I am certain that there are two things in life that are dependable: the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to enjoy both equally.
--The Pillow Book

Words have power over me.

Their first power as to take me away and heal me. I was fond of escapism, of being someone else for just an hour or two, of being more powerful than I was.

The second power was to seduce me.

I invariably fall for writers. My first lover always says he started writing poetry in order to impress me. I recall telling him he should write like you'd tell someone that they looked good in blue--offhandedly, with a small hope that perhaps he'd listen. He did, and has never stopped writing since.

I fell in love with a singer who also wrote. A traveler with a cocky grin and a magician's hands. A boy who was unaware that his words had the power to turn my knees to jello. A silver-tongued Southerner who wrote the most amazing love letters and whose liquid vowels over the phone made me ignore the ugly side of our relationship until it was almost too late.

A woman whose direct way of speaking and writing made me quiver in anticipation of her next smile, her next compliment. Another woman with fire in her eyes and a way of quoting songs I didn't know that made me want to curl up around her soul and lick it all over.

So many more writers, so any people have made me melt with their words. I still have every single letter any of them ever wrote me, in shoeboxes and computer files.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered that it was more than hearing or seeing words that had power over me. Being written on was powerful in its own way. Only one person had ever discovered and used this; while I mentioned it to everyone, I never made a big deal of wanting it. I waited for someone to be interested enough to take me up on it.

I finally took matters into my own hands, and made Chris watch The Pillow Book the other night. The Pillow Book, for those who haven't seen it, is a movie primarily about the places where the desires of the flesh and the hunger for words intersect. My desire to be written on started long before I saw the movie, but seeing it for the first time solidified my want and was immediately, painfully erotic.

That, I thought. I want that. Not the grisly parts, but the parts about being used as a canvas for poetry, for stories, for names written in calligraphy. I want that.

So I showed Chris the movie, and he finally understood.

That night, he took a ballpoint pen to my back.

If you've never had sensitive skin written on with a pen, you don't know that the point of the pen feels sharp. The pen does come to a point, and the sensation is just below my pain threshold, in that exact zone where pain, for me, transforms into a hot blaze of pleasure.

And there is something unbearably erotic about being written on, being used as a canvas. Lines of fire followed by the exquisite softness of kisses. The words etched into me, I didn't care what he was writing, just that he not stop.

I felt as if my secret language was being transcribed onto my skin. I remembered the countless hours I'd spent writing on myself, on my arms, legs, thighs, and breasts, writing in the languages of the inner countries that inhabited me. Metri n'a'topone. Tilfaw chi'antebra, metra', metra'. L'thn'a.

And I slid under the surface of my language and was gone.

I existed, for some space of time, without language entirely. I am a linguist by training and inclination; I rarely feel anything so strongly that I cannot speak, cannot even begin to express anything at all. I was there, I was present, and I cannot remember all of the things that flooded through me.

When it was over and my language returned, I seem to remember a long space without speaking.

And then sleep came, and the morning, and I washed the ink from my skin in the shower.

I am going to invest in a set of washable markers.

inscribed

I bow my head
away from you, the pen
and the warmth of your hand.

Lines of fire. You set
stanzas, couplets, Shakespeare
and Blake into my skin,
send me spinning
into wordless territories

those countries in which
I am a stranger, mapless.

And still you write.
And words

and words

sink into my shoulders
wrists
back
breasts
and I am fire without language
water without words

and I remember in that moment everything
hidden, stuck, lost, and sorrowing
and I am

flying

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