Eating

I love to watch a beautiful woman eating. I am hardly alone. Notice how most of the foods ads on t.v. depict women, in the throes of pleasure as their beautiful mouths go to work? In one evening of t.v., one can see any number of snacks being bitten into, yogurt licked off spoons -- womens' mouths at work.

A woman's mouth is simply sensuous no matter what it is doing, simply in being: soft, pillowy lips puckered in a kiss or parting to accept a cigarette's filter tip; sharp, strong teeth of both beauty and dangerous power; nubile, moist tongue poking out in naughty defiance or licking slowly around the edges of her mouth.

testing

In praise of sweet backsides and so much more

I helped a neighbor move yesterday, a sweet, single mom. She was profuse with thanks and gratitude. I thought, but of course did not say:

"Lovely lady, for the privilege of observing your glorious, blue-jeaned backside shimmy and dance like that as you dart down the sidewalk directing me where to carry the boxes; and undulating teasingly above me as we climb the stairs to retrieve more stuff ...

"... I would carry ten times as many of these boxes, through the very Sahara sands to your new home."

And I could not believe that some guy once had the privilege of looking into those dark eyes, twisting his finger in her lovely curls and caressing that perfect bottom ... knew her long enough to sire her child ... then threw it all away.

To go back in time and be bullied ...

They say that the number of girl bullies today is greatly increasing ....

As a boy, I endured my share of boy bullies until I learned to fight them back. The closest I ever came to having a girl bully me was one rude comment made about where I bought a shirt in seventh grade. Pure, uncalled for mean-ness. It puzzled me more than anything -- I had not expected such cruel words from such pretty lips. I did not hate her for it. Had she followed up with a request for me to do her some favor, I would have complied without hesitation.

Sometimes a naughty part of me contemplates what it would be like to go back in time, back to school days and whether I might then derive twisted pleasure from little boy me being bullied by some girl.

I imagine her lovely little lips pursing to spit in my face, and calling her girlfriends over to join her in doing so -- their giggles as each in turn mists my face with her saliva; her fingers gleefully removing the money from my wallet; her threat to sic her boyfriend on me if I didn't do her homework for her, her demand that I allow her to copy my answers on a test -- and the naughty little pleasure that each cruel demand of hers would give her.

Ah, the fair!

When a woman smokes a cigarette, she transcends mere mortality and becomes a Priestess of Pleasure, even a Goddess of Primal Fire.

In today's dull world, theophanies of any kind, and even of the tobacco kind, are mournfully rare.

Yet in one afternoon at a wholly unexpected place, a humble county fair, I was overwhelmed. I saw more lovely ladies enjoying cigarettes than I have in the entire year preceding. Lighters clicking, lips clasping, lungs savoring, smoke spilling forth sweet and sensuous.

Surrounded by crowds surging hither and yon, I also discovered that none of the nicotine goddesses seemed to pay attention to where they directed their heavenly exhales -- another nearly extinct phenomenon in our bitter and paranoid society. Again and again I positioned myself to enjoy the elixir that had pleasured each woman and now was expelled from her lips.

The best seven dollars that I have ever spent! Damn, must I wait a year for this fair to return?

Divine Woman

I am no anthropologist but even in my rudimentary studies of human culture, it seems clear to me that humankind has venerated more goddesses than gods, and worshipped deity as female far longer than male.

The triumph of the jealous Judeo-Christian-Islam father-god is but a mere moment, by no means universal, by no means eternal.

It only makes sense. As a primitive man, I might bow down to a male god out of fear of his masculine wrath, his power to stir up the seas and burn the earth. But in the softness of sun-warmed spring soil, in the dew upon the fields, in the beauty of the flowers opening their petals, the ripening of the fruits upon the trees, and the whisper of a breeze as it slips past me, certainly in a baby’s cry, in life itself, I know that I would see Woman.

What divine pleasures for the senses woman offers! The lullaby of her loving voice, the warmth of her hands, the softness of her form, the taste of her lips and the profound joy that a man gets out of intimately knowing and serving her – who can describe it!

She is valley and mountain, moon and star, ocean and stream, bird and butterfly. She is storm and calm, spring and summer, fall and winter.

Each mortal woman is a reflection of the universe, a jewel from the cosmic treasury, sparkling for a brief moment like a drop of water tossed up by the waves of the sea, before returning to her holy origin.

He took her hand

He took her hand in his and kissed her fingertips.

Her nails were cracked and chewed and none-too-clean but he paid that no heed.

"The first thing I want you to know," he said, "is that you are safe here."

She stood there, looking puzzled. Was this some odd role-playing script?

He looked into her eyes and saw the fear that she was trying so hard to hide. His heart swelled with anger. What kind of a world thrust a girl, a mere girl, out into its coldness and demanded that she face rape, even death, as the possible price for her daily bread?

She had no way of knowing what lurked in the hearts of the strangers who paid for her favors.

"Whose child are you?" he wondered.

"I am going to get us something to eat," he said, shaking off his thoughts. "Take yourself a good, long bath while I am gone. Scrub off all that make-up. "

He had prepared the bathroom for her with all the things a woman could want -- bath salts, lotions, a loofah. He wondered if she had ever known such luxuries.

He slipped out of the hotel room, in search of Chinese take-out and some new clothes for her that didn't look like a Halloween hooker costume.

Someday he would explain to her, someday, after this business trip of his was over and he had brought her out of this city and into a real home, that lives are saved in many ways, and that she had saved his as much as he had saved hers.

That he had been on his way to the Fourteenth Street bridge that night with no intention of returning, when she had called to him out of the darkness.

It was a come-on she offered, nothing of interest to a man in his state of mind, and he had brushed her off and kept walking.

But her words, "Are you lonely, mister?" echoed in his mind as the bridge loomed before him, garish and terrible -- and then, in the sad shadow world of his mind, something flashed or something snapped.

Death was darkness upon darkness. Death by his own hand, in those deep, pitiless waters, beneath the hard lights of this bridge, was a coward's solution.

"Are you lonely, mister?" she had asked. Yeah, he was. But the East River's icy embrace would bring no solace. And she would wait there in the darkness for other fools like him to wander by, until, until --

He spun around. He retraced his steps to where she was still standing, her face reddish in the glow from her cigarette as she leaned against the bricks of some building.

"Meet me at the Pemberton Motel -- you know where that is? Good. In an hour. Room 245."

She knocked at the door one hour and 13 minutes later.