The Violence of Desire 
JJS Harshaw

Feedback appreciated at: jjsharshaw@yahoo.com
(c) 2003, JJS Harshaw

(nosex essay)

"Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an     
animal's skin or its flexibility in motion."

         - Marianne Moore
           From Quotable Women of the 20th Century

"The nights were palpable and fierce, razors, outlined 
so clearly as to be luminous. A different country, its 
landscape and currency plain: heat, fear, cold, 
pleasure, hunger, glut, pain, desire, overwhelming 
lust."

         - Elizabeth McNeill
           Nine and a Half Weeks

"What makes a man or woman sexual? Is it a question of 
scent? Of pheromones? Or is it a question of evoking 
yearning?"

         - Unknown

"...because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over 
time they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, 
they return to the source. There is no you, no I, no 
tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in 
a single body, a single soul, oh total being..."

         - Octavio Paz
           Sunstone

    * * * * *

The day before September 11, 2001, I was in a hospital
Cardiac cath lab having three titanium metal stents 
placed in the coronary arteries of my heart.

I was 42.

On December 12, 2001, my body having defeated the 
titanium springs keeping my arteries open; I had 
quadruple coronary bypass surgery. Known in the 
medical trade as a "Cabbage" or "Coronary Artery Graft 
Bypass."

For four months after the surgery I was battling an     
infection in the leg where they harvested the vein 
grafts for the bypasses.

The infection is gone but because of my immobility 
during the infection my heart is "deconditioned" and I 
get winded easily. It is rapidly approaching the one-
year anniversary of my heart problems. In that year I 
may have made love with my wife once.

Between the kids in the house, our schedules, my 
health, my wife's fear of causing something bad to 
happen to me - all these things have conspired to make 
our life together rather sexless.

And yet.

As I lie in bed at night and watch my wife, my lover, 
I am stunned by the beauty of her skin.

Laying on her side in an old T-shirt, cotton panties 
and athletic socks, her face void of makeup and her 
hair tousled in sleep, I know the pleasure, the glut, 
the desire, the overwhelming lust that Elizabeth 
McNeill writes of in her book "Nine and a Half Weeks."

My wife evokes a yearning in me that at times, 
especially deep in the night, can wake me. Overwhelm 
me. Quite literally make my dreams feverish with 
passion.

In those moments I live in Octavio Paz's world: 
Invulnerable. I am at the source with her. There is no 
tomorrow, no yesterday. No names. I am consumed with 
desire, overwhelming lust.

I may not have been physically intimate with my wife 
over the last year but in my mind, in my spirit, in 
the root of my soul, I have been with her daily.

I see her face contort in pleasure as she cums.

I hear her moans.

I hear the obscenities she whispers as I fuck her in 
my mind.

I smell her scent.

I can taste the saltiness of her sex.

I can recall the softness of her breasts and the way 
her nipples distend when she is aroused.

I can feel the tightness of her anal ring as my finger 
invades and I suck her tongue into my mouth - 
urgently, roughly.

Violently.

I imagine her with all manner of men and women in all 
manner of circumstances; an extension of my sexuality, 
playing the whore, the virgin, the submissive, the 
dominant. And then,when the passion subsides somewhat 
and my head clears, I write stories and post them on 
the Internet.

The feedback I receive is mostly positive but there 
are those who are put off by the violence in my 
stories. My wife calls most of my stories dark and 
rough.

For using so much profanity in certain stories certain 
anonymous critics have chastised me.

Certainly there are times in our bed where the 
lovemaking is slow and tender. Funny on occasion. The 
banter - between moans and gasps - is light. When I 
slowly drink in her beauty, her scent, and her body in 
toto.

But there are times when we want to go to the source, 
to reach the place of no tomorrows and no yesterdays. 
To be fully and completely in the moment and let the 
heat of our blood possess us.

To be possessed by the heat of another.

In those moments words like "fuck," "cunt," "cock,"    
"bitch," "whore," "slut," "cum," are the prelude to 
the grunts, gasps, moans, shrieks of passion that come 
with one person seeking to possess the other and to be 
possessed.

They are sacred words, holy words in the divine 
passion of desire.

They are the preludes and the intermezzos as two 
bodies urgently, violently entwine and wrestle with 
each other in their mutual desire.

In the violence of their desire.

It is true that the greatest pleasure is to give 
pleasure.

It is true that the giving and receiving of pleasure 
is both a need and an ecstasy.

And the pleasure, the need, the ecstasy is deeper than 
the deepest part of the oceans.

Within our hearts, our very beings it is:

primal,

intense,

violent.

And, of course, it is always consensual.