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10.25.2012



Braille
by Adrian
 
My fetish is blind women, particularly the ones sightless from birth;
 the reality in their hands is literal, all glintless edge and surface,
a myriad of texture, all uneven. The girl of my dreams goes through life
with hands outstretched before her, trying to fit the world in her palms.
She knows how to reach into the dark, unquestioningly; a surface will
be in touch very shortly. All contact in her periphery, every other voice
a faceless vibration, an echo.  I like the image of the damaged picture mechanism
 in her mind's eye, and me being its repairman. I’d  retool her with stories
of what she cannot see.  Like what stars are or what they could never be.
Dates will be by the bay, at the foot of an ocean, we'd talk about water
 for hours and what she'd think and what I’d mean would be impossibly
 the same.  When it is quiet around us I will whisper in her ear the love
 story of the dark, Cupid and Psyche: because Psyche rivals Venus in beauty,
Venus sends Cupid, her son, a poisonous beautiful angel winged monster,
to induce Psyche to  love  the worse man possible. But as he aims at her,
he mistakenly pricks himself with one of his own arrows, dooming him for her. 
Arrangements are made and they marry, with a condition: Cupid beds Psyche
only at night, with a necessary darkness. Psyche, told of her husband as indeed
 a monster, prepares a lamp and a dagger beneath her pillow and when Cupid is asleep
 beside her, she unsheathes her weapons but finds too beautiful a husband. Cupid wakes
 and finds her and realizes the betrayal. He curses Psyche and leaves her forever;
Psyche wanders the earth, mourning her invisible loss. I lie about the ending but
 she will not notice. Then, when she assents, I  will take her to a room I had built,
 a high ceilinged windowless room, unfurnished, not even a bed. Inside,
 every gesture resounds. And I tell her this is like the story but I am Psyche
and you will be Cupid and I want you to run your hands through me
and read me and I want you to tell me I am beautiful and I take her hands
in mine and whisper, if you could, please. And in the necessary darkness
I unsheathe and show her my mask, my still blind-fold face, and the letters
on my skin rise and illuminate the most painstaking of confessions.