Taste

O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but - nothingness?

-Keats


Sex. I know what the word is. I know how to write it .. even if I rarely admit that I do. I know what the act is. I know how to do it. Well enough I am not plagued with doubt as to ability. To inspire? There is but to spur the primal need .. and yet ...

She is like a maze to me. Both chastity and beauty meant to be plundered and ravished in appreciation ... like narrow wagon streets where I wander from one to the next without reason. One foot in lofty ... I feel as if my head is full of webs and mists and I can not quite grasp what it is that trips so easy from my tongue when I have no wish to speak it.

And it is all such boskshit.

Is it her virginity? No .. virgins more ripe with their innocence have fallen to my tongue without so much as a thought spared the soul of destiny.

Is it possession? I have possessed .. I have conquered. I have stood the gauntlet of bestial passions a man when at the end I am clawed and bled for the fight of it.

Is it my own loneliness? I have disdained the best and chosen to be alone many more times than not.

So what then? What haunts me with an ahn .. a day ... between? Is it love? This thing I profane with distrust. By doubt have I spoken it into existence? Have I born it on my very fear? Have I fabricated this vision from transient moments of pain? Shall it be so fleeting a thing as my imagination?

Or is love in spite of it all .. a thing... as I once believed .... more powerful than even my creative force.

Who am I to grasp such petaled softness in callused and dirty hands. To leave velvet perfection marred and marked forever by my own humanity. I will fail .. I always do. One small thing will escape me and I will come to miss and yearn for that which I have lost .. how then can I step forward when I know that this awaits in store for me more surely than my eventual death?

Am I afraid of death? No surely not for I have faced it a dozen times over with head held high and lance held with no infirmity within my grasp. I have dared death .. charged it with no crack in courage nor intent. So why is love a power to be feared so more than death? Because as a man I have been trained to believe that honorable death is nothing more than what is sought by every man-child of the Tuchuk? Generations ingrained within my cells of war cries and battle sounds that lull and lure even the most gentle of men?

And yet .. truth be told ... in the face of love I am a coward and with every breath I must desecrate this sacred trust I have been given. I must humiliate this perfection and whisper vulgar lies to pollute the amity between us.

Is she deaf that she does not hear? Is she blind that she does not see? Is she mute that she does not defend herself against me? Is there no enmity within her for me? No matter what evil thing I vomit in her presence?

I still smell her upon me. Her scent lingering to remind me of fruit yet to be savored .. a rich ripe nectar to be seduced from the flower. She flits about my thoughts ... am I lover or madman? What shall be left within when all this vile waste is vented from me and I am unable to change that which I rage upon and pray will stand the force of all I throw against it?