TICKLE TACKLE
by
Tim Stillman
Mornings were never lost on us. Especially spring mornings. Early. In our reverie. Early in the day when poetry made trees greener than the day before. And grass more springy and fuller and richer seeming. More than loam. And the beauty of the sky was crystal fragrance. As has never been before. And the joy at ties of rainbows or chandelier dawns was that they were shared together. And we touched up in our morning bed. Stretched our hands and found each other, close and closer still. Not had to sail the world at all, after the moment we first met and first were born.
We slept naked on these still cool mornings. Light came under the partly drawn shades of white. The cars passed by singly and every so often. This was a small town. This was a town that had survived a harsh cold winter. It had survived for this moment, as day touched earth, as we touched each other. We were our morning fields, and after we came back to our bed, after the bathroom, we held each other as though we were morning lights. All the ones that had come before and all the ones that had come since.
And if we sexed, it was ballet, and it was sighs far more than size, and it was hands that knew the temperature of a pulse, that knew the commingled rhythms of hearts. And we loved because we were lovely, and if we were not models for Vogue or GQ, we were perfection for ourselves, and our legs touched and our legs leaf folded together and we fell into the graciousness of each other's arms. And we spotlighted each other's eyes soft and sleep filled still, with our own. We were nothing without each other.
As our penises hardened, and our balls tightened. We were envelopes of love for each other and of each other still. Some people wait for email or the post or a phone ringing or a door bell chiming and they wait a long long time. Maybe for all of their days. We speak our love songs and our words are wind chimes and telephone bells. We touch to each other's chest and play with each other's nipples, hardening them as much as our cocks, and the phone is answered, the mail is delivered.
We wish never to leave this age. We wish never to go to classes or take tests or have lunch or dinner. We wish to be young forever and vow it so. Our hair is long and our jaws are slender and our muscles are slightly delineated and we are making love now, as Heaven makes the sun outside our dorm window. Peerless sunshine, slanting through the shades. Casting him, my love, in light and shadow as strawberry color somehow, and we hold and are together. Nothing in the world will split us apart. We have counted each other's cells. We have paced the thoughts in the topography of each other's brains so brazenly, so carefully, so artfully, that we know the very grooves of each other's brain.
We remember childhood together. We remember the first time we saw each other in the seventh grade and knew we were destined forever, blond and blond, and hopeless with Math, each, and terrified of bullies. But soon the days took us and protected us and we were the days, as the calendar says March fifteenth, we are March fifteenth, we are the seasons. We embroider the sky with fleece and bleach up the blue to just the perfect shade on the palette of the sky. We are the warm eggs of our testicles. Just as we are the warm eggs and toast and bacon, succulent, food on morning breakfast tables.
We are the runnings in the dorm halls now. We are the ringing radio clocks. We are the rock music turned on and turned on loudly. We are the coolness of life. And we hold each other's cock as we have for so many years since the eighth grade when he said can we please try this? don't hate me for it....and we have been bulwark and snow and shifting autumns, and we have been the aroma of Number two pencils and Blue Horse notebooks and the cold air of drug stores and the sharp acrid smell of paper back books there that soaked up medicine smells and made us always remember that aroma from childhood, even now, when we read books.
And books we read, my God, name books we have not read, name books that have not had our hearts encapsulated in them, our minds enchanted by them, and holding hands with invincible invisible writers, with long ago writers, we found ourselves, for we are imagination come into reality and we are the locked dorm room door and we explore as we physically devour with our hands and our mouths the constant virgin flesh of one another, as our eyes devour the virgin white pages and black ink words of books, and we are so giddily in love.
We have not, since we first saw each other, been lonely, though god knows we've been sad often enough, when we have to be apart, when we have to pretend we are not lovers. The pure and insoluble ache of not being able to hold hands when our hands crave the other's. In the lunch room or in class. Boys and girls hold hands and laugh together and kiss sometimes on the quad and sit under the campus trees and cuddle, and it saddens us we are not too able to do that. Our dirty little secret, that started the sex play from a limerick perhaps and such fumbling and awkwardness and the sad fact our penises would go hard when we were in our rooms at our homes, thinking of each other but not when we were with each other--Embarrassment, the early years.
We love in secret and we love in shadow but we love and we are making each other cum now and we want each other to shoot in our mouths, and we want the day to start with the liquid from the deepest parts of us that have been harvesting it all night as we slept close in each other's arms, as we dreamed away from each other, and our bodies planning to come tomorrow, to come in a few hours, to come at sun rise, to come a minute from now, to come now, and to feel his seed in my mouth, to drink the over spill of him and he the same for my over spill. And out side someone is revving up his motorcycle, gunning it over and again, so he can tell the world what a big dick he owns, as hunters (or as we call them most disrespectfully, hunners) shoot animals and birds, with their prosthetic penises, which gives them big dicks as well apparently.
We have come equipped with ours, and there is nothing in the world wrong or hurtful or lonely or crippled and we are narcissistic, not of our selves, but of each other, for as long as we two are one, then morning will never die and will never melt into afternoon. It will always be only afternoon and night for temporaries, because when we come back to the dorm after classes or see each other at lunch, in our eyes there are the panes of morning and there are the hills of fantasy come true in his brown eyes and my blue. He tells me I have the bluest sea in mine. I tell him he has the most beautiful tallest mountains of brown in his. And we are together because the world does not want man to kill himself yet. The world does not want religion or politics or just plain madness to take over and strangle life on the planet, and thus there are we, and if we don't know to use our magical powers for others, instead of just for each other, give us time. We are still college sophomores. Even we have to learn how to grow and think deeper and the need for depth and he plays with my buttocks and reminds me I am naked, as I play with his and remind him he is naked.
We wear clothes of the other. It is as though we have exchanged each other's flesh and mind and body and soul, as though we love each other with such an intensity that we give everything we have to each other. We relinquish every cell, every organ, every molecule to the other, and how then could we be narcissistic at all, I ask you?
The motorcycle still revs, the cyclist getting his dick inflated as if by an air machine. The dorm raises holy hell of voices and shouts and laughs and music playing, and they try to damage the air around us with the din, and with the stupid words and the stupid music of some sort in order to fool the gears of their brains that they are really and truly alive and aware of sentience. We however know otherwise.
In a few minutes, we will have to get up and shower, not together, we share a bathroom with another room, and dress and hold one last time and then walk down the hall of oblivion and out the door to infinity where we will not see each other for an entire two hours--god, how do we stand it?, how do we survive being under the ocean of not having our lungs and heart and bodies and eyes and nose with us all that time. We live the other. We exist the other. And the last thing we do before we leave the room, after we dress, embrace, before we gather our books to head out to that sea of not him, we tickle each other silly.
And some day we will have more than whole weekends to ourselves. We will have banished the whole grimy sad horrific world around us, the world made by idiots and lunatics and monsters, and we will figure out how to make spring last forever and love to be not just a gift between the two of us, for we love this lonely world of lonely people, for we know deep inside how they feel, we remember back when, and also, though we've not talked about this very much if at all, we can't get close enough to each other, there is a self that possesses each one of us, and refuses to let us break free from it. We will spend our lives trying, but this membrane will be forever separating us, closer we, than anyone else, and now he bending over to get out of bed, I touch his bumpy arching spinal column as he sighs so sexily and he reaches back his gentle soft warm hand and touches my left leg, high on my thigh and I harden, as he turns his face to me, says I love you and I lean up to kiss his lips and then he stands, unwilling to go, and walks to the bathroom, first knocking on the door, then going inside. I watch him naked. I see him naked.
And I know we are each other's and each the other and how tremendously lucky we are. And I hear the sun rising more. Rise away and make a late afternoon sprinkle of rain, warm and friendly and not too wet, so we can run through it back to our dorm, maybe hand in hand if we find bravery inside us. The shower is running. The times we have showered together, we hold and softly wipe with soap and cloth each other in the tingly water flow, and our dicks get big, touching tip to tip, and we jack standing up against each other, hands on each other, outlining our forever new bodies, my head on his chest sometimes, his on mine, lusty love supporting sighs, and we have our own penises that kill no animals or birds, that rev no motorcycle engines, that are used only to make two human beings more in love with each other, not with ourselves, but with each other, than ever before, and I think, lying there, stroking my again hard on that is wet still from his mouth, what in the name of god is wrong with that?
The sun paints the day. Life is good. It will get even better.