Sahriv/Tempest
Canto III
Masu/Water
by Shoshana
III MASU/WATER
By the storm
Together lashed
And together bound
By bonds intended
For no earthbound creature
We stroke, I tireless, you weary
Amidst rough passage
Through a seething, restless ocean
I flotsam, you jetsam
Both heaving in the waves
Of my undesired passion
You choking on the
ever present spindrift
With which you are sprayed.
The garrote that is our psychic link
Has tightened around us both
A yoke we cannot cast off
This bond which you accepted willingly
Now bondage you would escape
Except for the other bond
The love to which I am oblivious
The love to which even now you cleave
And so you toss the invisible rope
To the one you long to rescue.
In your wild submission
You are enslaved to one in thrall
You desire not my body
In which once you delighted
Now you yearn for relief
From its endless emissions
And interminable demands
Intermission from intromission
But my lion’s love is fiercer than
his pain
Dauntless, you continue your mission
To deliver me
From this body pregnant with lust
To grant me
Remission from this venomous passion
That
poisons my blood and loins and brain
To purge me
Of this living death of licentiousness
Which
brings anguish to us both.
The rapacious and the ravished
Entangled in savage embrace
I ride you, my lifeboat
And vessel for my seed
Clinging to you
Through the roiling
Frenzied torrent
You sharing jagged shards of my torment
And always
Unstintingly
Your wearied flesh.
Fever still unbroken
Thirst as yet unslaked
My tumult of tumescence
Swells and surges and subsides –
Rearing, spilling, to be quelled –
Raging, spewing, to be quenched –
Rising, spurting, to be quieted –
Cycle seemingly without surcease
With neither respite nor reprieve.
Tides of commingled fluids crash and recede
As we welter in each other’s sweat
Your tears and blood, my semen
Your own seed long since depleted
And still the abyss of greed yawns
deep
As the deluge overwhelms once more
And I plunge within
I gasp in transient pleasure
Your gasped pain is slow to ebb
Soon fevered burning sweeps over me again.
The two of us swim through pain
Persistent protracted perpetual discomfort
Your hurts and weariness undermine your
mental shields
More and more we sense each other’s
suffering
My burning seeps into your mind
Your aching bleeds into my consciousness
I remain indifferent to your distress
My awareness of it serves only
To intensify the urgency of my demands
Thus generating for you more pain
Which in a vicious self-perpetuating cycle
In turn propagates within me more pain
To be sacrificed on the altar of your body
You shed tears in pity for my plight
As well as for the pangs
Suffered by your ill-used flesh
You continue to offer me
The only anodyne you know
Your own spent body
The battered currency
With which you buy my life
Your physical suffering you do not rebel
against
Accepting it as inescapable
But the affliction of your beloved
Both anguishes and appalls
You are terrified by your brief glimpses
into my insanity
By your fleeting taste of my raging appetite
By your momentary impressions
Of the searing pain which racks my body
And so you shore up your faltering mental
defenses
The best you can
To try to keep me out of your head
If not your beleaguered flesh.
Though even your love
Cannot spare me waves of agony
You offer your pain
As ransom for my life
Becoming fellow hostage to the storm
A wellspring of clemency
(Your own pain be damned)
You grant me all that I demand or need
Save the absolution
I need but do not want
Because in your prodigality
You find nothing to forgive.
Notes for Canto III masu:
Vulcan for “water” flotsam/jetsam: flotsam
is debris from the wreckage of a ship;
jetsam is cargo deliberately thrown
into the water when the ship is endangered cleave: adhere, cling to;
also, be faithful anodyne: a medicine that relieves pain prodigality:
extreme generosity
