Lesbian Wineglass

Drinking Wisdom from her Lips

“Some say the Muses are nine: how careless!
Look, there's Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth.”

-Plato-

I have heard her story thousands of times; ancient accounts dating back to the era of antecedents tell that she is legendary, fabulous, a mythical creature that many admire and wish to come across. So many legends, so many stories and writings have attempted to describe her, and comprehend her mysteries, yet in vain; none has seen her; none has met her. Some tell she has never existed and pretend that the human mind's eye has created her from nonentity; others say that her story is the fruit of scraps of frustrated desires; others believe that she had existed and that she had the greatest and strongest woman ever, an exceptional lady in love with her body and the similar, a rebellious and astonishing woman. Accounts are different for truth cannot be pinned down with facts and evidence.

All I can tell is that she had existed; she was real as much as I am, a woman liberated from subordination to males, a woman capable of satisfying her own desires, capable of loving the similar, and listening to the call of her body. Sometimes, I feel her alive in me, as if all her elements are running in my blood quenching my thirst for glory and love; sometimes, I feel like she is gazing at me, watching my steps and beseeching the helpless me to revive her splendour and spread her words of love and pride. One day, I was sober enough to see her blood and flesh before my eyes; she was drinking from my wineglass and whispering,

“Here you are, a little child of me, yet I have never given you birth; all I can engender is love; here you are drinking in the late hours of night and thinking, pondering like a Buddha; I know that your path is thorny like my path was, like the path of every rebel and dissenter is. Torture is part of our life; we can never be heroines if we sleep on silky bed sheets and feather-stuffed pillows; we can never be heroines if we lift the white flag and melt in the crowd; torture is the elixir of bravery and intrepidness; the more they will persecute, the more we will become obstinate and adamant.

So fill my wineglass

with your tears, so I can taste the bitterness in you and loose mind, so I can share your pain and savour the sour cocktail making you strong and great. Fill my wineglass with your torments and agonies and gaze in my eyes; you will see them torments and agonies turning into two fireballs ready to annihilate the whole world in seconds, ready to flatten and ruin the civilisations of the blind, dumb, deaf, and ordinary. Your tears taste so bitter, and in bitterness, we learn how to survive, grow and swell; so give me some more and fill the glass; I want to drink with you, loose mind and let my angels and demons free.

Fill my wineglass

with you laughs and smiles so I can savour the light moments and delights of yours, so I can take pleasure in your pleasure and satisfy the ancient legendary woman emerging from her tomb. Drinking from your memory anecdotes and stories of delight, I am feeling alive, animate, breathing. Fill my glass with your laughs and smiles for I know for sure that delights have come your way; life is half-black and half-white; and between the black and the white, we move back and forth, we take and we give, we remember and we forget. Your laughs and smiles have the same taste as my laughs and smiles for you are witnessing today the same pleasures I savoured in times of yore; you are a child of mine, something in your blood calls my name, yet, I have never given you birth; all I can engender is love.

Fill my wineglass,

with poison so I can savour the all the kisses of the cobras you have known; I recognize that falling in love with a woman is like falling in love with fatality; it has never been easy to kiss a cobra, a daughter of Lesbos; every kiss tastes different and can be lethal; every kiss tastes sweet as you ask for more poison. We live by venom, loose mind with venom and die for more; the cobra dances to hypnotise us; she moves right then left; she fixes us with her gaze until the cobra in us comes to life; she shares the dance, sweet dance of cobras kissing and imparting venom till falling over in the midst of pleasures. The dance is everlasting as the music of the flesh is ceaseless; bloods on their lips, cobras maintain the dance; the poisons of love in their blood, cobras never breathe their last.

Fill my wineglass,

with love and passion, passions that have ignited your madness and insanity, passions that have rendered you strong, sometimes weak; I want to savour the taste of your passions in their gusto and fervour. I know that your heart is like mine consumed by feelings and unrivalled sensations; I know that you are ready to go into hell for the sin of passion for your passion is greater than fires and heavens, for your passion is true and overwhelming. Fill my glass with your passions for I want to drown in the seas of love and never emerge again; I want to dissolve in the oceans of passion and never come back again. Fill my glass with the hazardous adventures of your heart; I am loosing mind; I want to loose mind; I want to travel to your world and share it all with you, as you have been sharing all with me.

Stop,

not a single drop; stop; do not spill more in my empty glass; I am no more able to stand to my feet; I feel like soaring in the air; I am soaring like a dove as if I am rising to heavens; I am inebriated it seems; just listen to me for I want you to know that I am not a myth; in me, you live, as in you, I subsist. We are the cobras, the atypical, exceptional women in this world; we are love, passion, tears, laughs, smiles, poison, and bitterness; we are threat as we are compassion; we are power in the world of the blind, dumb, deaf, and ordinary.”

Note: I referred to Plato’s depiction of Sappho in line with a Lesbian culture and history I esteem; yet, in my text, I was not speaking of Sappho but of the first Lesbian in human history whom accounts and historians failed to designate. For this woman, the first Lesbian ever, I dedicate this note.

-Faithinlove-

Lady in Red

I Love my Homosexuality

Love is not mere pleasure; love hurts.
Pleasure does not necessarily mean love as pleasure does not call for any emotional entanglement.
Pleasure fades away; love persists.
Pleasure and love, when they blend, give us the illusion of dwelling in paradise.
The paradise of pleasure and love hides hell and all its fires.
Pleasure and love are worth to taste despite the bitterness they engender. None can resist them and only cowards, insensate creatures flee this heavenly, dreadful cocktail.
So trust love and try pleasure.
Trust love, believe in it but do not die for pleasure.
Pleasure dies, fades away, vanishes; love survives eternally.

-(Thoughts a discussion with a friend stirred; I will not tell of the name of this friend; I hope the ingenuity of the person will help him/her guess)-

-Faithinlove-

A tight dress, a tight red dress covering the body of a demy-goddess stole my mind in a place that I do not remember anymore; a place I went to at night, a place that has no address, somewhere I cannot remember. She was going down the stairs gloriously lifting her hand to stroke her hair gently; her eyes, two bright stars sparkling from faraway were gazing at me, fixing me, going down and up, descending and mounting as she was going down the stairs.

My Homosexuality…

It is so strange how intricacy seeks simplicity, how simplicity fears intricacy and how intricacy swallows simplicity. A complex, multifaceted and intricate thing can never be simplified, reduced or classified. There are always questions and quagmires and I have always known that her descent from above, from the stairs and that our meeting that night would change everything in me from my perception of the world to my perception of myself.

My Homosexuality…

That night, the simple was learning how to turn into complex, into different, into rare, mythic, queer, uncommon and special. That night the simple began its process of transformation, its rebirth, its alteration, its greatest achievement, its real creation, its resurrection…

My Homosexuality…

She drew near the disconcerted and anxious me, the troubled girl shivering with admiration but also fear. Her hands touched mine as she was drawing near; her body was lying against mine; lips were almost touching as we were kissing each other with mere breath.

My Homosexuality…

As our first and final encounter was taking place, I felt something magic, something strange and beyond any comprehension. Her presence was pulling the ground from underneath my feet and erasing the world in its immensity. I remember but her eyes and her breath; I remember my thirst, my mouth waterless and devoid of saliva, my suffocation and the collapse of my senses. I was blind, deaf, dumb and numb to the whole lot and I was drowning in her gaze.

My Homosexuality…

I do not know how many minutes or centuries we spent there, standing like that. Time is relative; everything is relative; pleasure is relative and love is relative. Hypnotised I was, when she asked me if I believe in love, passion, phantoms, visions, desires, dreams, and me. I was unable to answer her, to utter a sound in her presence and before her irresistible beam.

My Homosexuality…

Fixing me with her gaze, she took my hand in hers and asked me to write about her as a woman, as love, as passion, a phantom, a vision, a fire, a desire, a dream, a culture, and a part of me; then, she moved away and pointed with her finger at my chest. I looked; I saw nothing; I raised my eyes to look at her again but she was no more; she vanished like a phantom, like a vision…

My Homosexuality…

To my horror and my bliss, she stole the dearest thing a mortal has as she pointed at my chest, not the heart, but my feelings and desires. She took all that to her world, a world I have always been attempting to comprehend like everybody, a world I have always failed to comprehend though the dearest parts of me are living in…

My Homosexuality…

I love her; I admire her; I miss her; I write about her; I live through her, I see the world with her eyes; I beseech her; I drink her in my coffee; I breathe her in the air; she is in me and I am in her…

My Homosexuality…

(The lady in the tight red dress, the lady I have been in love with is my homosexuality; I know it is a strange way to perceive lesbianism; but, my lesbianism is strangeness, queerness, complexity and beauty to my eyes. For me, it is thanks to this lesbianism that I have managed to survive the commonality and the ills. I hope for better days for me and for my community as I beseech freedom and write truth.)

-Faithinlove-

A Story of Becoming

Ancient Manuscripts of Love

Two ladies, two wineglasses, two eyes gazing at the past, two women, two secrets; I will not tell you more for two mean too much to me; tonight, tomorrow, in two hours, in two days, in two years, or even in two centuries, I will forget, if I can forget, and let, and walk away.

In my dreams, I saw her walking with strangers, and whispering to some guests words I could not hear, words I wish I could hear, words different from all words for they were coming out and dying on her lips, sweet lips, tender lips that remind me of the sweet, tender years of youth, years of madness and liberty. With age, they say we become wiser, a bit more intricate, and trickier; we become; we turn out to be, and all is but a story of becoming, a transformation towards the best maybe, towards the worst for sure. With age, we learn, and feel eager to learn and find out; and with age, we know that we do not know, and that we need to know, and that we know to find out that we do not know. With age, we comprehend that life is but a game, and we understand the “open-endedness”, the “no-story”, the “no-history”; with age, we become like an old tree, an aging olive tree standing amidst the natural and the artificial, longing for the sweet, furious wind, the wind that bring the new and clears the dust.

In my dreams, I saw her, a wineglass in a hand, a cigarette in the other; she was walking and treading on my desires and fantasies, puffing me with smoke, releasing herself from my demons, and sending demons to dwell in me. In my dreams, she was there smiling and gazing at faces, clownish faces that were eager to gobble her down, to consume her body and leave me nothing but dreams, and crumbs of desires. Leaving her empty glass on a table, thirsty for more, thirsty to drink it all, she lifted her head, and looked into my eyes. I was there, motionless, frozen like a statute, like a nonliving; I was there ready to quench her thirst and give her flesh and give her love. In my dreams, nothing is what it seems; beauties may become beasts, and birds may turn into dragons; in my dreams, I see things and feel a lot of things, and I may imagine even an angel without wings; in my dreams, nothing is what it seems; giants may become dwarfs, and god may turn into a demon.

In my dreams, I saw her approaching the marble statute and pulling behind her balls of fire and tempests of desire; in my dreams, nothing is what it seems, love may turn into war, an endless war of passion. She was so near; I could feel her breath caressing my skin, drawing some picture on my cheek, painting a new portrait of me; I was no more the one I used to be; I felt like being someone else; all is a story of becoming. With a kiss, I grew a century older; with a stroke, I grew a millenary older; with love and passion, we grow older and we become like ancient manuscripts, ancient relics that have a lot to tell. She wrote my history, in a dream, with few strokes, a lot of moves, a touch of passion, a number of kisses, and endless fires; she wrote my history with her body lying the length of my body, giving me warmth and unveiling to my eyes hidden treasures. My woman, and I, a woman, were two, two wineglasses, two secrets; I will not tell you more for two mean too much to me; tonight, tomorrow, in two hours, in two days, in two years, or even in two centuries, I will forget, if I can forget, and let, and walk away.

-Faithinlove-