“Yab-Yum,” we chant as one, all these years later, while around us shadows take shape and voice from our shared memory.
Poetry, doggerel, curses, laughs; flashes of brilliance, wine-slurred philosophy; a place and time and voices that live on in millions more minds than ours, yet in memory are still ours alone.
We were wannabe Dharma Bums, jailbait chicks high on the Road, and the Beat, hanging with Kerouac and Cassidy and Ginsburg on the fringes of their world. Tagging along with guys, we were swallowed up, instead, in the urgent mysteries of each other. In dim corners we echoed their game of Yab-Yum, silent, still, close, closer, fighting not to touch while breast swayed nearer to breast, cunt edged toward cunt, nipples ached for tightened nipples. Hunger pulsed hot and slick between damp thighs. Frustration battled willpower.
Blue-hot sparks of longing seared us, need rising in a tide that swept away the will at last, the game well-lost. Our bodies tore at joy with hands and mouths and limbs as fierce in hunger as any savage tooth and claw.
She thought she heard cheers across the pot-smoke clouded room. My ears still rang with glory. As they always will.
This is proof that a flasher can be poetry. Delicious and different, Sacchi!
ReplyDeleteAnd by the way, I loved your story in Darker Edge of Desire, though it struck me as bordering on fairy tale or myth rather than Gothic. Anyway, who cares - it was gorgeous.
Sacchi:
ReplyDeletePowerful,lyrical, evocative. Very well done.
Wow, you evoke those times, Sacchi! Quite poetic stuff. I always wondered why so many beat/hippie chicks stood for the treatment many of them got from men. In so many cases, the women kept all of it together while the guys got high, fucked around and philosophized.
ReplyDeleteI was also on the fringes of that scene. I lived in SF and worked in North Beach for years. Ferlingetti's City Lights Books was right up the street. Brautigan was a regular. Momma and I still see Michael McClure and his wife sculptor Amy Evans-McClure, though it's more of a phone relationship these days. He's well into his eighties.
I actually wrote this in poem form originally, then expanded it to 362 words for my anthology Girl Fever: 69 Tales of Sudden Sex for Lesbians. What you see here is an excerpt, tweaked a bit, from the longer version.
ReplyDeleteDaddy X, I wasn't in the Bay Area until the 1960s, and then only for three years, so I have to admit that this is fiction, but I'd begun my fascination with the Beats in my teens. Dharma Bums has always been my favorite from that period.
Thanks, Lisabet and Spencer!
Although in SF well before, I wasn't tending bar in North Beach until the 70's myself, but the area still retained the flavor. Lots of writers, filmmakers, strippers and ne'er do-wells.
DeleteAs a youngster, I was greatly affected by the beats and their writing. Instilled a freedom and love of the road.
I missed all of that stuff - and now I regret it.
ReplyDeleteWow, Sacchi, I loved this so much. Gorgeous poetry, and so, so hot.
ReplyDeleteThe coffeehouse I've written about here before was a throwback to that world in some ways, a weird wannabe time capsule, so I got a strange, adulterated taste of this world.
I totally loved Girl Fever, by the way. I loved that the flash pieces in that book were sometimes deeply poetic, sometimes deeply improbable, and sometimes deeply realistic. That book covered so much ground, and kept revealing original stories all the way to the end. It's great to see another version of Yab-Yum.
Hi Sacchi!
ReplyDeleteYou got that Kerouac sound going on.
Garce