The City is My Mistress - by Riccardo Berra (c) 2012 all rights reserved

You know you're out there walking
 and one line,
then an entire UNiverse sneak up to complete in your head?
send a shiver up your neck, and a shine down your spine,
So beautiful, accurate and bold of you
You should
whip out that bloody smartphone or stone tablet
and get it down
fast as you can,
But you don't

You tell yourself 
You'll remember,
You set to remembering,
get home,
You set to forgetting,
Till later when you discover
You no longer have anything.
At all

To recall
That you were once inspired
But aren't any more.

Teeth to edge and hand to heart you beg the bitch.
Kiss her feet. Promise to write.
Promise to be true.
Stop smoking, drinking,
Stop fucking other women
Days

Several
(Hurtful angry shitful low)
days worth more
of staring you down
She relents and returns one line.

Which with
Grateful, beyond words,
you run.

Even if
not even close
To what you had
You get back nothing
More than you deserved

This city is my mistress
I know her so well in the dark
Blindfolded,
She over me
Pressing into her
Til the complete
Emptiness
of release
Begs
in the solitary spaces where nobody but she and I go
For the things I do in her I can tell nobody
For her skin in winter,
Reliably cold and firm beneath my feet
I do not come home
I only am home, in her

So even when she's distant grown
And I'd, retired, banished for another become
Lost in unrequited miscollections
Another anonymity
Some dumb cock
Forced to redrink
My own shabby breath for inspiration
Hers to the last
Is the name
I'll call out.

 

rbb 1-8-2012 all rights reserved
---------------
My latest, written sorta in reverse, pretty much as described above.
Two poems sorta written as one?
Erotic or not? I'm up in the air listening to

Mississippi John Hurt from D.C. Blues - The Library of Congress Recordings, Volume 2

Clipped on 7-January-2012, 11:34 PM from I'll Fly Away - YouTube

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Limerence

copyright © 2012, all rights reserved

by Ricc Berra

It's been six months, fourteen days, twenty hours and forty-five minutes since we met. 

How often have you heard this story? 


A man walks into a working man's bar on a hot city night and approaches a girl seated near the door. She pretends not to notice as he rakes her up and down; her new Manolos, black pencil skirt, natural pearls, and the seal gray silk blouse unbuttoned to flaunt just a little more than enough of what she's got. He looks like he just stumbled out of a bowling alley. Her hair is freshly cut and styled. His is tousled in unruly ringlets. Her makeup shows attention to detail. His face, though handsome enough, needs a shave. She sips a Cosmo. He buys a beer. Offhandedly, he announces, "I don't mean to offend you, but you don't belong here." 

I act offended, but in truth, I'm not. I know what you mean before you do and I love you almost instantly for saying it. Still, I play coy and won't give you the satisfaction. You do not present well on first appearance. You will need to earn my trust.

"I've as much right to be here as anybody else," I address my own reflection in the bar. "And who are you to judge me?" My inflection rises convincingly toward the end, but I give it all away when my eyes flutter, pulled to yours in such a mad gravity that I blush and look away again. It's too late. You know you have me like bait on a hook.

You say "Sorry but you're so beautiful" and repeat that I seem out of place. It still sounds like a line, but when delivered with conviction, it works. I let you buy me a drink. And another, then a third and before long I'm at ease, laughing at all the right places, touching your forearm, resting three fingers on my thigh, biting my lip. All the signposts are there for you to read and interpret. You need no roadmap, no website seduction tips, you needn't bother, I've already read them all, practiced diligently in my mirror, everything from the perfect angle to avert my eyes, to the swivel in my hips as my bare knees brush yours when I turn on the barstool to face you. Everything has been planned, orchestrated, choreographed for you until you, emboldened by drink and by what you see down my blouse when I lean forward, brush my hair away from my ear and whisper a secret, how you'd like to take me home with you and what we'd do once we get there. 

There's no cab fast enough.

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The Girl with Two Lovers

By Riccardo Berra (c) 2011, Love on the Edge, all rights reserved

With thanks and love to Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard

A girl takes a shower, alone in her apartment. As she sits naked in the dark to dry herself, a familiar ache grows inside her. Lit only by the glow of her computer screen, she touches herself and as she does, she composes two emails, one for each of her two lovers. She asks them to meet her the next day, one at 1l o'clock, the other at 5 o'clock.   

The first lover is a day laborer, a brooding hulk of a man, to whom she writes:

You are strong and powerful. I am putty in your hands. When I arrive, I want you to tear my clothes off, slap my face, curse at me, push me, treat me like the little whore I am. You know what I deserve. I want to feel you smothering me, pounding me until I can't breathe and I dissolve in a puddle of cream. When you finish abusing my pussy, just flip me over and force my asshole until I scream and beg for mercy, though I expect none.

The second man is a poet, an intellectual, to whom she writes:

When I arrive at five, I will be Baudelaire to your Rimbaud. I will undress slowly and you, as you always do, will recite the sonnet you've written, just today, just for me. I love that my restless spirit is your muse, your poetry our foreplay and that my body is your consummation. I ache to feel you slip inside me, softly, slowly, until my passion overwhelms me. When I feel your breathe arrest and the flood of your seed inside me, I will know our love is sacred.

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Midnight Confession (Erotica)

"A Quicky"

(apologies to The Grass Roots) 2/20/2011

© 2011 Riccardo Berra, all rights reserved

Featured on ERWA March Story Gallery

I stood at the doorway, my face burning in shame. My wife of thirty years lay in the bed with her book obscuring her face.

"I don't know how to tell begin ..." I began, staring at the cover of the potboiler romance. The dust jacket featured a smoldering statuesque maiden whose near-sheer gypsy blouse dangled perilous millimeters above her nipple line. A bare-chested muscle boy with sea green eyes and day-old stubble stood behind her, mauling the ripe package the fabric barely concealed. This is how my wife gets her kicks these days.

"Claire came over this morning looking for you. She looked incredible —a younger version of you. Messy red hair, the skintight sweats, those crazy tank tops she wears. Anyway, her phone's on the fritz so she didn't get your message that you'd be out.  You know I worked all night on that story, the one that has been kicking my ass. I needed a breakthrough. I found it at about 4 a.m.."

A noncommittal "uh, huh," came from behind the bodice ripper.

"So this morning, the doorbell roused me from a deep sleep. I rushed down and opened the door. No shirt, no pants. I didn't even think what I was doing. Barely awake and definitely in no condition for company."

"You look happy to see me," Claire chirped as she brushed past me. It was then I felt how exposed I was, how far my morning boner was protruding through my boxers.

"My God, I'm sorry," I stammered.

"Well, I'm not," she laughed. Her hand lingered at the gap in my shorts where my cock jumped in a burlesque of its owner, neither of us knowing quite what to do with a visitor. You know how small our foyer is. I couldn't escape her touch even if I'd wanted to.

And I didn't want to."

"Ah, I think he'd like to come out and play," Claire said, pulling her top down over her luscious tits. She knelt at my feet and took out my erection. I barely had time to close the door behind her. God knows the talk if a neighbor happened by and saw her on her knees with my cock between her creamy mounds.

Remember the time at Lake Morrison when she was eighteen and went into the water without a bathing suit? How her wet smock and sheer panties left nothing to the imagination? She also fucked my best man, the night before our wedding. I doubt she ever told you. The two of them in the barn caught like scared rabbits in highbeams. She knew I saw the whole thing and ever since, she's always teased me when you aren't looking.

Between her tits and her lips, I was ready to blow all over her face, but in the twisted calculations of adultery, I figured, hell, in for a penny, in for a pound. So I pulled her to her feet and hustled her into the dining room. I'm sorry about the dishes we broke as I pushed her onto the table and peeled her sweats off. Does she ever wear underwear? I guess I'd always wondered if her cunt would look and feel like yours. It did, red and bushy, wet and tight, just like you, but twenty years ago, when you were still hot for me.

I'm afraid that our pounding loosened the legs of the old table. I'll need to get that repaired."

"Mmm," came the reply from behind the book.

"But after Claire left, I felt guilty. So guilty that I made up my mind to tell you. I know what I did was wrong. It only happened once, well twice actually. Again on the sofa, but what I mean is just today. Never before and God, never again. I was just hoping, I hope, we can get beyond this. There's no excuse, but maybe we can recapture what we …"

The book lowered very slowly. My wife pushed her hair back and removed her earbuds; the music still tricking out of them. "You say something?" she asked.

"Your sister stopped by this morning," I replied. "She was looking for you."

"Uh huh. I know."  She replaced the earphones in her ear canals and looked up at me. "I'm sorry. Was there something else?"

"No," I said, "Sorry to bother you."

Riccardo Berra, Love on the Edge, (c) 2011

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Trojan Horse

This is a dark tale, filled with the dark acts of despicable people. If you are the sort that such tales alarm or offend; don't read, move on, for the Net is filled with sunnier, happier catch and the outcome of these events will shift not one degree for one less bug-eyed observer.

My name is Menelaus Mikanedes, MNM to friends and enemies alike. You know my company's name if you use a computer so I won’t need to waste any time explaining how my inventions have made me rich as Croesus before he gave away 90 percent of his fortune to his pet charities. I am not there yet. I'm not the type to relax and play the benevolent king. Business is battle and you need ruthlessness, ever-sharper weapons and a bottomless war chest to be a winner. Nature of the beast. They say confession is good for the soul, but I won’t be able to affirm that. My conscience is clear.

Three months ago, with contracts pending for two large highly proprietary projects, my security team found a very clever breach into our software development farm that wasn't in the security spec. My guys laid everything out and by the coding architecture and the sheer brashness of the hack, I immediately knew the work by its signature. When they asked if they should close it down, I replied no.

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LIGNE CLAIRE

by Riccardo Berra 2010 (c) all rights reserved

We live in such instructive times. There are manuals and guides for everything. For your first period—"The Period Book: Everything You Don't Want to Ask (But Need to Know)." For your first sexual experience—the books of Suzi Landolphi.  For more advancing sexuality—"Our Bodies, Ourselves" and any issue of Cosmo. An expectant mother reads "What to Expect While You're Expecting," then the endless tomes on parenting in all its interminable stages, but what, pray tell, gives comfort to the 50-something gal who is vanishing?

Perhaps I already have. Invisibility doesn't happen all at once. It's more of a slow motion tumble down a cliff.

My darling Missy. It breaks Mommy's heart, tween Missy staring so deep and sincere in my eye, promising, cross her precious little heart, that she'd always share her most intimate secrets with me. Teen Missy won't even make eye contact and divulges nothing. When I enter the room or catch her eye in the hallway at school, her nose crinkles as if I'm a passing bad odor.  Do I smell bad?

My darling Curt. Never, I've concluded after 17 years of marriage, was a man more aptly named, for he passes by and through me like air. Before Missy was born, he was a sex fiend. We both were, God, so shamelessly young and hot for each other, hands grasping crotches, tunneling under skirts and through panties, fingers pinching nipples, tongues in throats.  Everything everywhere. Parked cars, hiking paths, broom closets, kitchen tables, once in a museum bathroom, in other people's bedrooms, our own occasionally, leaving love's evidence trails on Mother's Persian and best chaise longue, me bent over, rump up, screaming as he pounded into me—whenever, wherever we felt like it. We weren't exhibitionists—at least blatant ones. We were just uninhibited, in love and saw only each other. Nobody else mattered. But life has gotten its revenge and now it's me that doesn't matter.

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The Jealous Muse

by Riccardo Berra © 6-1-2010

She perched on the arm of his chair. When she'd first arrived, he'd been amazed that she could, but she'd stay like that for hours and he never minded. Except for her constant whisper in his head, he almost forgot she was there. She, so light, so delicate, could insinuate herself into the tiniest of spaces. She'd be what, all of 4'11", all of a hundred pounds wet? She had the final printout of his newest novel. She was wearing a diaphanous orange and ochre sundress. No bra or panties. What need has a Muse for undergarments?

She read incredibly fast and each page she finished, she flipped contemptuously to the floor. He'd not let her read the final draft until after he proofed it. He never let anybody read his work until he finalized it. He'd assumed at first that that's what she was being so pissy about, but something else was bothering her. The pages accumulating on the floor were numbered, thank God, but this was getting pretty fucking irritating. He made to swat her butt, but she became, well, it was like swatting cigarette smoke.

"This is your ideal woman?"

She was furious, rattling the remaining pages she held.

"Ideal in what way?"

"Ideal in the way of her perfect physique. Her perfect submission to you. Your perfect lover. I could be this for you."
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