything became whatever it was to become, spoke on multiple levels, in multi-dimensionalities; Wednesday's conversing defied containment, defied metaphor, defied simile, defied literalness ... but then not.

That it had become Eternal, that they were conversing as Eternals, that all which was before them would be theirs forever, this was the distinction and the subtlety of Wednesday ... yet, _yet_ , yet ... the kids are young people; growing and grown; yield Eternality from within themselves; celebrating Wednesdays ... gone but not gone; moved to other places, and so it seemed did their bodies move, their flesh uncurl a presence, a voice, a language which they had not heretofore discovered ... oh, maybe it had been there, for sure they believed this; that they had ignored it, sure; Forgive us? Forgive me? ... Why this twist? she looks at him, and he is dead: blank, slate washed clean, blackboard of babble and preachment erased; wiped ... and it is his looking at her: not just the wrinkles of the flesh – ah, yes, but it is the wrinkles! ... hidden in the wrinkles, the wrinkles being the flesh only this day, Wednesday, revealed, ferreted out, which had been there forever, but in a forever somehow until this day invisible to them, cleverly hiding, waiting, waiting for its moment upon the flesh, to be the script of the unknowing, and there it is: wrinkle; one, then two, then multitude, as if speaking in tongues, glossolalia of wrinkles!

Conversing in the absence of his presence, or her presence. This is the shady gift of eternal presence. Knowing now as the other begins to disappear, to be engulfed by this wrinkling, not just of flesh but of memory, of words in a way which past silences, even muted moments cannot deny, this wrinkling moving like a wind which is motionless, like a wave which is dry, like the sight which is eyeless ... ah, every body part, and so every worldly part, every thing and non-thing which is other is now not; fading but more, obliterating, seeping into formlessness ... he touches her hand and what they share is senselessness, what they share is forgetfulness, what they share is voicelessness ... its own type of howling, screeching, growling, wailing, shouting intensity of being as it mates with non-being ... they had shared its anticipation; taken, they knew not the how nor the why, often just going with the common imagining; taken the roses and snapped off the heads, adorning themselves with stripped stems; taken the darkness of cloth and shrouded their heads; made the room so bright that each was blinded in pain: oh, yes, not simply the pleasure of candles but the glaring, the glaring obliteration of sight by incandescent madness, she had brought in every conceivable kind of light they had in the house, spotlights, heating lamps, cool fluorescents, lumens of every sort, turned the room into a shadowless pit, and into it they plunged; in like manner, the cavern of blankets which was their cave, their intimate cunny, their Platonic parody, a joying in being snatch, being cunt, of being cocks rummaging around in the stink of sex without stop, of sweat and clinch and suck and drool and press and push, so hot, so dark, so feral ... with a touch of its savagery of death, this each had more than once anticipated, but back then they had no wrinkles with which to hold it, to nurse it, to capture and drag it homeward, back into the everyday; into meaningful modes of conversing.

Bodies sagging and compressing. Translucent. Mottled. Cracking yellowed fingernails. Dryness: brittle. Geometric collapse: ossified scaffolding crumbling. Not just coldness, simply no source: neither of hot or cold. Desert rattle of wind, their breathing. Sand grains falling, tottering from their heads, baldness, spots, clumps, withering on the vine, bone and cartilage and tendons and muscles, all inverting, sucking inward with no outward echo ... tasteless, odorless, touchless, presence-less: wrinkled and wrinkling ... into the Void, into the Obliteration, into the Maw: only their discovery of Wednesday, only their practice of conversing, only their depthless loving through and in and with and by everything has prepared them for this, their final conversing: wrinkling.

They are cremated on Wednesday. Will be. Can only be. For conversing is, as it has always been, as they have come to know, feel, intuit, imagine, is but the return: of the word, of the sound, of the glance, of the gaze, of the kiss, of the embrace, of the flesh, of the soul ... echoing: of what is to what is not to what is to what is not to .....

Conversing is Wednesday.

# THURSDAY

_Laughing_. With how many others had she said, I like him. He makes me laugh. When it is the male who laughs, isn't it when he's a beta and she's an alpha? Moving up and down the spectrum of sexual identity, laughing drops markers. He told slightly off-color jokes during their early years. She never did. Now she does. Hmmmm. He liked the sports and religion ones, now she's all, Want me to play quarterback, and then telling cock jokes. Things like that. Laughing took them to unexpected realms of their imaginations.

You're attacking me. No I'm not. Just being sarcastic. Gees, lighten up. She was never sarcastic, till his belly started to roll, liked to shout, Surf's up! as he plopped on the bed and rolled towards her; grabbing _his_ ass.

Ya see, saying to the guys, not even friends, just guys at the local bar, it was a topic they all readily understood, at least the ones who had hair messages on their combs; Ya see, I can't kid her anymore. I mean, Christ, make a "The sky is falling joke" and what do you get? Anger. Even rage. Nothing funny about that, she pouts, pushing her breasts – These fed your children! – into her reinforced bra. I mean, once it was only my hands which reinforced those whoppers!

Git up little doggie! and all the women around the table laugh that familiar laugh – oh, have the times changed! Each sees the fading stallion rear up on his haunches but with "little dickie" nowhere in sight! Oh, you didn't really, did you?

One guy who was always ready with a psychoanalytic tidbit – Piece of crap if you ask me! thumped unfailingly when he had left the bar ... Women are just funny to men. In an ontological way. You guys know it, they have no cock. What's funnier than a body without a cock? and they do laugh; did; always will – _Little penis_ , whatever they try to call it, dress it up, label it, what it ain't, is it ain't a cock! Damn right. _Damn rights, all around._

The feminist doppelganger found itself in like conversations, in later years, mostly through "women's magazines," gabfest columns about "Can this marriage be saved?" written to those who don't want to be saved! but nonetheless, Their brains have always been in their cocks, think we could change that, make them responsible, what's a guy when he's shot his wad but a whimpering six year old wondering "What's happened?" and they all laugh, roundly, Guys wanting it up, up so badly, and all the lies, "pathetic lies!" who hasn't had to deal with that, and those grave eyes, like at a funeral, he's lost his best friend, Will he rise from the dead! with sucking sounds, lips pursed in exaggerated fashion, and loud sucks, Suck and fuck, that should be in the wedding contract!

They were each part of all of these events. Who could ever claim to be outside the culture, not grappled by its unconscious assumptions, again, deep-thinkers, saying, It's been like that since Adam and Eve ... Yeah, says the angry woman but there was a before Adam and Eve; male eyes bug-out; she smirks. No one laughs.

That's where they realized, not a thundering decision, not a Mount Sinai type thing, but sitting around the table: You don't come at me like you used to. You want me to? No. Not that. Just, are you paying attention to me? When you laugh at me, at least I know you're thinking about me. Gees, damned if I do and damned if I don't!

They always have more fun when they watch comedies or farces. The serious stuff was always difficult. She'd see something he didn't. Then, he'd get fixated on one thing she didn't – usually something having to do with the female star. They had always liked to dance. She laughed easily at his odd-ball antics: insane, weird, crazy, just a loony! – she liked calling him that. For him it had always been one tool in seduction. Somehow realizing this, You gotta make 'em laugh, some braggart, but it was true. They laugh, then you can make them cry, why it worked that way he didn't know, just did.

For her part, she liked to amuse him. Cut out funnies she thought would tickle his fancy. Most times did. But she was more cutesy than he let on. He did like her on birthdays, always being the clown: a red-light bulb, buffoonish make-up, the whole clown outfit, she came out of herself then, Just being silly! is how she saw it ... but, again, it lead to a good time in the sack so he took it.

Yet, all in all, it came to a thudding close. They weren't laughing. She didn't seem cutesy. He didn't seem crazy. Word jokes just got them entangled in, That's offensive or stupid or insensitive, yeah, insensitive, and certainly, You've lost whatever little sense of humor you ever did have, fucking clown!

Then came Thursday.

Thursday had never had gravity. If they had felt it important to find a word which both described how they saw the past and why it is that they found Thursday as Thursday day is right now, it was gravity.

Joking, maybe we didn't share laughter, just jokes. Like tricks, she says, almost confessional. Yeah, I see what you're saying.

They both had thought that Thursday was just a day of merriment, lightness, when they goofed off together. But then the Why rose up. _Why?_

Why? he was the first to ask. Who knows, she says, we were just kids, young. Are we old, now? Not that, but you know, hate to admit it, but we've always looked to our bodies, haven't we? Looked at them and read the script, isn't that how we've been talking? Yeah, but not about laughing, strange isn't that?

_Gravity_. Sure, it's simple, looks simple right now, maybe because we've passed through? Look, we just joked. And joking kept us apart. Allowed us to avoid danger, isn't that it? So that I didn't have to look at you and .... Go on, and what? ... _Be scared?_

She knew he had hit it on the head, just as he said it; she jumps, frightened. The word was its own presence: _scared_. Yeah, I was in the bar, and it was a younger guy, not even married, just shacking up, really liked this girl, so he says, but as he talked he started making fun of her, and it was funny, an ass like a bowl full of jelly, stupid stuff, stuff that guys laugh at, we did laugh, but he kept going and well more than the things, she wails like a strangled cat, stuff that's funny when you're high, aw, just trust me on this, it was funny, but he kept getting more and more violent, not that he hit her but he started calling her Bitch and Cunt and Whore and Ragged Piece of Ass ... Was I like that, hit me, right there, did I ever talk about you like that?

True confessions? Is this what we're doing? Telling trade secrets? Things men should never hear? ... Okay. I'm game. The girls don't get drunk, anyways, rarely happens if it does, but it's not, Honey, I lost my penis! not like that, there are plenty of jokes like that; what came to me, actually, my sister brought this up one day, several summers ago, it's like men don't count anymore, like they're not bad boys anymore, she said, Nothing they do really counts, not if you have your own job – she said, And a hefty insurance policy!

But it wasn't just the talking, they did talk, found that this laughing business caught each's curiosity, was something which seemed to be carrying a message, each liked knowing how the other had laughed, especially when not with them; somehow, the other's world seemed more understandable, more acceptable now, Sure, guys are assholes, but any more than old hens? Cluck. Cluck. You've a point. Are we going to argue about who's more pathetic? Think we're missing the point, here, again.

So, Thursday. You have to know their bedroom. A big room. Almost like a suite. One of those rooms which is almost a full floor. Boy's closet. Girl's closet. Even a bidet. A Jacuzzi and a small dry sauna room. But what was telling were the doors, closet doors, both fully mirrored, directly across the room, she standing naked, he, too, both at the same moment with the same look glancing and seeing the other glance back, mirror images of themselves, at that moment it struck them: they laughed, more like chuckling, but it was a turning point and he turned, she turns, they face each other, not looking at each other but at their asses in the opposing mirrors ... _Ha!_

It was a shared laugh, like, The joke's on you! Neither had to say anything, for it was themselves as the joke, that's what snapped, like a great punch line, a visual pun, he's in her mirror, she's in his, a joke like when one realizes that one has been missing the insight, almost like hearing a joke in a foreign language and being the only one in the crowd not speaking that language and everyone laughs and you look around and you wonder if they're laughing at you, like that: a joke, also like funeral humor, the grave-digger's Ah! Yurick, I knew him well! Just life's pun, that humans never know when to laugh because all they've been doing is joking; goofing off; and here is the real humor, and they see it, that babies pop out from each other's body, his and hers, pop like flowers bursting into bloom on their flesh, it is the humor of the magician, both a gasping Wow! in amazement and the befuddled laughter at one's self, one's missing the whole point, that what is, is not; don't you get it? That you don't get it? ... they started laughing.

It's a bawdy joke, that's what life is. Yeah, but that's so heavy, heavy. Okay. It's not us anymore but the Bible isn't funny, is that it? Gravity, remember I said that first, what it means, now, after what we've been discussing is that Science doesn't have it either, not any humor that is.

Adam doesn't look at Eve and laugh. No, wait, more, hey, here's an insight, one of Gigantic Importance – boy, am I in love with myself! Ha. – that that's Original Sin, that they laughed, went over to the Tree of Life and said, This is it? This is all? He knows what they mean, All you could come up with is a Tree? and they laughed and Yahweh didn't like the joke. Whatja think?

Maybe. Maybe. Come here. He does. Slip your finger in me. What? delivered in a paused, nonverbal pull-back wrinkle of the forehead; Go on, do it! So he does. Kneels; slips her panty; knocks and enters. She's loose but he doesn't feel sexy. Uncomfortable. Do you get it? She says. His eyes shake with his head, a No, like Tell me! She laughs. Shuts her eyes. Tilts back her head. Then, like a thunder-strike, she starts jolting, not fiercely but visibly, first a full body slack and shuddering wobble, then down her legs, her arms, like electrocution, he can smell flesh-burning, all the time his finger _just there_ , he not moving, it all happens in just one flash – Flash! And she's shuddering with a huge orgasmic wave, almost like an organ screeching, not being played well, some hands just pressing the keys, a high-pitched burst of a wail, and his finger is ringed, lip-ringed, vulva sucking; it's still inside her, droplets of her tearing inside his hand, his palm; just like that, over; before he pulls it out, not even thinking about that, but before he does, she says, Why do you have to come inside me? ... God, he wants to hack off his arm and leave it dangling there, Now, that's funny, a woman hobbling around with an arm armed with a cock finger hanging down – but he doesn't go there. Slowly pulls out his finger. Stands up. Steps away from her.

Ya know, it used to bother me. What? Ya know, when you used to laugh, you still do, but when it used to bother me. Oh, right after, right? How many years, I mean, I buried it for how many years, how stupid! Yeah, especially since I wasn't even aware. How can I be at fault, oh, shit, I can always be at fault, can't I, Sweetie. Back to that? Your little pricking sarcasm. Hmmm.

But that's my point. I should've not been bothered, at least I think I shouldn't've. She pauses, wants to press that thought for more oil. Light the lantern.

Do you laugh now? Yourself.

Actually – and it was her most embarrassing confessional moment, so she is acutely aware – actually, I do.

Thursdays. The only day which, so they thought, got skipped now and then. As if it had come and gone in a flash. Actually, it had. In the beginning, so to speak, they had thought that it was something they had to work on, so they bought comic movies, went to Moliere festivals, watched reruns of The Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello, things like that, regularly zapped to the Comedy Channel, even snatched a few cartoon books off the bookstore shelves ... and it seemed to work, meaning, they'd laugh, not always together, but it changed their mood and they usually ended up screwing. Not the best laugh of the week, but they tried to be as funny as possible. She'd wear her clown suit – a fellatio fantasy he certainly did like! He'd get an old stogy and do a boshed imitation of Groucho Marx, but, hey, it was fun trying to be funny!

Yet, it kept coming back. Normally the morning after. As if someone had snuck in and left a Report Card, a big "F" and not for good fucking, no, they realized that they had missed it still somehow: that Thursday had not really come.

Gravity. The word kept coming back. What does gravity do? Make us fall. A theological pun there? Let's not dawdle with that! Yeah. Okay. It's that mirror stuff, isn't it? Seems so.

So they stood in front of their twin mirrors, buck naked, a little too self conscious, waiting, just seconds not minutes but it seemed like forever, and it was forever, that's what got them laughing.

Like that finger up her vagina, she just knew to do it. Why not just a finger? Why the cock? She had to laugh. Did she really need a cock? Especially today with all the fertility technology. All she needed was a syringe or whatnot. Just a finger? What a joke! She laughed belly deep and raucously. Within a minute or two his dumbfounded face lit up, _Oh!_

So, he knew. That old fantasy, maybe, the first one, Do I want to remember? she comes in and arouses him, by whatever means, sometimes it's a stripper's dance, others, a seductive tongue, but whatever, within a flash she is stroking his cock, rubbing it, and stroking it more, wetting her fingers, blowing him, sucking his head, serpentine slithering down from top to bottom, licking balls, puckering and playing with his soft pubic flesh, not only just driving him wild but not asking, not indicating, making not the least motion to call him out of his pleasured frenzy to come serve her, no, she is worshipping his cock, totally absorbed, and he is a rod on fire, bubbling, boiling, ready to blow, _kaboom_ and rocket skyward ... she turns her hand towards him, sperm droplets all about, she licks them, he laughs, a trembling laugh, a shiver of terror laugh, but he laughs and laughs, closes his eyes and laughs.

What does she want? That's what I've wanted. For how long? He knows she says, No, in almost a whisper. It is a No which asks Why? But he has wanted it, now she's there, legs apart, pressing his stiff down past her vulva and setting it at her backdoor, her asshole, her pit of dark pleasure, Oh, my god! and he is in her, it is hard, not easy, no time for gels and aids, just her desire, he doesn't want to pause, not halt the moment, pressing, pushing, ignoring pain, both are, into her, deep, why and why and why, even deeper, she pushing up as he grapples her butt, adjusts her, legs up high, on his knees, plunging, working, no doubt he is working, sweat all about him, but a curious breathing, of them both, he with an intensity, a Yes I can! Yes I can! and she with a, Do it! Do it! grittiness; a slap on his sides, a flailing back of balled fist onto her pillow, his grip like teeth upon her, pushing so hard that there is no sensation, that's the joke, not an aware joke, but the joke, he is not feeling her, she is not feeling him; they are simply locked, bolted together; stuck.

Of course he came. She did, too.

But when they fell apart, more than anything, they looked and simply laughed, just a small hop and skip of laughs; then turned aside from each other, gazing at their reflections, that of themselves which they could see, in their bedroom mirrors.

Masturbation. Anal intercourse. Both made them laugh. What did Adam do before Eve came? Beat off. And after? ... See, she's part of him, rib or whatever you want it to be, but from inside him, so when he fucks her he's fucking himself, right? Jokes on him! Just another form of masturbation, get it? Having sex with himself. Seeing her in the mirror, but she's not there. How can she be? It's only him! ... So, she can't have a real cunt, can she? What then? she asked. You tell me. she says, He's fucking himself up the ass! they laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh, roll about and over, hoot and holler, slap each other, until they are all funny tears.

Thursday. They laugh, now, because that "funny stuff" is them. She works him with all the expertise she can muster. Slick creams. A finger in the backdoor digging in his root cellar as she strokes him: Fire in the hole! she loudly laughs; he is amused, but would laugh if he could, being nothing but burned embers in his brain, his cock just bare-feet-stomping-red-hot-coals jumping and jiving and going flipped-eye crazy as she digs out of him every funny stuff which is in him, here not just her palm dripping with salty come, not just that, but knowing and she knowing that he knows – ah, the special terror of the Lover, who knows one's Secrets! – she licks him, consumes him, he knowing with a trembling knowledge, a laugh almost a bark, nervous, like ready to jump off a bridge with bungee cord giddy laughter of mad fear and extreme pleasure; that she is laughing, sucking him down, licking him down, consuming him – the joke's on you, buster! – because he is not himself, he is her; this deepest of pleasures is her deepest of pleasures; their laughing together. Such came an actual Thursday.

The joke is often misdirection; a double entendre; a surprise ending. Such comes to them. And when it did, what about them on such a Thursday was not humorous; not a two-faced jokester? They played with food, loved the carrot jokes. She putting one in her ass and asking him if he'd like to get fucked? Or, juiced as she said. He liked to stick a banana up her vagina and eat it: Banana Split – not too original, she thought, but didn't have to say. It made him laugh, so it made her laugh.

Laughing had opened this new vulnerability; of being so very common each to the other: that what one thought, one felt so did the other. Quickly. Almost instantaneously. One of them said, "Creational! Like that's it. You and me. Male and female. Flash! And the joking begins, the laughing starts: life inside of death, carrots pulled from the asshole of the ground, hahahahahahahahaah!"

Inside her. All his life he had followed the cartoonish arrows: Insert here! Meaning the vagina. _There_ was meaning. Life. Maleness. But it was light-hearted, not grave. Sure, the ass is the grave. Crap and all that. Disgusting. In fact, neither had had the wherewithal to bring this into conscious discussion. From the first there had been the "Eyes closed – plunge!" type attitude. They just did it; _it_.

Then, it came, one Thursday: they had just done it; slinking apart; turning aside as was their way, when the laughing started: as if from a presence there but not there: each heard it, slowly rolled towards the other – then it became their laughter, surely, it had come from inside them, or they had drawn it out of each other?

We're holes.

We're probes.

We're ins which come out, but then not.

They started laughing; talked through the laughter; with the laughing.

I don't need your holes.

I don't need your probes.

I don't need the ins.

I don't need the outs.

Stop! Stop! Stop!

Laughing removed the taboo signs, "Forbidden. Do not enter." But also placed new ones. For as they broke barriers, as they gazed upon their flesh and saw the humor of male and female, of one trying to be the other, of the comical rushing in and out like Keystone Cops of cocks and cunnys, so they spied newer barriers, the ones which said, Die! Or, Time is running out! ... moving them to work each other for a new laugh, to search their bodies for more deeply hidden taboos, pleasures of Ancient Treasures, of mythic measure, to grasp that they were simply two and as two but an addition of one and one, yet laughing, here the laughing really began ... begins: see, it's Thursday, and well ... c'mon, lighten up, laugh a little!

Laughing is Thursday.

# FRIDAY

_Celebrating_. Not very original, for, for many folks, the profane and pedestrian Friday, the day ending the workweek, what most feel is really The Week and then starts a different phase, called weekend, it is this Friday which is a release, like the gates being released at the track, horses or dogs set loose chasing something fantastic: a dream, a pot of gold, a fake rabbit, illusions and illusions of illusions, this is how most would accept a description of Friday. After a dinner, maybe some dancing, then the perfunctory transformation: he is not an Accountant, he is a Wolf; she is not a Medical Transcriptionist, she is a Tigress; lots of illusions there, being illusions because on the following morning, which sometimes comes even before midnight is struck, on that morning there is the, Oh, did we do that? Oh, this is a mistake! Oh, I'm not really like that, really. So many had said, Well, I was out celebrating, maybe too much. But you can't hold me to what I (said, did, promised, broke, transgressed, confessed, blah blah blah).

When celebrating first assumes a fixed Friday slot on a personal calendar - not uncommonly when first in college or with the first paycheck or at least when twenty-one, that magical age for hard-drinking, celebrating with wild spirits or real spirits or even homebrew - when it is first set there is scant reflection or even in-depth preparation. One just does it. _He boogies. She shimmies._ The goal is always a bedpost. Hoping for a touchdown – between her legs over right tackle, or a fast-break Slam Dunk! ... something like that; hating to settle for a field-goal, or a pop, you get off Texas Leaguer; you take it, _somehow_ , but it's not that memorable.

She likes to say that she always liked the morning after more than the evening before. The waking to a warm body, something she continues to like, but back-then, that was the thrill. Sure, I loved the sex. but she would go on, Just the presence of someone about. Someone who was paying close attention to me. I'm no fool, I knew he wanted back into my pants or some other male way of scoring, but I liked the smaller celebrations. By which she meant a shared breakfast. Watching this other body which now she knows in such an unknowable way, all his raging fire, his beastly self, namely, his illusions, she liked that; didn't talk about it, but liked it intensely; would watch him gulp, each one how differently they lifted the glass of juice and gulped, some with throats that performed a dance, others as if it was just an inhale, Whish! the juice was gone. She'd just get off, time and again, feeling, yeah, she did pause to stress that, feeling his cutting the pancake, the strength of his wrist as he poured the syrup, the tender way he cradled the hot coffee cup, _Oh_ , it was the memories of these mornings which she so relishes, which were her real orgasms, ones which every man, no doubt about it, every male just didn't know were female orgasms. But then she also knew that not all her sisters talked this way, either.

Before he met her, he wouldn't have even given it a thought, that there was another way. His way was great. He knew he was shedding "himself," that false person he had to be to work, not that he hated his job, no, on any given week-day he would have said, I really like being out on the street hustling sales, but on Friday, when he did admit it, he'd say, I'm dead by lunch; most guys laughed, tossed back a beer and knew that his squirrel was running really fast around that cage! – they all laughed, the image was common if not spoken, there being an itching, not needing to be scratched, but an itch, more like an awakening but it came on like an itch does, as if out of nowhere but of course it was on some other biological time-clock, and he was aware of this, that when he woke on Fridays his feet started to move differently, when he pulled on his shorts the flash thought came, "Where will I take these off tonight!" ... the early hours, there was an eagerness to complete, sum the week's work, write the reports, so that he could slip off what was becoming more vaporous each hour, his identity as a worker, the illusion he had sustained simply to get enough money to go out and celebrate, celebrate with that long-suffering self within himself, the one already buck naked by noon, already undressing every babe who sails through a visual intersection of his desire, already transforming: unmasking, shedding, molting, simply needing to enter the room of ritual, the bar, or, when matters had progressed to steady dating, to the florist for the magical flowers – potent scents, drugged scents: ah, how roses and roses and roses have become his prime tool of incantation, his visual enchantment: _Come!_ ... flowers and at times a box of chocolates, if they were to dine-in, then a bottle of wine, preferably champagne – What girl can resist my blessing her breasts with champagne, the wine of Kings and Queens, and then licking her? – all the boys at the bar smirk: Bad-boy bad-boy! ... Ah, celebrating!

Friday. That day where night could go on for days. The illusion within illusions, that they were Lovers, that they would be Young Forever, that they were Free, that they were omnipotent Gods and Goddesses! ... Yes, he had shared many a Friday with many a lass; failed miserably at recalling names, except for the serious few, but they had been few, the less serious had been many – "Liar!" and he blushed before his brothers ... Celebrating had, in time, become all that his young life was about, and it was riddled with a fear that such celebrating would end, could – _Must! ..._ Curious, he would speak to himself, not the others, Curious, you celebrate to find a mate, and when you find a mate, the celebrating ends. Note, he was not thinking, changes, rather ends. The old "marriage is the death of youth" meaning the death of Spring and the death of dancing and the death ... well, because there was no goal anymore, at least not one that he could see. As his years of celebrating took on a chronology, this thought turned into a bitter-sweet joke, "Good Friday" he started calling it, not shying away from the off-handed blasphemy of the phrase because for him something very powerful was dying: inexorably at an incremental pace, cell by cell: himself as a Young God, Omnipotent Male – is it all illusion? Is celebrating an illusion?

Now for her, the migration of thought and feeling trod an obverse path. Something in her kept cutting short Friday and bringing the morning after closer and closer. She was aware that this ever so crimped her hours in bed. Meaning, she began getting up and out of bed after intercourse before either one fell asleep, got up and started puttering around in the kitchen; of course, the many hes got irritated, What are you doing? and when she said, Oh, a night-time snack, what do you want? When this was said she measured the groans, became expert at the ones uttered with a pillow suffocating his face. The depth and length of the moaning determined whether the poor fool got anymore that night. In fact, he – now he of hes - became her focus of celebrating because he had not moaned, actually, within seconds appeared in the kitchen right beside her, bottoms only, sure with a wicked eye, but he did go about setting the table with a plate, getting down the glasses. She wasn't sure if he knew what he was doing, but he got lucky several times that night. She celebrated a long, long Friday.

When they got to a point – were sometime married by now – when they did look back and did discuss "What we were like," and stuff like that, it was then that she asked, Why did you come into the kitchen that night? He pauses a moment, exhales as if releasing a long imprisoned breath, Hell, if I know! he says, leans over and kisses her. But – but and but and but and but: both knew that each did know, knew that they were sharing an illusion, the illusion of being married, not how it happened but that it did happen; but he's not telling her even now, now not wanting to cripple this illusion, their married one, just wanting to move on; but as she asks the question, she knows the answer, that he had scored and yelled, Game over! ...his own illusion, she'll grant him that; for her own self, she smiles wordlessly, saying, I kept telling you there was no Game!

But Friday is a Game, not athletic, not gambling, not like that, back, again, to illusion. It is her game of no-game. I'm not me, I'm this other person. Isn't that how it always goes? Meeting and then fooling around, playing the game, trying to get the other to see you in a different light, a special way, like no one else? And when this happens, you become friends, special friends, boy and girl; then, steadies; then fiancés; better, engaged, now that lets the cat out of the bag: engaged; so if you're engaged, linked, clipped together, what then can be the illusion marrying conjures?

Back then, it didn't have to be asked. Questions weren't really helpful. There was just one illusion after another, and you participating like a hapless member of the audience. Look at it this way, as they say, How many five year olds still wet their pants? I mean, How many twenty-five year olds – give or take some years – haven't been married? Get it? It just happens. You don't do the trick, it's played on you.

Friday ends the work week because it just does; that's it, no illusion!

When they got engaged, they jointly watched one illusion fade as another took hold. Their "single friends" faded. As if, they grinned, there ever was such a thing as "the single life." It has always been – will always be – "one seeking one," not a life lived alone, but a life lived with the presence of that one who is not here yet! Single folk live with an illusionary mate.

The novel one that began to take hold is that they continued the single life; not that this burst in with bugles and all that, it took time: that as a couple they were in search of another mated couple; their coupled illusion.

She had complained, "We never go out anymore!" and he griped, "The kids control our lives!" meaning that there was something inside them, now the _singular we:_ married people saying we with the same energy that an unmarried person says, I'm single; both meaning that there is an illusionary mate they have with them but yet not.

True, married sex went for them the same predictable way unmarried sex goes. A Friday comes, but now it is, Can we get a babysitter? Should we leave them with grandma? My sister, she cancelled! Things like that. It is sex as the goal, again, but this time it's sex wanting the familiar illusion of unmarried Fridays. He wants to feel that he can seduce her. She wants to be seduced. So does their married sex go. Under this illusion.

When did it change? How did Friday become Friday as it is now? (Forget for a moment that this one is an illusion, too.)

They had gotten their married week in order just as each had done when unmarried. Monday was surrender to the work-week and Tuesday was a numb and forget everything but work often was Wednesday if not just simply forgotten a blank space in one's book of recall then Thursday was irritating awakening a bit the scent of Friday in the air and then Friday this time for celebrating: the first Friday was a movie the second dinner the third dancing, usually in a bar the fourth obligations at a party of friends etc.; not that they always came this sequentially but that they were there, and as a texture of illusion they held. As long as they had Fridays, as long as they were celebrating, they felt that they were really married.

What is the Erotic principle Friday unveiled? She thought, at first, that it was Temptation. In reality, so did he. That at these meetings what they did together: as couple, as we, was ward off temptation. The Temptation to infidelity, to divorce; she was with him so that he could quickly pierce the illusion that he was single again; when he looked at a woman, her whole body spoke, even if she wasn't looking at him, ever from another room, "No!" ... he was like that with her: a bit differently, he liked to dangle her as Temptation, like to see her all dolled up and looking good and knowing that there were just lots of lonely bastards and a lot more of really fucked up married losers who would go home that night and beat-off thinking about her, it was some of this which he liked, a special type of male celebrating.

But that wasn't it.

It was a special married moment. When they began to find couples with whom they could celebrate. Celebrate as couples. Share daily stories and events. Weave in and out of weekday time: a lunch-break at the gym; time together goofing the Web; volunteer teams at the various local schools their kids attended; then, moving in time to emotional bonding: feeling like family, adoptive parents of the other's kids, things like that; giving rides, but as expected, like you were their kids' dad or mom, like that.

It happened: like waking up, breaking into that first moment of aware consciousness as a kid, realizing that you are simultaneously me and them: a we; can't ever not be! Can never exist, have existed, will exist without or outside or apart from them: coming to know you have "My father's eyes," "My sister's smarts," "Auntie's temper!" The first startle of immortality scented with mortality.

Celebrating as being celebrated: never again a singular illusion: familial.

There Erotic principle of procreation, even grasped symbolically, even mystically – but not just that. Now, for decades, the mingling, the conversing, the embracing, the kissing of "our larger family," kidded as "one Big Family!" at BBQs and festive occasions, holidays. Then, another moment of awakened consciousness. There were several such couples. Growing slowly to five. A group of ten. At one juncture, a playful insight: The Hand, we're like a hand. Two hands actually, five males, five females. Together, yet separate. This was the start of the imagination of another type of celebrating.

As unmarried Friday celebrating was with the illusionary mate not yet there, so was married Friday, until another illusion set in, that of The Hand.  
He watches another's wife. There is the yearning. There is the hard cock. There is the goosebump riddling so familiar to the thief on the prowl. Yet, it is not that. Not steal so as to secret away, but to have so as to pry open the deeper secrets of his own mate. For all in The Hand had become "close," in those ways peculiar to each, one more intellectual than the others, one more artistic, one more innocent, yet, it grew into its own balancing act, not like a seesaw but like the ocean with so many waves, some crashing the beach as others are riptide, yet others, small eddies and whirlpools ... it began, as it seemed proper when it was examined as to its development, it began with two and two.

The familiar discussion, now discussed in details for several years, about, What do you two like about each other? and going down that question to others, discovering, exposing who one is and who one is in the other's eye and then asking the other couple, and now being four-eyed! ... such that the shes are knowing each other directly and then indirectly as the hes are so knowing; in this motion, the prestidigitation of the illusionary Hand waving was without mark or conscious note, not a boundary which can be recalled ... he knew that he wanted to find her, so he took the sister aside and said it straight out, I want to be intimate with you, and it did make her blush and it did turn her on but it also caused her to pause for she and her man had discussed this, Really, we did, he so wants to know your wife, and I do too, and you know ... but what are the words and the reasoning and the syllogisms required here? For it is like unto the unmarried mating: two grasp hands and quietly float up the stairs to the magical bed of enchantment and illusion.

Inside her and his coupled mind are a thousand words crashing, pushing to the head of the line, juxtaposing into simile and metaphor, erasing themselves as they form ... for this is an illusion of uncharacteristic potency, she realizing that there could never be the thought of children, a biological impossibility now, for her and her sister, and for him, then, what; he here, her husband there? ... all they had ever had was the imagination of children, of pregnancy, of procreation: the ready answer to, Why marry? but now it is, Why couple? yes, Why are we together? for what we have created, our family, the kids, the answer we have formed together is not all, not the full answer: this evident from years as The Hand: especially as one ages, they laugh, We're all beginning to look alike. Yeah, just like little babies look so much alike! Ha. ... it is for that discovery of what is not even anticipated as discovery, so poignant when he first realized that she: "It's you! You're the one." Meaning he was "you" to her, that one; the one which makes you, you and me, me and that elusive we.

It's the "we," which is the rub; the conjuration here. As peculiarly as they once were I when unmarried – a peculiarity only peculiarly grasped once deeply married – so with a like peculiarity were they we when married; a we which is we, but then, not yet.

Not yet, in a "Look!" poof, a puff of smoke, the whipping away of the black cloth and the sudden appearance of, of what? – "Ta dum! _We!_ "

The we beyond even the familial we, which must be reached for, Hands reaching out, Hands creating, Hands upon the flesh, the mind, the soul: upraised Hands, offering hands, eager Hands ... with their Hand, imagining and so creating that we which plays, creates, worships with the Eros beyond both living and dying.

Fridays now are meals: foursquare. A time of conversation; of merriment; of dance; of hugs, embraces, kisses; of a moving upstairs to a common bed, four bodies, mingling, sometimes in separate rooms, sometimes together; watching as he slips into his wife the magic of this other male, this brother, who is, by that coupling, _himself_ ... almost bemused by his lack of desire to kill him, of the absence of what was once all that drove him, namely jealousy; watching her breasts give suck to a madness, and as that madness spreads over both of them, how contagious it gets, he and she now into their own madness, finding that their bodies are not their bodies, a celebration they do share in later moments as akin to that of birth, of the kids, that unusual feeling of being alive in and through another, a feeling one articulates as Living Beyond Death, yes, you see them and you know that they will be here, not just moments, see we can be moments, maybe even years, alive without the others, but, kids, they're on a wholly different timeline, different stage, even if we live long, they live differently ... you watch your kids have kids ... it grew along that line: there was in the foursquare a loving of he for he and she for she which had no place before, no imagination, was not a strong illusion, rather a fear, something which would have been misinterpreted, not a celebration but as a party-stopper, a relationship killer, now, they can be present each to the other in the touch of their lovers, receive the beauty cherished by the other as they cherish the beauty: the strength of each male is so different, Like wines, one says; I know we should be talking cocks, and we could, they do strut differently! and they giggle like naughty schoolgirls, But it's his hands, your husband's hands are so, what would you say? I'd call them crafty. Hmm, I always thought of him as a gardener. The way he like to work my pussy, it's like watching a gardener prepare a bed for planting. I know what you mean! At first it alarmed me, I thought he was afraid to come inside of me. I felt so ugly, I got scared. But then his fingers, they're so soft, they pressed me apart and he began to hum, but I guess you know that humming, and the lift of her eyebrows and the quirky roll of eyes said more than YES! Well, then it got to where I almost said, Take more time! Not that I felt selfish, but that I felt so, ya know, I've thought about this a lot, I wanted just the right word, "Oceanic" that's it. What do you think?

There were many conversations like this. Flights of mutual fantasy. Sharing of private moments of regrets. There were days when the sharing wasn't so lively, so full. Just like a bad fuck back when, he'd say. The sisters thought the same. But, in the main, it was good. And once begun, it just became their way of celebrating.

In time, it moves throughout The Hand. Five couples sharing the same illusion. Having parties where drinking was deep and dancing was wild and fooling around was the foolishness of the moment. It took time however. Decades. Not so much in the counting as in the imagining. If they had paused to look back they would have said, Took years and years and years. And lots of tears and tears and tears. Right, joys and sorrows.

Celebrating which took them over and through the pits: psychic, mental, emotional, astral but more, spiritual: Hell. This wherein they knew the numinous power of their coupled illusion. A child who dies too soon. A battered daughter-in-law. Handling the drug abuse of a grandchild. Burying a spouse. These all have come in time, and each and all have been celebrated.

In this way they married into Life and Death: this their coupled illusion. As Friday became not the casual off-handed blasphemy once spoken, but now, in truth and deed, Good Friday: mythic.

Good Friday. Itself is an illusion. That it begins. That it ends. Does celebrating end or just pause or never begin? As pain; as pleasure. What is happening right now, meaning you: is this illusion? Only Friday affords the asking of this question, the questioning of the illusion as illusionary.

Celebrating. How to celebrate the illusion? Which single folk find is the mate not yet there, and the married folk, that also, but then, as you've begun to pierce this illusion – Right! – you see that marriage is an illusion in that you are mated not just to give birth to children but to give birth to family, for some Family. This the foursquare illusion.

One last razzmatazz. When that illusion of living called dying occurs. He or she who is now life's illusion, is now commonly unseen yet uncommonly seen, but isn't it just in a different presence? Isn't that what the foursquare coupling and The Hand's intimacy is about, has always been. That the presence of the mates is not contained within their flesh, within their singularity: of I and we, but is manifest in the fullness of others: those not yet mated with?

He dies. She dies. They gather. The Hand. If one has died, are only nine alive? What is living - especially to those to whom you've been present? Present in the depthlessness of yourself as you've shared intimacy, coupled and coupled and coupled?

Okay, you say, you question: Mythic?

So take a myth, any myth, but let's stay with Good Friday. He, the son, did not die on Good Friday. Easter is the insight: that Good Friday dying is Easter Morning's illusion. In that sense, Good Friday never ended, did it? Easter, the Resurrection, was not new life as in "creation from nothing," the _creatio ex nihilo_ often foisted upon _Genesis_ , rather it was a celebration of what flesh is: that the flesh of the Son is the flesh of the Father; that even God is "you," that other who is embraceable, kissable, with whom you can converse, is Beloved!

Easter: what was it but discovery of Good Friday's illusion? A lifting of the blanket and saying, Oh, there you are!

But she knows this in an even more fuller, robust, bawdy way: She didn't die when her children were born. Never has. Never will. ... Neither did you. Parts of each of you: you the stirrer and you the cauldron; the celebrating was of what had always been, was, and is, and shall ever be: for where do the babes, these Holy Innocents, come from? As if from space or time, but only your space and time: that of the we: single as couple; coupled as The Hand; celebrating as Family.

Good Friday is we celebrating.

There is a message in the myths around us about Friday celebrating. For some it is Friday sundown and the celebrating stops; a Sabbath begins. Whatever that means, has meant, will mean to you, it is a transition to a heavenly presence, a heavily spiritual presence, taking one into a mythic moment: one fuller, pregnant, robust. For we, the Sabbath or the Sun's Day – something yet to be explored – is the issuing into and the blossoming forth of "Royal Enthroning."

Where did the Risen One go but to sit on the Heavenly Throne? In The Hand, their Friday celebrating plumbs the mystery and mysterium of this ancient imagery: a newborning imagining of dying.

It is the mysterium of Family: a presence eternal, for everyone has Parents, is a Child, and parents others. Family is multi-generational, never dies, is the only basis for Memory and so Knowing, more for Imagining: imagining the sacred and the profane, but, more, what is Beyond: which is that which is evoked, created, made manifest, becomes present as we embrace, kiss, converse, play ....

Me and We: they gather. They eat. They talk about the departed. They touch his/her clothes. They reminisce. They expose faults; they expose virtues. They eat some more. Read a letter. Recall an award. Drink and drink; some toasts; glasses smashed to free the spirit transforming. We dance to the music the departed so loved: feel the sound which she/he has spoken and through the music has not spoken but been sung, tapped, stomped, just his/her way, graceful, awkward. In everyway we make that one present.

On their flesh, so they have come to grasp, is the eternality of family, this the final illusion. One is not just single nor coupled, one is familial. Family of Man. Family of God. Family of The Hand. Just family.

She or he who is now uncoupled in the flesh. Walks naked among them. Calls each to a pleasure. A word. A dance. An embrace. The comfort of intercourse. Sometimes it is volcanic; disruptive; angry and raging – all times, at least some of this.

Then it just happens. Need there be angels? Sometimes. ... So many times we have been ceremonial. Dressed with the pants and suits, skirts and underwear, adorned with earrings, lips colored her way, a cigar chomped on as he had chomped, their favorite mask, so many celebrations having been held with masks and disguises, the beguilement of painted bodies and bejeweled flesh ... the setting sparse or bountiful as the one not there was, so there is at a time a Mondrian motif, lines and lines, clarity, the modesty of a set table, an uncluttered view from the window, the purity of an aged Scotch, as equally there is the bountiful: overflowing beyond the Baroque, statues, enigmatic artifacts, masks from ages and cultures afar, flowers rare with essences that stimulate, strike the smell, all moving through the senses, bubbly baths and smoke, lots of smoke, offerings, the glut of a favorite desert, thick wines with rustic rumble, there coming all about the saturation of the senses, colors of drape and cloth, wraps and blankets, pure madness, buckets of petals, most often rose or lily, crushed as they die so they give life, food in every wicked delight imaginable; merely exhausting in the plentitude, this the given that it is the plentitude which has given rise to his/her now apparent emptiness, apparent because all know it as illusion ... as illusion so they imagine and become throughout time and space: it is this uncoupled one as Royal Throne, as living throne, as the seat of we: family, and so the enthronement: he/she is lifted up and set down becoming the firmament, the base, the foundation of all time and space: it is a single body taken in its every dimension: every sense, every follicle of hair, every pore – Yes, numinous being! – as such is the presence with the dying made present: for as flesh is the ribbon of all time, as it is the ribbon of spouses as they become parents, their children are such ribbons, so this flesh is where and the how of continuing to be present to that of we which has been transformed: dead, passed, rigor mortis ... _we_ : with a he or a she: a firm cock drifting along the Dark River, another paddling upon her delta, there are birds aflight all about her, kisses flying on arms and legs, tongues, serpents loosed to lick her at every point of sexual excitement, sensuality dark and foreboding, a search party out seeking every Promised Orgasm of Delight, ever the connecting loop: a phallus to lick like lollipop, a cunny to roll around like licorice drops in one's mouth, there is an intimate presence in and upon every part of him/herself, the sheer physicality of it all is humorous, baffling, anti-gravitational: they sit, they lie down, they roll about: time and space sit and lie and roll with them: it is the merging of flesh boundaries, the puddling of endless embracings, the rising up as of a mist: this mist the we: not just collective, not just communal, not even just mythic: something else: something which only defines as it is experienced which is Good Friday celebrating .... for most the imagining is manifest ouroborically: the snake consuming itself is eternality, but, for them, the snake is the spinal cord, the erotic river of imagining linking lust and thought, the unconscious and the conscious, the sleeper and the dreamer, the sacral and the profane, human and divine: it is familial ... and as many as there are so are they so linked, so connected, so looped, so intimate with each other, latched, laced, sewn, stitched, layered; candles being lit, candles fading and dying, incense burning, dark blood wine offered, the blessing of sacred water, sprinkled, sprinkled with kissing; flowers, shy, boastful, beguiling, intoxicating ... it is the now-no-longer-departed one's presence, eternal presence, as fully present as those who have been present with him or her ever were and shall ever be; a conjuration of family; eternal family; celebrating family ... royally enthroned, forever celebrating.

"This is Good."

Celebrating is Friday.

# SATURDAY

_Gaming_. Saturday and Gaming is an easy take. It's a culture of Apollo and Athena, throw in Mars and Venus, there is no need to separate gaming from eros, the naked Olympian athlete, the scantily clad runners: on land, sea, the ice rink; just "below the surface" so to speak there is the wagging cock and the bellowing boobs. TV, the eworld, cereal boxes, the feigned athleticism of porno magazines: the Girl Next Door plays basketball and has a velvety vagina, Just Look! ... but No Touch! which is the actual story here, what Saturday reveals, the imagination which lacks imagining, that is, which kills: Win At All Costs, To The Victor Goes The Spoils, Numero Uno, Hail The Conquering Hero ... Death Where Is Thy Victory? ... Christus Victor.

But it didn't start there. She was the one, actually, she raised on Equality, so had played many games, was a sport, even proudly to herself and sisters a jock, liking to take on all beta-males and swaggering, even others of her now not so fair sex wrestling in the grunt and the grab for the balls, indeed, she has won several trophies, Golden Balls, hung them around her neck; smart, just as so, Scrabble, cribbage, racking up Top Rank in virtual play, stacking the bodies high, and so ... he found her in such a gaming spirit, swatting softballs at a social gathering; he playing first, liking to swat bottoms as they stretched in vain for the bag, imagining the girls as being bagged, thrown into a sack, nubile bodies with jiggling teats – ah, he was a testosterone reeking teenager when they met, but what is he today; she'd say, Don't ask! – she a short-stop, a step quicker, a flick faster, a wink smarter than most guys, he knew he couldn't outplay her in the infield, in fact it had been a first attraction: she had that stuff he liked in certain guys, the flair, the razz and the jazz, a commanding smile, a hop step and tip of the hat, such stuff which made it okay to swat such a guy on the butt, or throw your arms around him and lift him up, a hug prolonged, such was okay: it was that energy, which she had and has, which makes it okay: teammates, that what it is, teaming energy; until ...

She had been educated with an "advanced and progressive education" which revealed a certain type of Saturday. Not one to which he was unaware, but not one which probed his subconscious as hers did. In fact, Saturday, so they do speak right now, is the subconscious, its play that is, not the heaviness of the Unconscious, but not rejecting all that that brings, rather, it is the day when those things "just below the surface" of whatever the shared consciousness is, what some call culture, this she knows, says to him, "When we game, things break through, like flying-fish. Break out, then plunge back down." He smiled; sort of a stupid smile.

Their first years she could have said, "See there's a pattern. Athena from the head of Zeus. Eve from Adam's ribs. Just about every religion has a myth where the female is derivative." She could have said that, but she hadn't because it just wasn't her language, yet; but she played it out, rather, he played it so hard that it had to come out of her.

"Look, throw it this way." And it was the boy showing the girl how not to throw "the way girls do" as if that were some primal offense. She wanted to say, "Biology is destiny!" but knew how it would come out, so, she just threw it harder and faster than he could, unable, even if she wanted, to alter her skeletal-muscular design, just getting it to first, "You're Out!" so what could he say, to herself: What the fuck can he say?! Bastard!

Then, "Girls can't dunk!" So what if she was a three-point ace? It was the dunk. Neither doing the psychoanalytical, "It's just balling the rim," and seeing her cherry and his testicle ... well, it is a matter of attraction not gravity or anything, look, do you think the ball is shot or is it the rim which attracts? The guy who wants to fuck or the woman who sirenically draws him, tempts him, jacks him off with her southern mouth? ... Subconscious: things like this were playing out.

Saturday is gaming. Ain't that some fun.

They had Saturday more days in a row than any other day of the week. Both had been gym rats, each had a fitness routine, PE was a bore because they were juiced with tougher stuff, not stars, not always First Team, though second and thirds they did lock-down, it was, rather, that they were players, liked gaming; so liked each other.

"You like that blast? right out of the park!"

"If I hadn't made the squeeze bunt, we wouldn't have won!"

"I'd like to run off tackle and score between your goal posts!"

"Bring your bat and balls and see how many flys I can pop!"

Raunchy kids; young adults; they got married and kept gaming.

She liked that he liked her smoothness; liked to run his hands down her sides and across her belly and under her breasts as if doing some kind of butterfly stroke. He told her, "It's like swimming!" with pants in between the words which also let her know it was like a smithy at the firepit; she knew her walk was a shimmy and that he was ever throwing erotic snowballs at her, she swatting them away, he showering her with them; with such an imagining did they game: tennis, golf, any thing perpendicular with a ball or just a ball, spending more and more time balling, after the game: now, even Scrabble, not that it was square chips with letters but that there was a Score: fooling around, "Odd score and you do it my way!" got them as physically taut and primed and on tip-toes as any other game; watching games even, "My side gets seven, you take me to heaven!" always his way for a Saturday blow-job; she as savage, "I make the spread, you're dead!" and he knew that she'd make him work her until he had lost all of his cocks: his penis, his fingers, that weirdness she liked with his toes on her butt, all day until there was only his tongue, long bereft of feeling but at her beck and call: _Ha!_

He was no fool; at least he said such to himself; flexing his biceps, eying the faintest outline of his six-pack, tensing up a pec with a decent thickness; She likes me, silent homage; there is about his way, walking through a door, something a guy can do a gal can't, this he knows, the way he one-arm drives, a certain casualness about dominating mechanical lust; oh, he knows she knows he knows and all that crap, and he likes her for it: her envy, not even remotely into the ancient silliness of penis-envy, rather, into her eyes, that look which wants him to drip his virility into her eager, suppliant mouth ... in gaming he knows she wants to be him; that she is trying to catch him; that gaming is his game, somehow not hers: ah, the subconscious: they are wicked about each other when gaming.

Saturdays are such, have been, often are, but then never will-be anymore because of the game wherein they became the game; were found gaming.

Some, this never happens to. Rather, they age, and it is an aging defined by a lack of gaming; neither is any longer the jock nor even interested; try to find other hobbies, most often simply coat over the lost time with boredom, the hanging-out together which mindless hours on his sofa with beer and her like absorption into ladies journals, this is how it goes; not uncommonly, he is aroused by grandchildren at play, giving them all his wisdom, she too; but it ain't the same, for they have lost their edge, their gaming. And it happens at about the same time on Saturday, that Saturday forward from which some go this way, others that.

He fidgeted with the imagery of playing cards, just a flick below his consciousness, feeling them as two hands, but two combining for one win; that threw him off, the necessary merging of hands, the melding of suits: that they were being played by some other presence, this was not as hard to take, to accept into awareness; it was never a game he thought he'd lose, certainly not them; but it was maddening, because it seemed only the refs knew the rules, and these kept changing; easy it was at first, getting pregnant – they could've shouted, "Touchdown!" but they weren't that cranked; they did feel like he had pitched and she had hit a homerun; not winching at the bat being his penis swacking the ball, really sperm, but, hey, there was a feeling of having won, of having beaten a serious opponent, of having stepped into the Winner's Circle ... but unlike other games there was a fear here which was truly ominous: Fear; they had always worried, as athletes do, about injuries: sprains, breaks, abrasions, jammed digits, most of all bruises, the bruises seemed the hardest to rebound from, but, hey, he started worrying about her: miscarriage, stillbirth, death at child birth, yeah, there was a real, "You're Out!" shouted in a terrifying voice here; so he focused on the morning sickness, which proved to be slight, and on the discomfitures of "Blowing up, hell, I'm blowing up like a balloon!" – Focus on what you can handle, he kept muttering, coaching himself; for her there was an existential dread about it all which she could not, never did, articulate to him: "The only Rule is that there are no Rules!" Isn't this what her mother, sisters, aunts and all who shouted encouragement, hooted from the stands, bellowed from the outfield bleachers, isn't it this: anarchy, chaos, revolution in the sense of revolting, everything seemed to go so "normally," missed period, that "different feeling," the feeling of feeling something – it is really a person? inside me? swimming? eating? – something inside: if she had set down to do this in a disciplined manner she would have talked about herself as the ballpark, that the game was happening inside her; a cellular game, a genetic game, an earthwoman versus the alien sky god game, no doubt he is an alien, now she knows, knows his game! To glide down from the sky and fuck her so that this game "plays through" right through her, oh Leda, why didn't I understand? ... but he says to her, "I'm a player, I want to play!" ... What kind of Saturday is this?

Power. Skill. Craft. Practice. Discipline. Self-control. So many words of the game. Tactics. Strategy. Defense! ... They continued to game as they became this game; for the first months actually gamed a lot. Bought and played with baby-games. Justifying this as a positive response to the coming child, not giving into the dreaded thoughts, the sickness, the message of the malaise; Chutes and Ladders, spinning a top, Froggy-Froggy, old games, new games; even ring-around-the-rosy (ancient Black Plague ditty about whose meaning they were totally unaware but would have invoked its power to ward off the darkness if they had known) ... reading together: not what they thought of as an adult game, though they did read favorite poems, snatches from novels – "Listen to this ...! and whether the spouse so addressed really wanted to listen was not in question, rather, the compulsion to speak was satisfied – so, reading was also acting out children's books, "Goodnight Moon!" and a lot of Doctor Seuss – "Butter side up and butter side down, ah, planning the seeds of revolution!" ... but as she became bigger, larger, what could he say, she certainly isn't going to call herself fatter!?; "robust" is his favorite word, for he slyly plays her ego, conveying to her that she is enhanced, fuller as in richer, a largeness which is also a largess: and there was truth to the stratagem, for she began to be doubly alive, not just the now kicking babe within, but with a sense of feeling so deathless, that's her own word, "deathless," that they, truly for the first time ever, plunge into the play of themselves.

Deathless. If they had had to, they would have, named it: The Game Deathless. For every aspect of her became so sensitive that all they could play with was Intensity. No other way to describe it. Not, again, wakefully conscious; not chatting to each other about this. No, it is just that when even simply in sight of her that he feels his bones being shaken about within his skin, feels himself like a shaman's purse with loose bones and someone rattling; feels the joke of himself, of the construction of his body, of the connectedness of his fibers and fluids within; it is as if she is shaking him to cast out, auguring bones, cast out so to read, interpret, indeed, he looks at her, a simple glance, and he sees himself, more, feels himself as a robust presence – how else? – just so much fuller, that he is every man who has ever looked at any woman, that he is Primal Man and she Primal Woman, that the universe is all but just them, two, standing across from each other, being present, and it is a magic, this presence, being present to, for from their look, this engagement of eyes, does the world unfold and he reads in vivid images which flow from her eyes like video, images linked, telling a story, Story, of Desire, of Yearning, of a Seething, here a word which is capturing for him what fire and lust, heat and passion cannot contain, for the air seethes between them, becomes, itself, alive, panting, it is their breathing, once apart, now merging, like waves clashing, his in is her out her out his in, a common breathing, and they are the Wind which blows over the Deep, which Broods: yes, brooding, a depthless perplexment which arises as each raises a hand, an arm, moves with thudding gravity towards the other, a hug, an embrace: deeply latched together, and they Brood: she the hen sitting upon him, he, her clutch of egg: she sits upon him; it is clear that he wants he to sit upon him, to nest him: to Brood, brood, brood ....

Never again would they need Saturday as Saturday had been, not need it, as once they thought they did, that unless they gamed together that they would lose something essential; indeed, it appears that this has happened to so many others – but, not that Saturday now that there is this Saturday; for each has become the plaything of the other and for the other; yes, it is the flesh which is the objective play platform, much like the chessboard; it is their appendages which are like game pieces, like the goodies found in the Monopoly box, and they do select their favorites; it is their senses which afford them free tickets to play, any sense being a way into the park or out onto the field, but, again, what Saturday is, is quite robust.

Robust is their playing together, for it is their play which continually opens to their eyes new Prizes; prizes to be won but which must be won as they, together, contest; contest first in their singular flesh, taking that of themselves which are playthings, he drawing a wetted fingertip from her lips down her contented breasts to awaken, shake up the embers, of her inner play, to heave the spear of his finger with astral might so as to terrify her, wake her up, scream, Get ready, here I come! ... they do this, she buckling him with a from-behind linebacker tackle, waist high, shoulder set into the small of his back, fast hands inside his pants scrambling to tie up that secretive cock, one playing its own game of hide and seek, she now playing Switcheroo! and spread-eagling him for her plunge of the goal post, a plunge of mouth and cheerleading fingers, raising him so that she can fuck him, ram him, scramble his brains with her cock energy! ... they laugh as players laugh, surprising each other, a tricky juke this way when his hands go that way, stuff like that, but all for ending this game to begin the next: this wherein they are coupled, two as one, a singular presence: where they are beyond Lovers, Lovers for whom there is a Quest, for whom the lover is the Quest, beyond that into Couples, into the gaming of Beloveds: where they are dying together and rising together; where the discovery is of the Trick, the Trick inside the Game which has no Rules; there he touches her belly, now three children sacked, and there are lines of Memory, stretchmarks which read like archaeological riddles, ancient language, not just of herself, no, of him: he having been her Trophy, her Award, wearing him through their medallion children, babes now grown; babes of babes ... what is there upon the other which is not for the Robust Gaming?

What Rule is not broken? For it is her Beauty which the ravages of aging so-called unveil. It is his Fierce-Heart, his Lion-heartedness, to which the slight limp of arthritis testifies; limps as he struggles to play throw-and-catch with his youngest grand-daughter. What of her Innocence? Her eyes which have seen the Monsters. Seen them in dream and at the graveside. Seen them: attacked by them, her mother's Alzheimer; her sister's cancer; the moments of his infidelities and her own! ... What of their Love-making? Hormones fleeting, the coolness of the Moon, the drying heat of the sun at Day's End? ... upon their bodies they have each and all of these most robustly: yes, he has marched in Grand Triumph when her Victory was complete, that moment returning from their Passage into the Valley of Death and into the Valley of Life, now impassioned parents: now coupled together, as fiery, as passionate, yet, most Humbled ... this a Rule for which there is no Rule: Humility ... and maybe this is the feeling which draws them into Robust Gaming, for they sense with every sense that, together, there is always more to them than they had ever known or even thought they knew – one child has asked, "Isn't this mathematically impossible?" ... The child had been pondering: _the whole is greater than the sum of its parts._

Gaming. Isn't is such a whole? Isn't that our sense of Robust? He knows that it is a garble of words to utter to anyone but her, I am you, and in that meaning, You make me robust, in that meaning, You game me, in that meaning as each player cannot play unless the others play and in that each player is always just that, an equal player, regardless of position or role, so, she says, I am you, and together they sense the presence of the Gaming energy, something once just sighed as "Alive! I don't know, gaming just makes me feel alive!"

Gaming is Saturday.

# SUNDAY

_Communing_. There has always been a Day of Rest. A day where things come to rest. Meaning, activities. The active principle. That day to admire. Beauty. Design. Handiwork. Even the unfinished, the incomplete, the empty, as in the cup once created is empty. It is not uncommon for folks to think of Sunday as a day-off. Meaning to bum around, be aimless, have nothing to do, imitate a rock, like that. In some senses, all of these descriptions are accurate.

What do you want to do, today?

No answer quickly forthcoming.

You're not going to just do nothing ... again?!

He wanted to say, Doing nothing is doing something, just not what you like to do; but he didn't.

I'm up for whatever you want to do.

Why do I always have to think up what we're going to do?

It's not that ...

Sure. Sit on your hands and watch a ballgame, right?

He's doesn't want to self-convict.

I hate this. I'm getting to hate Sundays.

You never want to go out.

Well, for me, I work all week. I need a day to catch-cup.

Catch-up? spoken wordlessly; he sensed it was a trap: bear-pit.

But we got so much done yesterday.

Look, I need to get back to my sewing. It's been months. Simply months.

But I thought ... oh, don't say that!

What if we just call them up and get all the kids and go out for pizza later?

You can bring me back a piece.

There probably isn't another day over which they have had so much conscious discussion about its outward form and essential meaning. They both agree that it should be a special day, maybe even holy or sacred. They go to spiritual meetings, sometimes to a church or a temple, even equinoxes and solstices held in meadows and on hilltops. They also say to each other that it is a day of recreation, here stressing the re as in re-creation. That they and the kids need to be recreated, get back to their true selves.

So, underlying Sunday has always been some notion of resurrection. That as the sun/son rises, blah blah blah. But it's been tough. Sunday's been tough. Especially in the dark of winter when so much is inside; so much becomes group TV watching.

Yeah, yeah, they know that they should elevate their TV watching to "family discussion," but, hey, the kids don't laugh at their programs, and, certainly, both have had enough toilet jokes and sexual comments, allusions, intrusions and outright repulsive blather to have stopped trying to overcome the uncontrollable psychic vomit which adolescent TV is. ... What a lie! All they do, so the kids say, is moralize. Okay. Sunday makes them feel guilty; but they haven't a clue.

There's Holy Communion. And there's the Lord's Supper. And there's a Sunday of Sundays, namely, Easter. Too steeped in the Christian culture to ignore these. They've heard this: a day for the group, for the family, for the community, for the Holy Family. It's also the Sabbath, a day of commemoration, of the Sacrifice: of Godly intervention in History. He and she are not stupid folk, but they know that all they've done is dabble. At least that's their Sunday feeling: queasy.

They have sex on Sunday, but it is, let's say, inhibited. Not that they so name it, just that they do so. If they go to church or a lecture or a spiritual gathering, then, it's only a night, sort of when it is almost Monday, that first work-day. It's not that they don't grasp the underlying eroticism to celebrating, especially to communing. They've gone beyond the traditional patriarchal interpretations of The Last Supper to see its roots in the sacrifice, the breaking of the body, the nurturing through blood of birthing. They can see the Festivity, the Jubilee of the Crucifixion ... not overly intellectualized, but heard enough in group conversation and rancorous debate that they grasp the fundamental spiritual method: to ponder that what is, is not.

So, what they've found as Sunday is, at this moment, a queasy feeling. And with it, uncertain thoughts.

Of all they've experienced on other days, it is, almost, as if Sunday is not just the Lie to the others but a totally alien experience. Indeed, it has dawned upon them that it is The Alien's Day, meaning, God or any outside Creator. All of the other Days have some source inside of them, but Sunday?

Communing with the Alien. Isn't that it? Tradition which says, Lift Up Thine Eyes! or something like that? Tradition which says, For This Is My Body ... meaning, not ours. Somehow Sunday is the struggle: How can God, the Divine, the Holy, the Numinous, the Alien commune with the Human, the Profane, the Shitter, the Ephemeral?

She has invigorated many a Sunday with shared meditations on being pregnant and giving birth. He has heard her and praised her as Death-defier and Life-giver, as Blooming Rose and Rock of Ages. She has integrated him within her: what comes to them "naturally" as they embrace. Ever so much more naturally as they age: she widens, he saunters in, they couple, eternity is their living breath, their fervid heart-beat.

"Crap!"

"Crap?

"Yeah." He wants to hear more; is desperate.

"What am I, but crap? When that great event, let's be honest, that Great Transient Event. That's what's birthing is. It happens. Then it's gone!"

Before he can, she says, "Don't" and silences him with harsh eyes.

"Why do I feel so crappy?" Pauses. "We?" she intones quizzically.

"We," he submits.

"You once told me this. This, what was it? Males are waste?"

He flinches. Grimaces. Isn't sure where's she's going.

"Waste. Offal. Shit. Crap. Like menstruation, we're sloughed off, till the Final Slough-Off."

He clasps her left hand; kisses her fingertips. His eyes are closed; reverential. It is a gesture which ignites her, "What the crap are you doing?"

How long ago did he come to the conclusion that it didn't end in a bang nor a whimper but with idiocy: an expression in word or movement or action, such as mutilation or suicide or eating-shit? Had said to himself; commanded, "Eat shit!" as if it were the last sane act of the now insane man.

"Don't you see?" he began, picks up her hand, again, kisses it again; as he kisses he stares into her eyes, eyes which are filled with a burbling of disdain and disgust, "Don't you see, we're dead. Don't you smell it? We're shit."

She wanted to slap him. Slap him and spit at him; on him, a big glob of spit on his forehead, dripping down into his eyes; spit which burns his eyeballs out, like acid, scratching out his cheeks with dribble, down into his mouth, down into his throat, choking him, forcing him to gasp and gasp and gasp for air, growl, fail to vomit, but die, seeping down death which burns out his heart, his lungs, his bowels, his cock ... and keeps burning down and down and down and down ... but all she does is turn abruptly from him and lay down on her side, teeth clenched, fingers fisted.

They had often tried a Sun Ritual. Taking it to mean brightness, clarity, happy and run around the picnic table silly giddiness which ended in a good meal, what a day's end would call forth, "I had a good day. It was nice." In those words good and nice all laid wrapped.  
They had never considered that the Sun is because of the Shade.

There had been moments on other Days. Negative moments. Nasty seconds. Distasteful hours. She had really pissed him off. He had irritated her with a never ending prick, not of his cock, but of a needle; his "needle-headed stupidity" she'd comment.

Invective. Cursing. Swearing. Oh, they both admitted to the slap, the kick, the punch, the push-off-the-precipice, had worked hard enough at communicating to be in touch with those feelings, and so, fortunately they believe, avoided acting upon their "darker impulses."

In fact, this was why they have always believed that, despite all their misgivings, that they had communed on Sunday. That, truly, they have shared many Sundays.

Here it comes: right now, preparing for sexual intercourse, not being a day where it has been too intimate, but an acceptable Sunday: reading the morning paper, he baking her favorite biscuits, she out tending the flowers, he frittering away at a stack of magazines and zapping for a game, not finding one of high interest, she sitting down to organize the forthcoming week, he polishing his shoes ... then, to bed: their minimum ritual is to light a candle, just one: light it and crawl in bed, have a moment of communication, not necessarily sex, though often sex, so they have come ...

They can't. Not as if one can and the other cannot. Both just can't. As if they have lost their specific compasses. She without delta. He without his roustabout. They are closed off. Sense each other. But not with any of the six senses. As such not recording that they do not smell or feel or see or taste or hear: not heat, not cold: yet they do sense, in a senseless way, as if grasping their presence as emptiness, not a negation, not a no-thing, but as something each has never been to the other; it is not just death, no, they have peered and seen each other as death, it is more of an unknowing, a sense of total otherness, not other as with a reference: this is this and that is other, not that; it is that the closer they get, and despite their sensations, they do physically couple, link as they have a thousand times, linked in cold port and tropic wharf, yes, but it is as the closer they get, the more intimate by degrees they can be described, so is it that they are not, and here, it is beyond that Humility where they have been profoundly moved by what of the other is not them and what of them is not the other, the majesty, the numinosity of otherness, no, there is no such understandableness about this moment ... it is what only the word Alien grasps for; it is what once God must have reached for, for The Sky, for The Earth in mythic terms; but it is Alien reaching for no other word, no other feeling, no other sensation to be its counterweight ... they are pressed as close together as is the essence of the dot.

Sunday follows Saturday. They could accept that. Sunday is a Shade Day. They could accept the mystery of that. But Sunday, not a day? What is happening? Or, not happening?

If their children had come to find them. Knocked on their bedroom door and, after cautious moments, entered, they would not have seen them. Oh, the bodies would be there. Coupled. But they would not have sensed them? Not in anyway, for they are Alien.

They had practiced their special Kissing. The "69" which sought to be practice for their ouroboric communing. Only realized now, fulfilled in an alien "69." ... He down upon her, but instead of worshipping tongue, he presses his Third Eye which is his Sacral Cunny which is his Other Self hard-pressed against pubis, opening itself to receive her clitoris, unbound it into his Sacral Cunny, to open his Brain as astral spread of legs, and she, with his cock now pressed upon her Third Eye which is her Sacred Cock which is her Other Self, piercing as she opens her Brain: in this way communing, communing most robustly, full alienly, on Sunday.

Even if they had been so communed, their children would not have noticed.

They are alien. Present but invisible. Present but unsensable. Present only as Communing.

In the recesses of their own selves, their children would have been startled by the presence so evoked by this Communing. They would have staggered from a glut of knowing, an over-abundance of insight, an untimely gorging so robust that it is almost properly described as "Nothing." And, "a feeling of nothingness."

It is their Embracing which slips into robust Sunday Communing. Scarce how can this be recorded, is being recorded? Here, on this last Day of the Days you have read about? Which we have labored to communicate to and with you?

That's it: with you.

The only link which words can offer.

What are we with you? You who are not of our flesh. You who have not been called forth or called us forth on any of these days? You who are not the direct expression of our Kissing, Embracing, Conversing, Laughing, Celebrating and Gaming? You who only are Sunday?

Communing. Is not this you?

In your sensate self try to reach beyond your senses. Or, at least, fill them so fully that you risk ... risk what? Not just death? Not just joy? But, what?

You who are the alien.

You to whom we can as fully be simply Crap, Offal, Meaningless Individuals, Other Folk, Enemy, Outsiders ... in every profane and sacred, every burst of Sun and Shade ... we who are alien to you who are alien.

Communing is you.

Communing is Sunday.
