Conquests

Conquests 

Mark Coleman

 Got caught with my hand in the cookie jar. By hand I mean fingers, and by cookie jar I mean your quim. We were young, and my bedroom was still filled to the brim with adolescent shit. Posters for movies that I've since grown out of. CD's of superannuated bands. VHS's full of riffraff and Riff Raff.
  Your seemingly blushing skirts and starch white panties bordered with pink, faux Valenciennes lace about your slender ankles. A French tickler at the ready. I made you laugh with an apish weather forecast on your moist, agitated state.
  Of course, I didn't really know what I was doing. My introduction to the ways of love came in the form of Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace. I later recognized the bruises on the latter's legs.
  I just sort of parted your thighs and stuck my fingers in. Moved them around a bit. Up and down. Side to side. Tried to probe as deep as I could. Though wet, I imagine you were nevertheless hamming. You were only fifteen and far more experienced than me. Two years your senior, and I'd never been bitten.
  We used to stick our fingers in light sockets or make escargot forks out of tin foil bubblegum wrappers that we'd blow out circuits with. Just for the Hell and the thrill of it. We'd compare principal referrals and brag about what bastards we were.
  You were on black tar. I was constantly drunk or stoned. Usually chucking some pills into the mix. A half brain dead friend would throw his antidepressants at me before driving to the head shop. Me grinning moronically behind the steering wheel. He would just chuckle.
  Told him I wasn't going to do drugs anymore. He got angry because he'd just bought a bag of shrooms. So, I jumped out from behind his couch at him and let out a terrible scream. He ended up crawling around on all fours thinking he was a cat. Much to the chagrin of those not in on the joke.
  I looked like I'd stuck a narwhale down my pants as we commenced kissing. My hand now just resting on your perspiring cunny. The other searching the globe of your breast. Spinning it to find a suitable honeymoon suite far from the watchful eyes of the US. Finding the location in an aureolar gland as my tongue circled your nipple; I planned out layovers, meals, and filched drink tickets.
  I laid a few flicks there then threw my head between your thighs. You, on your part, fondled me beneath my trousers. It must have felt like a lamppost hit by a baseball bat. You always acted the lady even when I mistreated you later on.
  At a certain point, the boy inevitably thinks he's a man. He files conquests into his bedposts, and shares sordid stories with his friends. He fancies himself a Lothario or Don Juan as soon as a few pubes start to come in and he has to shave.
  He thinks all women come at his command. His very touch. To his eyes the old timers are dried up and useless. Their days have passed, and now he reins supreme. And yet...
  We bring out the offspring too young. We look back longingly on what we (thought) we were meant to be. Constantly thinking just what if we had pursued the dreams that now haze and torment us, day in and day out.
  All history is written in quills dipped in booze and blood. The victors cheer their way into the unknown. Oblivion rats gnawing at their already half devoured faces. Slowly disappearing under the weight of their own triumph. A boneyard night under a starless sky.
  I think of my copy of the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden. Along with the bawdy, Victorian erotica mixed in with more serious literature (most of which I have yet to read) in the bookcase where I arrange all my books by height.
  I always beat off before I get in the shower because it will all just go down the drain anyway. Henry Miller sometimes pisses on whores in bathtubs. Bukowski usually just pines and covets. While Mailer's ex gets his goat. So he starts stabbing.
  Thompson had wives but always seemed asexual to me. But he still had a yearning for more than just unbridled intoxication. We are children built for and out of fornication but making love is a sore substitute for the other kind of love that sets the heart aflutter and, if we're lucky, tears it asunder.