NO SKELETONS FOR ME

No skeletons for me for I love the flesh.

 

I love the flesh that one can feel – skin to skin.

Caresses exciting both caresser and caressed

Discovering curves and hills and valleys

While becoming intimate with another’s terrain.

 

I love the smell of another’s epidermis

That contains the organs and circulatory system.

The pulsing, throbbing, lub-dub heart

And the red, red blood coursing through veins.

 

I love the hair tousled with my fingers,

The crown of a woman – her glory.

Cascading down and framing the flesh of face

Adding color from shoulder to pate.

 

Give me the flesh and feel of a hot-blooded woman

And I will merry be as I pleasure her with carnality.

ONE BLUE EYE

 

With one, penetrating blue eye,

I see you seeing me.

You are looking into my soul

And seeing me want you.

 

You see my naked desires

I’ve vainly tried to conceal.

My intentions are now exposed.

My lust for you is now exposed.

 

I cannot fake my “friendship” for you,

And I cannot fake my naturalness,

My unnatural cravings for your love,

For your natural reactions to my actions.

 

 God, I am so naked in the light of that eye.

But as long as that eye does not turn away

I can only hope that I have not gone too far.

I hope it is telling me that it is all right.

 

It is all right for me to want you, to lust for you,

To want to possess you even for just a moment.

It is all right for me to want to give myself up

To whatever it is that you and that eye would have.

 

 

Keep looking at me as I build my confidence,

As I gain my strength back in my nakedness.

Let me straighten up and look at you in that eye

Fix your gaze on the man that you want.

 

I want you to want me as I want you.

To see you as you see me, in all your nakedness.

I want to see you want me, and lusting for me.

To see you eye-to-eye as two naked, desirous souls.

 

Curiousdwk

PURSUED BY THE BLACK CAT

 

There is a black cat silently stalking me

But one day, I shall be the secretive stalker.

Her lusty greed has set my loins aflame

As she prowls more lordly than the sun.

 

So soft, she sinuously steps aside

And advances stealthily toward my back.

I feel her breath on the nape of my neck,

But it is I, this time, who has set the trap.

 

The hungry hunt is on as I go about,

Flayed by thick thorns and rocky path.

Feeling the glaring hot white noon

I spin around to see her ravenous face.

 

I see the blood veins shining in her neck,

Her yellow eyes and nostrils full of fire,

Her supple body twitching with hot desire.

She knows now what her dastardly fate will be.

 

It will be me, the hunted, who does the devouring,

As I leap upon her agile, feline body.

And wrap my controlling arms around her sleekness

And feast and gorge upon her sinewy neck.

 

Her monstrous mouth opens to devour me

But I swiftly shut her mouth with mine.

I taste her hot anticipating wetness

As our fiery tongues battle for supremacy.

 

We roll over and over alternating on top

As our flailing arms and legs entwine.

The ferociousness of our torrid passion

Knows no boundaries, no limits, no rules.

 

Till finally she resists my advances no more,

And willingly lets me have my way with her.

As she succumbs to my ministrations of pleasures,

And realizes the pleasure of being pleasured.

 

And then, when fully spent, we mutely lie,

Our arms still embracing each other,

I softly caress her with my lapping tongue

And savor the salty taste of her moist flesh.

 

When we prepare to go our own separate ways

We hold each other’s body tightly against our own,

Feeling our hearts beating the rhythmic message:

Maybe next time, she may be the sacred devourer.

 

Curiousdwk

A kiss seals two souls for a moment in time.  ~Levende Waters

New Year’s

 

The Times Square New Year’s Ball doesn’t just drop on Dec 31^st.

I’ve seen that ball drop three times in one day.

These are days where I have renounced my past

And sworn completely new allegiances to some promise

Accompanied by the resolution that I will not break it this time.

 

Like the millions in the throng, I make the vow to myself,

And swear that if those millions can do it, so can I.

 

The old year is behind me, and the diapered year before me

As I am excited about my new year and plans.

It’s easy to make resolutions with millions around you,

But they don’t stay and you know that you will stray.

 

If only this time could be different, if only the change were real,

But I lack the one thing that would seal this resolution for good.

I lack a person to seal it with a kiss.

 

curiousdwk

 

 

 

One can choose the paradigm of competition and control, or one can choose the paradigm of collaboration and cooperation.  Depending on whether they want to be motivated by fear or by empathy.  (me)

Let me see.  I’m in international waters.  Legally.  I have had my ship checked at the last port and reported to Israel the contents.  We have hundreds of people on board including Nobel prize winners, journalists, politicians, and people set to do humanitarian deeds for people who are desperate for supplies.  The Zionists have said to bring it to their checkpoint on land where they have forbidden previous shipments of supplies.  They have a whole list of deadly things which cannot be allowed – like coriander.  And cement.  And so they set up an illegal blockade.  (There isn’t a country in the world, including the US, that will say that the Gaza blockade is legal.) 

 

So the bungling Israeli Navy dispatches a bunch of Sylvester Stallone type thugs to board the ships via climbing down ropes onto the ships late at night.  Then, when the passengers realize that they are being attacked by pirates and start to get physical by pushing them into the sea, the baboons shoot ten people and then call for help.  And the baboons claim they killed in self defense.  The only one gullible enough to think that the charge of “self defense” is sufficient in such a situation is Obama.

 

Meanwhile Obama says, “Oh my.  We regret it.  But that’s life.”  And goes on making TV appearances regarding BP.  While the rest of the world is up at arms that once again, the US has shown itself as less than moral and hardly worthy of claiming to be for freedom and compassion.  Turkey demands that the US give some action besides the couple of words:  “We regret”.  And Hillary and Obama still echo, “We regret”. 

 

The US has lost its financial power.  The financial superpower is no longer the US.  The US has the military power, but so what?  What good has that done in our current two wars or our past wars all the way to Viet Nam?  Our military might is useless in our current world.  And we have lost our reputation of being fair and compassionate with a passion for justice.  The US has lost so much respect in the world and yet the politicians are still fiddling while our society, like burning Rome, goes unnoticed. 

 

Will the partying in D.C. stop in time to realize that we are a part of a global civilization and not an island?  Will the two parties stop warring in time to try to change the direction of our society in time?  Or will they insist on playing their competitive games until the walls come crashing down?    

 

I, and many others, believe that this last bungled fiasco by Israel will be like Selma, Alabama – the watershed experience where rational, non-political people realize that change must come.  Must come.  With or without the support of the US.  The US can work with the rest of the world, or continue to pretend that everything is hunkey-dorey and allow Israel to continue all of its illegal acts (building dividing walls, occupying a land with 1.5 million people by illegally controlling their air rights, their water rights, and their human rights, insisting on building yet more settlements, setting up an illegal blockade, oh my, my fingers are getting tired and I haven’t begun an exhaustive list) while the global community buries us.  We are losing Allies faster than a mountain geezer can swat flies. 

 

Yet there will be many Zionists (not Jews or even Israelis for many of them are as ashamed of the work of the Zionists as the Palestinians are and I am proud to know them as some of my friends) who will expect to hear nothing more than, “We regret”.  To them, they want to hear that expression, “forevermore”.  For that will mean they don’t have to worry about legality or morality in the future just as they haven’t worried about it in the past.  And when one is immoral, they don’t want to reflect on their actions or the resto of the world’s reactions for too long before hearing some affirmations. 

 

Oh look!  Here comes Israel looking for the US to give it more arms.  Perhaps they’ll get a double load if they say it is for “self defense”.  While more and more people in the US are saying “Not in my name!”  I wonder who Obama will listen to this time.  I’ll bet he gives Israel it’s double load and then turn to say to those saying “Not in my name”  these words:   “We regret.  We regret that we don’t have enough money for schools, or for health, or for safety, or for the vulnerables in the US.”  It really is a regrettable situation, isn’t it? 

 

“Isn’t it appropriate that the month of Taxes begins with April Fool’s Day and ends with the crying out of “May Day”?”. 

From the Writer’s Almanac:

“Today is May Day. Even though spring officially begins in March, today is the day that celebrates the height of spring, a day of spring festivities and celebrations.

Like many of our modern holidays, May Day has its roots in ancient, pagan celebrations.

Beginning in the third century B.C. in Rome, the festival Floralia, for the goddess Flora, was held in the days around May Day, April 28th to May 3rd. Flora was a goddess of flowers and fertility, and the festival was held to please her so that she protected flowers and other blossoming plants. There was a circus and theater performances, there were prostitutes and naked dancers, and a sacrifice to the goddess. Deer and goats were let loose to symbolize fertility, and beans and lupines were scattered for the same reason. Romans usually wore white tunics, but during Floralia, they got to wear bright colors. Although Floralia wasn’t instituted until the third century B.C., it evolved from an ancient celebration of spring and fertility traditionally held at that time. Ovid wrote: “Mother of flowers, Flora, present be, / We raise the chant midst jocund games to thee. / Begun in April, unto May deferred, / For both are thine, the jocund song is heard. / Upon the confines of both months we stand / Embellished with the bounties of thy hand.”

In the Celtic British Isles, May Day was celebrated as the festival of Beltane, or Bealtaine or Bealtuinn — Bel was the Celtic god of light, and taine or tuinne meant fire. It was the summer half of the year — a time when the sun set later, when the earth and animals were fertile. Beltane lasted from sundown the night before to sundown on the first of May. On the eve of Beltane, people lit bonfires to Bel to call back the sun. People jumped over the fires to purify themselves, and they blessed their animals by taking them between bonfires before leading them to their summer pastures the next day. It was a day to walk around the property lines and assess your land for the summer season, to mend fences. Women washed their faces with the spring dew so that they would stay beautiful, and there was dancing, tournaments, parades, feasting, and general revelry. There were lots of flowers — men walked around the fires with rowan branches to keep evil spirits at bay, and May trees, or Maypoles, were set up covered in rowan or hawthorn flowers as a blessing. People danced around the Maypole, seen to be a phallic symbol to promote fertility, and villages would compete with each other to see who could produce the tallest maypole. Young couples went off into the forest to spend the night together and came back the next day with flowers to spread through the village. A young woman was crowned May Queen, and she would ride naked on horseback through the village.

Many of these celebrations continued as late as the 17th century — the Puritans were not too pleased, especially since so many young women went off into the woods and came back pregnant. Maypoles were made illegal in 1644.

Since the Puritans discouraged May Day, it was never a major holiday in America. Eventually it was reinvented as a holiday for children, with flowers and candy. And elements of it — rabbits for fertility, colored eggs (also for fertility), which had been scattered around the Maypole — were incorporated into Easter traditions. But May Day has its followers in America. The largest May Day celebration is in Minneapolis, where up to 50,000 people turn out for puppets, dancing, and music in a joyful community parade and a ceremony calling back the sun, put on by In The Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater with the help of about 2,000 volunteers.

May Day has also taken on another meaning in much of the world as International Workers’ Day, or Labor Day. It actually began in the United States, where anarchists were hanged without a fair trial for their involvement in the Haymarket Square riots in Chicago in early May of 1886.”

My comment:  Damn, those Puritans knew how to spoil a good thing, didn’t they?

 

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. (David Friedman)

Here is a personal story of my encounter with the Viet Nam War.

The Test That Changed My Life

 

7/7.  July 7^th.  July 7^th = 28.  After applying the principles of interpolation that I had learned in statistics, I figured that the number 28 would probably carry me to February 7^th, 1969, plus or minus three days with a confidence level of 92%.

 

It was the Fall of 1968 and the fall of my dreams as it was the first year of the military draft lottery.  The need to draft young people to fight in Viet Nam had become so great that the draft boards, in an effort to appear impartial, had randomly picked calendar dates for the year and assigned them sequential numbers.  These dates represented the birth dates of draftees and would let young people know when during the year they could expect their number to be up.  July 7^th, my birthday, was assigned the sequential number 28 and so I figured I would be drafted around the first week in February.

 

I was going to college in Ohio that Fall and I received word from my local draft board in Jacksonville, Florida to come in for the dreaded draft physical.  I tested the system by submitting a request to have my physical in Ohio since that was where I was attending school and I no longer had any family or other reason to go to Florida.  Their approval gave me a one month’s reprieve for the physical.

 

I immediately dropped out of school and with no money, I got a ride with a student to Chicago where I had a friend.  I stayed with him while I went to as many draft counseling centers as I could to try to come up with a way to fail my physical.  But I was told that at least 80% of the inductees wanted to fail and unless I had reams of medical reports indicating a long history of a very serious problem, the best way to beat the draft was to flee to Canada.

 

At the end of my reprieve, I hitchhiked from Chicago to southern Ohio just in time for the physical.  On the selected day, I met a group of other boys assigned the same fate and we traded stories in the bus on our way.  One boy had been on speed for 14 days straight with minimal sleep hoping that his blood pressure would keep him from being drafted.  Another told of how he would climb on top of his dresser, barefoot, and jump down.  He would do this over and over again hoping that his fallen arches would mean that he couldn’t do the necessary marching and so he would fail.  And I remembered hearing the stories while in Chicago of boys who would get a revolver and literally shoot themselves in their foot.  The bus ride was filled with the nervous laughter of boys describing not only their quiet but also unquiet acts of desperation.

 

After assembling in the main hall, I was surprised to hear my name called out along with three other names to go into a side room.  I was even more surprised when I saw these other three carrying duffel bags.  And I panicked as I listened to an officer snap the instructions of boarding a bus to go to boot camp in South Carolina.  After telling them that there must have been some mistake as I was there for my physical, not to go to boot camp, they checked their papers and agreed.  By this time, all of the others who were there for their physical had already gone through the first of several exam stations.  So I went to the first station alone, and filled out the form regarding medical history.  While filling out the form, I checked off ear problems, knee problems, and ankle problems – all with no supporting documents.

 

I then rushed through another station and caught up with the rest so I was last in line.  We went through the motions of turning our head and coughing even though the examiner was already three boys down the line by the time we coughed.  The swiftness of the examiner as we “bent and spread” convinced me of the superficiality of the entire examination process and so I started planning my escape to Canada while in the line waiting for the hearing test.

 

The hearing test consisted of sitting in a soundproof room with five others, putting on a set of earphones, and then turning a dial to the left if we didn’t hear the tone, and to the right if we did hear the tone.  Of course they knew that everyone would want to claim that they couldn’t hear the tone so they advised/warned us that the different tones were set in such a way that they could determine if a person could consistently not hear a tone or if they were faking it.  Also, anyone who failed the test once was required to take the test a second time which would insure consistency of one’s responses.

 

Being the last person in line, I wound up entering the room by myself while the rest of the line had progressed to the next station.  I put the earphones on and although I’ll admit to being rather liberal in my turns to the left, I wasn’t radical.  The day before the exam, I had developed a boil in my right ear but it hadn’t affected my normal hearing too much.  But evidently when the earphones were on, they pressed my ear against this boil so that I honestly couldn’t hear the tones I was supposed to hear.  After looking at my results, and evidently looking at its consistency, and realizing that I was already one station behind everyone else, they indicated I had failed it and didn’t make me take it over again.

 

Finally, at the last station, an examiner saw that I had checked off ear problems on my medical history and saw that I had royally and gloriously failed the hearing exam.  He then looked in my ear, saw the boil, and evidently didn’t like what he saw.  I was never so glad to hear that I had failed a test as I was that day.  It was enough to make me wish that I believed in a god that I could thank.

 

That night, my girlfriend and I took the last $18.00 we had together and went out for dinner to celebrate.  We celebrated by setting our wedding date to be February 7^th, 1969.

 

David Kimball (Curiousdwk)

 

 

            Our neighbors, the Pazzotis, live in a long
narrow canary-yellow house with Mrs. Pazzotti’s old
father, their 2 daughters, their husbands, 4 kids,
a tortoise shell cat and a white poodle.
            Their yard is my childhood dream: toys,
bicycles, tubs, bird cages, barbeques, planters, pails, tools
and garden sculptures: an orange squirrel eating a nut,
Mickey Mouse pushing a wheelbarrow, St. Joseph
carrying a lantern, his other blessing hand
broken at the wrist, and two tea-sipping toads
in an S-shaped love seat, smiling at each other
under a polka-dotted parasol.
            On the yellow railing around the deck,
a procession of nine pinwheels. This May morning,
they thrash the air with each breeze like clumsy
angels nailed to their posts. On the garage wall
at the end of the yard an electric cord
shoots up to the roof. One half connects to a blue
neon insect electrocuter, the other half snakes to, then
disappears into a pedestal cemented on the cornice.
            And there she stands, in plastic
beatitude—and six feet of it—the Madonna,
in her white robe and blue cape, arms
outstretched, blessing the Pazottis, their yard
and neighbors, lit from within day and night,
calling God’s little insects to her shining light,
before sending them straight
to the zapper—tiny buzzing heretics
fried by the same power that lured them
to their last temptation.

 “Plastic Beatitude” by Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. © BOA Editions, Ltd, 1997

I love this poem.  I love the description of a yard that only a kid could love.  (Which is the same as saying a yard that only an adult would condemn.)  And I love the image of the flapping of the wings of the angels who can’t move. 

But I especially love the image of the plastic, dim-lit Madonna and the irony of the seductive  alluring of her for the insects for a “blessing” only to be sent to an electrified hell in the zapper.  And I thought the picture of the alluring Madonna as the Playboy cover was appropriate.  For we all know that all Playboy readers are damned to a hell of some kind for following their base desires.  (smile)

Here is this year’s Valentine that I came up with.  I even sent it to some of my male friends.

Valentine – be Mine

 

Before I say:  Valentine be mine

I need to stop and define

Who is a Valentine?

 

A Valentine is someone special

Who makes me want to spend

Quality time with

And makes me want to do

Special things for

And makes me want to share

Experiences with.

 

But a Valentine is also special

By making me feel special.

I love how that person

Makes me feel about myself,

How I feel about my dreams,

And about my involvements

With life and with my Valentine.

 

I love to feel special

And my Valentine helps

Me to feel that way.

 

And that’s why I feel

So special about my

Special Valentine.

 

Now, Valentine, please be mine.

 

David

The annals of the French Revolution prove that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many . . . the light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude.  (Samuel Taylor Coleridge – 1850)

 

Last night I attended the City Council meeting at Fitchburg, MA.  There was to be a bill presented allowing Planned Parenthood to renovate an abandoned building on Main Street and use it for their counseling services.  No abortions were to be performed there.  Yet there were angry protesters from the Pro Life movement there to prohibit Planned Parenthood.  I wanted to go to tell my personal story of an encounter with Planned Parenthood and how it changed my life.

 

When I arrived, I was met by a group of three women who asked me if I were Pro-Life.  Although I have read about them, I have never encountered a direct question “Are you Pro-Life?”  Of course I’m pro-life.  I cannot say that I am not pro-life.  To me, I am pro-life of the mother who needs to make a decision.  I am pro-life in the new life that Planned Parenthood gave me when I was young.  So I didn’t answer “No, I’m not pro-life”, but rather I answered “I’m pro-Planned Parenthood”.

 

I was married when I was 21 and my wife at the time, for a variety of reasons, hated kids with a passion.  One didn’t need to be a psychologist to understand why if they knew what she had gone through between the ages of 8 and 17.  So she did not want to have kids at all.  Yet she was afraid of taking the pill because of a tendency to clot.  She knew that if she had ever gotten pregnant, she would kill herself.  I knew that also although I didn’t know if she would kill herself while pregnant or after birth.  But I would have been a young widower and possibly a single parent.

 

So after talking it over, we decided that I would get a vasectomy as that was less intrusive than her having her tubes tied.  We were very poor then as she was not working and I was only making a little more than minimum wage.  So we went to Planned Parenthood in Chicago and they counseled us.  After their counseling, we still wanted to go through with the vasectomy so I had it done at their downtown center on a Friday afternoon, went home on the subway, rested over the weekend, and went to work that Monday. 

 

That vasectomy saved at least one of our lives and gave me a quality of life I would not have otherwise had.  Planned Parenthood’s accessibility was the key because we didn’t have the money to do it any other way.  I feel indebted to Planned Parenthood and get very upset when I see ignorant people working out of their fear and hatred to try to keep these people from doing the tremendous good that they do.  As I said, abortion wasn’t even to be an issue here but they are so dead-set against Planned Parenthood that they didn’t care.

 

I don’t mind if someone is ignorant.  And I don’t even mind if someone is ignorant and doesn’t want to know or learn something.  But what I can’t stand are these right wing-nuts who are ignorant, do not want to listen and learn, and insist  on imposing their views on others to where others are violated because of the right wing-nuts fear and hatred.  What does it take for these people to learn critical analysis and empathy?

 

The result of the City Council vote?  They didn’t want to pass the bill but they didn’t want to have to explain why they would vote against it, so they copped out and just tabled the motion.