A Conspiracy of Angels

"By the way...I'm bisexual," she told me,
while burrowing into my shoulder
like a small furry animal
preparing for hibernation.
"I'm bisexual, but I prefer men."
"Okay," I said,
as I tweaked and toggled her eagerly engorged nipples
which strained against the fabric
of her fluffy red sweater,
like pup tents at the devil's luau.
"I'd like to introduce you to my breasts,"
she said, removing her top.
"The left one is slightly larger than the right."
"Hello," I said,
taking the more precocious of the twin sisters
into my mouth.

Later, she said,
"I want you to touch my clitoris
as softly and gently as you touched my cheek
when you kissed me."
And as she ground her groin
against my pelvic bone,
I thought to myself:
She knows all the right buttons
on her own console,
but not a whole lot about
servicing my hydraulics.

She was a Nordic nymph
from the cornfields of America's heartland,
with hair as pale as wheatstraw
and skin as creamy fair
as a carved whalebone cameo
next to my desert-brown olive-tree hues.
She was the snowy white center
to my dark oreo cookie,
and despite her lack of a diploma from Masters & Johnson,
we were both very happily in lust,
and prematurely placed each other's portraits
in our hearts' secret lockets.

"That looks so enticing," she said.
"What does?" I asked.
"Your belly button peeking over the top of your jeans,"
she answered, reaching for my zipper
and cradling her cornsilk head in my lap.
But as she bobbed for my apples,
and spasmic scoops of eros delight rose in me
like a kundalini thermometer
in the yab-yum boiler room,
a shapeless, viral, amoeba-like fear grew in me as well,
dividing and multiplying and chewing at the back of my ribs.
And riding piggyback on that fear
was a wailing, wild-eyed sadness,
a madman's flask full of tears never cried
for every woman whose love I'd known and lost;
a bladder-skin of painful endings never mourned.
And as the sticky white egg-nog of life
spouted from between my legs,
so did these jagged imps of melancholy
leap from my mouth with an anguished yelp.

This did not sit well with her.
"You should be a gorilla!" she admonished,
and sent me a card with a picture of King Kong on the front.
She stroked my ego as she stroked my body,
but all of her boosting and bolstering
was just fuel for the fever of fear and sorrow
that continued to proliferate in my emotional petri dish.
"You're giving me too much power," she said,
"and I don't want it."

We traded childhood photos
and tapes of our favorite music.
She came to my house with a bouquet of flowers
and we stood embracing at the bus stop in our greatcoats,
wind blowing through our hair like a gothic romance,
and someone yelled out "Kiss her!"
"You're so pretty you could be a girl," she told me.
"Ummm...thank you?" I said,
bending the syllables upward into a question mark.
We went to a concert
where her hand never strayed
from my knee or my thigh,
and afterwards, she stained the bedsheets
with the gushing rivers I unleashed from her.

"I'm going to go hang out
at this lesbian bar downtown...
is that alright?" she asked me.
"I don't know why you feel the need
to ask my permission," I said.
And the infection of angst
I had almost been able to appease
relapsed back into a cancerous malignancy.

We went out to dinner and when I became confused
about the direction of the restaurant,
she turned her back to me there on the street corner
and clip-clopped away in a snippety snit.
Later, over drinks,
she made some pitiful excuse for her behavior;
something so feeble,
it must have been pulled out of someone else's ass.

That night in bed,
our genitals did not greet each other
in their familiar slippery handshake.
Huddled in isolation at my corner of the bedcovers,
like a pile of old, dirty laundry,
I dreamed of a woman who gave me a phenomenal blowjob
and then disappeared,
just before the point of climax,
literally dumping me onto the sidewalk,
like groceries out the bottom of a wet paper bag.

Before even one of her eyelids
had fluttered into wakefulness,
I knew it was over.
"Every time I'm about to come out of the closet,
I get scared
and jump into a relationship with a man," she said.
"...I'm sorry."
"I find absolutely no comfort in that," I said.
And I went home and covered the mirrors
with black drapery,
preparing for my long overdue prayer of bereavement,
and sang my primal heartbreak death-song
for the happy birthday of love.

David Aronson
March 2006