Spring has sprung, the grass is rizz

I wonder where the birdies is!

Okay, it's not much of a poem, but this year, there hasn't been much of a spring here, so it fits. *G*

New life, color and warmth returning, the sun occasionally peeking out to chase away those winter doldrums, that's what spring is to me. I'm one of those unlucky people who are really bothered by the lack of light in the winter months, so when we change our clocks I'm ready for more light. Yes, I know there are allergy sufferers out there, and I'm really sorry for your suffering, but man, let there be light and may that light bring a little color into the world!

Doesn't your blood run a little faster when you see the buds forming? Don't you get that urge to walk the garden and see if there are any bulbs coming? The robins are back now, their song a joyous welcome to us every morning. (Okay, so they're really just yelling for me to get up and feed them, it's a pretty yell)

The snow is gone, FINALLY, and I'm ready to walk the beaches and go outside without my winter whoolies on!

I guess for me it's about the re-birth of things. We'll see fawns in a month or so. The eagles are already building their nests close by and many of the birds are doing their courting dances. It means the hardship of winter is passing. It's been awhile since I did any courting, but that feeling of everything new and the eagerness is still there. Don't you feel it? You can't wait to feel that warmth on your flesh.

Sweaters can be tucked away for next winter. The less cumbersome clothing pulled out and tried on to see if they still fit. For the fortunate, non-allergy people, opening windows and airing out the house is such a huge joy. It's still cool, but that's amazing too. Tightens the nipples and makes your breath catch. Yum!

Young people shed clothes, and the chance glimpse of a bit of flesh unseen for months is always a plus. Roller blades, young women in cut-offs and tanks, racing along the sea walk is enough to get anyone's blood going. A young man in tight jeans, his t-shirt flung around his neck--bare-chested he blades along at speeds that make your heart race.

I dunno, the cuddling of winter was nice, firelight and a warm blanket to cuddle under have been fun. But, that fresh air and lovely breeze off the ocean are pretty tantalizing. Spring is here, and I'm definitely ready for it.

Are you?

In the Spring, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of...

By Jamie Hill

Ragweed? With apologies to Lord Alfred Tennyson, this was originally supposed to be a romantic post about Springtime, and all the mush that goes with it. Unfortunately, ever since the thermometer hit 80 degrees (F) I've been suffering with a case of watery eyes and runny nose. Not a cold, although it could be since we've had 30 degree weather one day and 80 the next, but the dreaded 'a' word: allergies.














As a kid, I had the usual minor symptoms, but nothing like my two sisters who suffered from Asthma and Hayfever, and required shots and inhalers to manage. I got by with over the counter meds until I was probably ten or so, and started noticing every time I was around a cat my eyes watered profusely. Hence, the trip to the allergy clinic in another town, which at first seemed like a cool way to miss a day of school. Was I ever wrong about that.

Hopefully, clinical allergy testing methods have improved over the last number of years. In the olden days, I sat with a medical gown held up to my chest, open in the rear to expose my soon to be tortured back. In theory, the tests involved injecting various allergens under my skin to see which ones I reacted too. In reality, the practitioner stuck a needle sideways under my skin and pulled it straight up...pop. And then she did it again. A whole row down my back.

Then came the cool, soothing marker which she used to put dots down the next row of my back. Then the needle...pop, pop, pop. Repeat for several rows. I was in tears by the time she finished. The results didn't thrill me to pieces, either.

I had a few allergies. Cats (wah!) but not dogs, thankfully. (My mother would have had to choose between me and her tiny toy poodle.) Cows (not a problem, hamburger was fine), horses (love them in theory but never spent any time with them), ragweed and....are you ready for this? Dust. That's right, dust. Every day my mom dusted my room (God bless her) and we tried a series of different pills to see which helped. It was a crapshoot, really, and I finally ended up with something like Sudafed that came over the counter. As long as I avoided the animals and my mother cleaned everyplace I went before I went there, I was good.

Fortunately for mom, my sisters and I grew out of the allergies. My sister with asthma has occasional flare ups, the the rest of us can control whatever seasonal problems we have fairly easily.

Until this year.

I haven't beeh hit with symptoms like these in ages. My eyes itch and burn, and water like crazy for no reason. My nose runs inexplicably and at the most inopportune moments. I burned through a pack of Sudafed the first week and switched to DayQuil and Sudafed alternately the second week. Nada. Someone suggested I might try Claritin, and I mentioned to my husband that I'd have to get some the next time I went to the store.

He immediately got up, grabbed his keys and left. He came back with Claritin, which has been my salvation, and a smile. Now that's love.

Oh hey, this is a romantic blog post afterall!
---------------------------------------------

Just a quick reminder, The first book in my new series from TEB debuts today. Switching Seth is book one in the Rose & Thorn Society Series. These books will be stand alone titles with the same backdrop, the BDSM club Rose & Thorn Society.

Welcome to the Rose & Thorn Society, where the scent of submission is sweet.

Find Switching Seth here. Enjoy!

A poem for the season

by Lisabet Sarai

serenade
to this march day
of unlikely ardor
burning the senses
            brown.

unbuttonings
city-wide.
unloosing all
the summer armies
prematurely;
            town-ladies,
open-toed and
hoop-earringed.

hazy sky
smiles benign,
spills time.

blessings on
the taxi drivers,
hungry-eyed, and
meagre busboys
smiling, sweeping
deli doors
of sidewalk dust,
and every shirt-sleeved,
melting executive
             watching me
             watch myself
in the windows.

(March 4, 1974)

Happy Spring!

Belly Dance and Empowerment

by Jane Kohut-Bartels

Quite a thought but it’s part of an ongoing discussion I have been having with other belly dancers and with women outside this particular dance form.

One woman replied to an entry blog recently:

I think of my own practice, and I know that dancing transforms my thinking, my moods and in some very fundamental way, grounds me. It also transforms me, my body over a period of time, but my head. too. I think my head even more fundamentally.

This is the heart of it for you. You are lucky you can feel this way about something.

Sometimes I have led myself astray. I have tested the waters of different things, disciplines I was either not prepared for, was seriously lost, was a detour, or I should have stayed on the porch. There are a lot of ways I can sum up a number of recent experiences.

Recently this came home to me and I had to take considerable stock of what I was doing and where I was going.

When in “trouble” it is sometimes best to fall back on the very things that have brought us forth and have proved to be valuable in discovery of self. My friends and family know that I am both a writer of erotica and a belly dancer. I just published my first book, A Seasoning of Lust, available at

(http://www.lulu.com/content/5739484 )

Sometimes I am primarily one thing, and then….I am the other. The trick is not to discard one for the other, because both are now integral in my being. I pull from both for life and creativity.

Actually I am more than just those two, I am a wife, mother, a painter, a seeker, and sometimes a royal pain in the ass.

But I want to pose some questions to my friends who are joining me in this “dance of life” which I see as belly dance.

What are our aims in coming into this particular dance?

I know that I have struggled with many issues over the past 5 years, but it varies for every woman. Is it ego identity as to who and what we are, or is it to ‘heal’ deep wounds brought about by a lifetime of abuse and self-abuse, or do we just see it as a ‘creative’ outlet?

Do we come from a place of self-loathing? Do we feel non-sensual or lacking in our beauty? Do we give so much to others that we have nothing, or little for ourselves? Have we become disembodied where we live in our heads and our bodies are just….there?

All this above will be present and we will bring that into the dance. And that’s ok. We work those issues out within the movement.

We can work these things out piece by piece by being ‘present and mindful’ in the movement. And the movement will transform us, slowly at first, and then, one day, we look back and we shake our heads in wonder. How much we've grown!

And this issue of self-loathing? Over and over I hear from women who ‘hate their bellies’. I can totally relate! I went through a long stretch of hating my belly, too. Then I suddenly made ‘peace’ with it. I will never be flat bellied, but then again…

Belly dance isn’t ‘long hair’ dance, or ‘arm dance’ or ‘hidden feet’ dance….it’s BELLY dance…and for a reason.

The belly is the seat of our femininity. It’s not the hidden vagina, it’s the outward expression of our bellies, as they grow with children, shrink back with stretch marks, and we seem all to define ourselves by trying to make it disappear. We hold our stomachs in tightly until we can’t move….

Or breathe!

Well, along comes Tribal Fusion and here is presented the BELLY in all it’s glory! Those stomach movements that Rachel Brice, Zoe Jakes, all of them, are very liberating…Snakes in the belly!

Undulations that express the very essence of our femininity, our being women. As generators and cradles of life.

(I attended a 4 hour workshop in Montreal in late January. I was glad to see that the teacher, Audra Simmons from Toronto had a belly on her. She has 4 children and this is the natural way of things. Our bodies expand and contract with life.)

We are not flat assed/bellied/titted men…We are full blown women with dangerous curves and belly dance gives us a dangerous attitude, too.

Given enough time, it’s called Empowerment. A realization of our Femininity, a fulfillment of our innate Sexuality.

And we should have fun dancing….it’s not all sweat, sore muscles (but it is in the beginning…) and serious attitude.

This is a very funny video….I screamed with laughter, because that is good for life. Laughter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwK2NTt-MBc&NR=1
More later….

Lady Nyo who is also Teela when she dances

A poem that speaks to belly dance. Will be in Volume II of “A Seasoning of Lust” out this June.

THE TROUPE


Waves on a dark but sparkling sea

They cluster together

And with the sounds of the first drums

Sail into position

Striking a pose.



Stretching out in formation

Gentle waves of skirts flaring

Breasts lifting in sweet provocative gestures

Hands arched in arabesques

Like leaping dolphins.



The coins on their bras

Catch the lights and sparkle

Like Sun lighting the whitecaps.

Spiraling outward

Like a nautilus shell

Eternal in movements

Eternity flows

From long fingertips.


Now the Sea roils

With stomping feet

They mark the tempo

Increase it with breakers

Crashing over their gleaming heads

To fall together in

Turkish drop

The Sea finally

Calm and restored.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

March, 2009

Let's Do The Time Warp Again!

It's December 9th, 1990, and the place is Apartment 1 in Blacksburg, Virginia. What's that? You've never heard of Apartment 1? It's only the spot where all the truly great geeks hang out - the members of VTSFC (VA Tech Science Fiction Club), VTAS (VA Tech Animation Society), Ron's Women, the Patowski Twins, Whoman and Rueben the Boy Blunder, Fred, Derf (the anti-Fred), and a whole slew of guys named 'Michael.' I spent a lot of time with that gang, in that apartment. Back in those days I was their official Goddess of War (can you guess how I earned that title?), and I knew how to shake 'em down.

But back to Decemenber 9th, 1990, in Apartment 1. The hot chica in the football jersey and spandex leggings was yours truly, and the spry young stud dancing with her might have had a girl friend, but he was going to be mine before the night was out. Yeah, I was a home wrecker, a devastator, a woman with her sights set on a very specific prey. He was a hot Latin lover, one of the few boys who could actually dance, and you couldn't get a crow bar between us that night if you tried. And believe me, no one was trying. They didn't dare.

It was the last party of the year for Apartment 1. Winter finals were coming up, followed by Christmas break, and we were determined to dance until we fell through the floor into the apartment below up. Even the local stray cat, Mushroom, was doing his jive thing out on the porch, all hopped up on catnip and L'il Friskies. We played all our favorite songs that night - Paradise By The Dashboard Lights; Rocky Horror's Time Warp; a heavy metal dance mix of Carmina Burana's O Fortuna (I'd give my eye teeth to hear that song again); and a very naughty, outright nasty mash up of the Speed Racer theme song. Some genius had taken a bunch of sound clips of Trixie and Speed and mixed them with an electronica version of the theme. In the midst of the song was a high charged interlude of 'uhs' and 'ahs' that built until the song suddenly exploded into "Here he comes! Here comes Speed Racer!" and ended with Trixie giggling, "Oh Speed, you were WONDERFUL!" Another song I'd give my eye teeth to have.

Through it all, I danced with a boy I would one day marry. Kim called dancing a vertical expression of horizontal intent. I have never heard truer words. My future husband and I were as vertical and close as we could get when someone spun up "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" by the Police. When we kissed, the room exploded in applause. Like the Speed Racer mash up, we'd been going through our own little interlude, weeks of public flirting and promises of what might happen at the dance. People had been waiting for that moment for some time.

That was 1990. Now it's 2009, going on 19 years together. I wish I could say we still dance, but we left Blacksburg a few years later, after we got married, and moved to the suburbs where wild parties are few and far between. There are no good clubs that I know of, and even if there were, the cost of a babysitter these days and my bad knees kind of prohibits dancing. Even Apartment 1, that bastion of youth, will soon be gone. Developers are bulldozing it over to make way for new condos. It's the end of an era.

But I still feel that longing to dance, and I've done what I can to satisfy it. No longer a svelte twenty-something, I've turned to work out DVDs and Wii Dance Dance Revolution, trying to prove I can still get my groove on. We've got two mats for the DDR. Maybe tonight I'll put the kids to bed early and invite my husband to come join me in a dance.

A vertical expression of a horizontal intent

by Kim Dare.

I was at a bit of a loss for what to write this week. I'm not a dancer. Never have been. Never will be. You know those little girls who twirled around the living room and wanted to be ballerinas when they grew up? Nope. The teenagers who danced through to morning? Not me.

Luckily for this blog post, while I share my characters interests in some things, at other times they insist on making their own preferences known.

For some reason quite beyond my understanding half the people I write about love coffee - I can't stand the stuff. Likewise, if they go out of meals, my characters almost invariably order something I dislike about the menu.

And some of them, despite my ambivalence about the subject, do indeed love to dance. I have one or two professional dancers that make appearances in my stories, but for the most part the dancing you'll find in my books isn't about intricate steps and complex choreography. If someone is that interested in another characters footwork it'll probably be because he has a strong interest in feet rather than dance!

For my characters, and perhaps for myself if I do get onto the dance floor, dance is more likely to be about two characters just pressed up close to each other, feeling the beat going through their bodies and rocking their hips to the rhythm. There aren't any steps to the sort of dance they do together.

I once heard dance described as a vertical expression of a horizontal intent, and that's probably quite accurate for my characters.

Their sexual personalities do tend to come out while they dance. Sometimes it's all about who follows and who leads - who dominates and who submits - and how comfortable the characters are with those roles. Other times it becomes about watching someone dance or about feeling another person's eyes one them, tracking every movement as they dance to someone else's orders. And now and again it's simply about discovering what they can get up to on the dance floor without any of the couples around them realising what they are doing.

I can't say I wanted my characters to love dance when I started to create them. But, do you know what? In hindsight, I'm actually quite glad they do.

.....................................................................

One of my characters who loves to dance is Eric. He makes his appearance in a male/male BDSM erotic romance called Turquoise and Leather that was released earlier this week.

Here's a little bit more about the kind of dancing he loves...

The twirling spotlight hit the table dancer for one perfect moment. George McAllister stalled on the edge of the dance floor, savouring the view. The light moved on, leaving a shadowy outline in its wake.

George held his breath. One bright flash, a glimpse of an open white shirt and black leather trousers, and darkness returned. Mesmerised by the sway of the young man’s body, he blindly moved closer, his eyes slowly adjusting to the intermittent darkness.

Another arc of light found the right spot, displaying blond hair and tanned skin for his appreciation. He stopped to admire the brief image before it disappeared again.

Sidestepping dancers, George moved a few paces closer. A flash of light illuminated the dancer’s face. Eyes closed, lips slightly parted, the dancer threw his head back and gave himself over to the pounding beat of the music. Undulating to the rhythm, the dancer’s hips traversed intricate patterns, begging for a partner to complete them.

George swallowed and altered his stance, allowing his rapidly growing erection more room in his trousers. He was only vaguely aware of the rest of the club until someone barged into him. He spared one brief glance for the man who collided with him. That was the trouble with these new clubs — too many bodies all crowded together and not enough good manners to go around. George thought back to the way leather clubs used to be —back before leather turned into a damn fashion statement rather than a sign of dominance and submission. There was a lot of be said for formal rules and everyone knowing their place.

The song ended. He looked back up to the table. A red headed man climbed the ladder onto the high pedestal and filled the now vacant spot.

At six foot four George was tall enough to see over most of the crowd, but he was still half way across the dance floor. He couldn’t make out a blond head of hair winding its way through the press of people.

A new song and a faster tempo brought rapid bursts of light to the dance tables. Every few seconds the whole room lit up then plunged back into darkness. George nudged people out of the way as politely as possible, searching for the dancer.

The music pounded through the room in a thumping, rutting rhythm. In the middle of the song, George spared one glance up to the tables. He found him. The dancer hadn’t descended. He’d merely migrated across to another table top, connected to the first by a narrow platform. With his back to George, the dancer lifted his arms and pushed his hands through his hair. His white shirt lifted and exposed his back, revealing tantalising glimpses of golden-brown skin.

As well as George could judge from his position several feet below the platform, the dancer was close to his height. But he was of a far slighter build. His cut off shirt sleeves revealed muscular arms. For a brief moment he turned and showed a well developed torso with defined abs. It was the lean muscle of a runner rather than the bulk of a gym junkie. He was just George’s type.

George stopped again, hypnotised by the dancer’s movement. A little voice in the back of his mind piped up, telling him a thirty-year old dominant should have more self respect. He should be ashamed of acting like a submissive teenager at his first school dance. His cock didn’t give a damn. It reverted wholeheartedly to teenage enthusiasm.

For the first time in years, George could ignore the loud music and jostling crowd. In his mind’s eye, he saw the table dancer spread out on his bed in his apartment. Golden skin sprawled against crisp white sheets. Black leather wrapped around the dancer’s wrists and ankles. In the silence of the fantasy, he heard a hush broken only by his lover’s frustrated whimpers as he teased him to the edge of his orgasm. George felt the smooth bare skin under his hands. The dancer arched into his touch, begging for more.

George’s fingers twitched. He imagined burying his fists in the thick blond hair, holding him in place so he could take his pleasure as he wished. His cock jumped again. He pictured the dancer kneeling submissively in the middle of an empty room. The dancer’s breaths coming in gasps, he broke their silence to whisper just one word— Master…

He hadn’t felt such an instant pull towards another man in years. For all his sarcasm about the leather hook up spot, the club eliminated any need for subtle questions. Everyone was gay. Everyone was kinky.

The dancer was obviously submissive. No dominant would advertise his availability on top of a table. And a skilled observer could judge his preference for catching rather than pitching from the way his hips moved in the dance, pushing back against an absent partner on every beat.

Best of all, he appeared completely at home on the table. He wasn’t new to the scene – he’d know what he was doing.

George smiled. It had been too long since a well-trained submissive knelt at his feet. Stepping forward in each moment of darkness, looking up in each light opportunity, he made his way to the base of the dancer’s table and stood by the bottom step of the ladder as the song ended. The brief pause between songs brought black shoes and leather trousers down the ladder. The dancer turned and jumped the last step, landing snugly in George’s arms.

.....................................................................

If you want to read more, you can find the book here. But I won't lie to you. If you're in it for the dancing, it may not be the book for you - that's about all the vertical expression Eric and George manage!

The Rain Dancers

"See that moon? It looks fuzzy." says my wife as we pull into the drive way in our little house in Augusta. "That means its going to rain."

Panamanians have a thing for rain. When ants swarm and get agitated, its going to rain. When bird flocks congregate in the trees and make a lot of noise, its going to rain. Its a safe bet its going to rain, because the way I remember it, when I lived in Panama it rained like a mad bastard for nine months out of the year, and the other three months were dry as west Texas. Panama has two seasons. Rain on. Rain off. Panamanian ladies like my wife are that way too. When she gets mad, all hell breaks loose until its over. But when its over, its like nothing happened. They get that from the rain. In Minnesota, where I grew up, rage is more like a slow radiation leak, silently poisoning you. "Now I know how you feel. Okay. I'll just remember that." That's how it rains too.

When I lived in Panama a few years ago, I remember thinking, with some snobbishness, that the outside facilities for telephone and electricity had a sloppy third world, give a shit look. Everything seemed to be done that way.




Its morning in Altos Del San Pedro and I'm working on the engine of my old car on the street in fronto f my mother in law's house, where we live. As the planet I'm standing on rotates, the shade of the coconut plam I'm standing under has wandered away and I'm now in the full sun, baking and sweating and parrots screeching down at me. There's this screw, a really tiny dedicated screw only made somewhere in Germany, the pride of German engineering, that holds the throttle linkage together and I'm trying to get it in the hole that fastens it to the throttle, if I can just get this little shit turned in the threads so it'll stay in place, but the chain link keep slipping - and- sonuvabitch! The screw pops out of my grasp. That's what I get for cutting my nails. I can't see it. I only hear the ting-ting-ting of doom as it cascades down the dark cast iron canyon of the engine block and I've lost my ride. Now I start to understand why things are the way they are here. I can't stand the heat, I'm going insane and I don't want to do this anymore! I can't even think! - except my car is disabled now and I look up and the rain is coming too. Noon. Right on time. Soon the Rain Dancers will be here.

The American plains indians referred to this kind of rain as "walking rain". You see it in the tropics and in vast open spaces out west. Its not the monotonous, morose rains of Seattle or Minnesota that go on for days and send up the suidede rate. This is passionate rain that comes looking for you. It falls so hard it hurts.

Suppose you're standing in a parking lot of a shopping center maybe in the Canal Zone and the sky is such a bright clear blue you can't even look at it, cloudless, except for the apocolyptic science fiction beast coming in your direction, always west to east, always at high noon, without fail, and always gone by one o'clock. Standing beside your car you'll see that one half of the lot is in dry bright sun, every pebble and license plate visible. The other half is vanishing. It’s being eaten by a solid wall of water stalking towards you on legs of lightning at about jogging speed, obliterating everything it touches. This rain cannot be defeated or resisted. Umbrellas will buy you a little time. But they will be overwhelmed. If you're driving, you have only seconds to pull over before the windshield wipers go under water and you're blind. This is the walking rain which has snuck up on me while I was peering and feeling around for the screw in the dark cave of my car engine housing, and before I can make the ten running steps from the curb to the veranda it’s got me. I go down like a gazelle with a lion on its back. I'm soaked through. I can only make out the shape of the house dimly. A diving mask might help. Once on the veranda the women folk won’t even let me in because I'm a mess, so I just watch.

Here they come.

The young men have stripped to their underwear. Sometime there are girls too. They run like Olympic sprinters to the end of the street, turn around and sprint back the other way. There's no purpose. They're made insane by the rain itself, They just want to feel flesh on bone in motion. The lightning comes and there's a cannon shell explosion someplace down the street when a transformer is hit. These guys don’t care. They're dancing now. They're in their clinging underwear boogying down to some Dionysian beat from the machine gun drumming on the tin roofs, and the white water torrents running down the gutters. They've gone primitive with the passion of the moment. Before the Conquistadors came and turned their ancestors into Catholics there'd have been an orgy. The rain is slacking off a little now. If I move quick, I can hang out with my friend.

I run around the little house to the back yard where a homemade ladder is leaning against the edge of the roof. I climb up the ladder and the rain beats me back, as though I were assaulting a medieval castle. Once over the top, I see him there already ahead of me.

In Panama, Iguanas get huge, with long tails to help them jump like squirrels. People have a dozen ways of cooking them. The gaudy iridescent green seems as though it would make them easy to spot, but when they climb into the bright sun dappled leaves of a mango tree they vanish like bubbles.

He sees me but stays where he is. This is a very old, very clean iguana. He’s not scared of anybody and he wants his daily cold shower. I stretch out next to him and we watch the near naked kids in their shorts running and gyrating until whatever carnal possession working in their soul has run its course. The sun is coming out and the tin roof is bursting into clouds of heady steam. Even my clothes are steaming. The kids walk home looking happy and a little shook up. The iguana has slipped off, jumped to the neighbors roof and bounced off to the coconut palm in my neighbor’s yard. He shinnies up and as soon as the sun hits the leaves he’s just gone.



Tonight I turn off the engine of the van and we start getting our groceries from Walmart out.

"Yeah, the news said it might rain." I tell her. “I miss snow.”


C. Sanchez-Garcia