Tickle Theory Skepticism (ROUND 3)
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Let’s workshop this poem about how the high-pressure physical response to violation can eclipse vanilla intimacy in such hurts-so-good fashion that it multiplies the trauma into something unnameable.
Tickle Theory Skepticism
Her unwanted arousal soon jackknifed into wanted enough for her command (“Get that shit. Get that fuckin pussy!”) to leak through the panties he stuffed down her throat, past the arch—what would have been, even with the retching, at least some mercy. For this let her be loud but not quotable. It freed her from muzzling herself into whispers, a spiritual war, and yet still—the runoff all guttural groan, gagged gibberish inadmissible to the judgment of loved ones—blocked her ears to anything beyond the gravel of neck-bulging rage, snarling orchestration hindsight would readily neuter into “No! No!” even with all the unsavory marks against her traitorous flesh:
like how, her greed gone cerebral, the cervical origin of “balls to the wall” struck her for the first time; or like how the law “Hips don’t lie” would read the testimony of her gyrations; or like how the weapon she swung at him, sockets popping in her crazed claw for the nightstand, happened to be the Hitachi Magic he made her hold against that lip-smacking slop. But no, he stole back even this dangled grace of psychic deniability—yet not by pulling the panties out. Ass-fouled fingers lodged them deeper, choking the excuse “People’ll say anything to live,” and he cut straight to decrypting that soul-tribe communique frothing beneath the torn garment of all that blubbering:
“Mmm, yeah. Knew you was a mahfuckin nasty pig! Huh? Huh?” To see herself shift like this—to bald grind work—after strokes too few and too flaccid for the alibi of orgasm, shift so far out from the first of many pardon-windows (as if this mother of two, clicking the wand higher like a morphine pump until it cycled, were less a spectator, screaming to hearten the home stretch, than a coach, screaming from the very first bungled drill)—how could that not square her trauma into a bucking self-revulsion unnameable even had there been no struggle to get in the mood, let alone juice out so many rounds of ceiling-fan PSI, no matter how much pill-hardened overtime her own husband put into it?
