Letter to a Young Orgasm
after Rainer Maria Rilke
You ask me if you were good, and you compare our evening with so many others as you worry about your inadequacies, questioning if you should have said this, or done that, or kissed there. You ask me, no doubt, as you have asked countless others before me. And I beg you to stop. I beg you to ask yourself, Is this what you were meant to be? To do? Really? If not, do us a favor. Give it up. But, if the answer is yes, and still yes, then please, learn a little silence. (I have never cared for those chatty orgasms. The kind that talk all night. Nor do I like sleeping in an aviary.) And learn a little patience, why don’t you? For isn’t the beginning of the orgasm the most memorable? Those moments rife with anticipation? Your love with her hair unclasped, spilling over her shoulders, a blush just beginning like a red wave to wash over her nude breasts? For what meanings would our lives, so full of yearning, have if what we wished for most were always close at hand? Or worse, already and easily within our grasp? For is not longing itself the essential ingredient in a young orgasm’s brief life?
Elegy for the Last Orgasm
after Rainer Maria Rilke
How could she not cry out when you pressed her to your flesh? How could she not hear the sorrow that sings at the core of every man’s heart? Already she must have fallen. Already she must have sensed the heat coursing beneath your skin. For every orgasm secretly wishes to be burned.
Slowly she mastered the art of holding onto the pain, letting the flames travel down to her fingertips as she blew on each tiny flicker until it grew, filling first the room, then reaching up through the rooftops, then the sky. It was only a matter of time before others saw her blaze. The world, have you noticed, offers so few visions? Maybe that’s why she became such an angel, an obsession, a never-ending dream.
But now, even you know the risks. How moments can be reduced to memory in a flash. How love turns to dust that rises like a thousand tiny planets into the glittering air. Not to mention, how to forget. And never look back. Now you simply relax, sip cinnamon tea, and survey each night as if it were a dark sail, gliding into the horizon.
You even look forward to endings as if they were blessings and your only relief. For you, Love, have mastered the art of eternal restraint. You now know: never to cling. Never to look back. For it is only the now that matters. Is it not? Such powers you have gained. You even know what can never cease. What troubles your existence. How sometimes only a lie can save you. How, if you were to glance at the sky, the meteors would fall as helplessly as rain.
The Orgasm and the Magic Maid
after Franz Kafka
An orgasm awoke one morning after a restless night. Opening his eyes, he was alarmed to see that he had been transformed into a human being. “Some terrible mistake has been made,” he thought, looking with horror at the large dome of his belly, and then he went back to sleep.
Soon a woman began to shake him. “ Look at you!” she shouted. “Sleeping all day! Why don’t you get up and make something of yourself?” He didn’t answer, but when she bent down to slip her stockinged feet into a pair of red pumps, displaying the slope of her hips, he felt a sudden urge to do what she said. But when he reached out to give her buttocks a mischievous squeeze and saw his hairy hand, he put it away immediately. All those brown spots on his manly hand! All those blue veins! He shuddered.
“What has happened to me?” he asked. “Perhaps this is just a nightmare,” he told himself, and he closed his eyes, lay as still as a statue, and tried to fall back asleep.
A while later, he heard birds singing through an open window. A soft yellow light filled his room. He felt a brief moment of peace, and thought life as a man might be okay after all. But then he heard a key in the door. And not long after, a loud noise filled the apartment. Before he could get out of bed to see what was happening, a woman wearing an apron and a little white cap with the words, Magic Maids, embroidered in red script across the front, entered his room, carrying an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. “What’s a Magic Maid?” the orgasm wondered.
Seeing the orgasm still in bed, the Magic Maid stopped what she was doing and came to the bedside. “What kind of woman leaves an orgasm sleeping in her bed?” the Magic Maid asked, looking at him hungrily. The orgasm flinched beneath her eager gaze. “I wouldn’t mind having a little piece of you myself,” she said, and she slid into bed beside him without a moment’s hesitation, the smell of Lysol filling his nostrils.
“I’m so very tired,” the orgasm said apologetically, but the Magic Maid didn’t seem to hear him. “I have a headache,” he added as she unbuttoned her blouse. “Would you mind taking a swig of Scope?” She didn’t answer. Instead she pressed her lips to his. “I would so love a cup of water!” the orgasm added as politely as he could when he broke free for a moment. But the Magic Maid grabbed him in her firm hands and inserted her tongue in his throat. “I really would rather not do this,” the orgasm continued when he could speak again, but the Magic Maid ignored his every plea. Instead she blanketed him with her ample flesh, pressing all of him into her with gusto.
“Help!” the orgasm cried out at last and as he felt his power waning away. The light of his soul flickered and dimmed into the Magic Maid. His last memory was the voice of what he thought was a pedestrian outside, or maybe someone calling a dog or a child or a god, he wasn’t sure which. He only knew that the voice sounded desperate, that whatever was lost would never be found.
