I am as I am
I please whom I please
What is it to you
What has happened to me
Yes, I did love someone
Yes, this someone loved me
As young kids love each other
Knowing
Innocently
How to love one another
And that with such glee…

Can be mean little buggers as well, though, can’t they? They’ll slit open animals for the fun of it and lie through their teeth. They’re the best and worst in us in miniature. Whatever.

I love the smell of you. After you had gone the other day, I refused to wash myself. She came home later, wanting, the usual, but I couldn’t touch her. She slept on her side of the bed and I on mine. (Yes, she recollected, he had pulled her to that side of the bed…) I on mine, enveloped in the odour of your juice and sweat. She? She washes at least ten times a day, how’s a man supposed to get excited if he doesn’t have the smell of you in his nose? We wash far too often. Should only wash when we really need to. You should get Him not to wash for a while so he stinks of man, then you give him a royal blow job, he’ll spray like a whale, I swear.
You, you smell fantastic, your tight, juicy foufoun. I read a book once, in French it’s called Le Nez; The Nose. Know it? It’s about a man who kills virgins so he can use their odour to produce the ultimate perfume. That’s one crazy shit, but I understand him. When I sniff my fingers, hhmm, I smell you. I run my fingers under my nose right in front of her, and remember you. I’m not going to wash that bedsheet. Going to keep it somewhere safe so I can smell you when I want to.

My wedding day, right? First marriage, and I’m at my in-laws. The future bride and her parents had gone to the hairdresser’s. We were celebrating the wedding at home, so the bride’s family had asked a neighbour to help out with serving the guests. She was a young, unattractive girl. Come and help me, come and scrub my back for me, I called out to her. She came and scrubbed my back. Thick as a plank, she was. Get in the tub…  She was a country lass and boy, did she smell of c(o)untry. I moved my head down there to get a whiff of her, but believe me, one whiff was enough, even for a man like me. We had a real good shag right there in the bathtub. Then I got dressed and got married.

In the village of my childhood, you wore your underwear for the whole week and washed at the weekend. (Girls as well?) of course girls as well! The air was rank by Friday! And our culottes yellow up the front, brown up the back. (You look happy at the recollection of it…) of course I was happy! Life was simple, but sweet… This is the smell I have in my nostrils till today. This smell, this innocence, of unwashed sex.
In the old days, all the children slept in one bed. Of course there was incest going on. So what? You always hear about fathers raping their daughters. Now you listen to me. Half the time, it’s not rape at all. Those girls want it. They want to make the experience, then when they get jealous of their fathers, they accuse him of rape to get their own back and the poor bastard ends up in prison. We were kids, but we weren’t doing anything abnormal, see? Kids are like this. Kids are sexual beings, too.
Boys were trying it out amongst themselves as well of course they were. I saw my brother get buggered by the boy next door. He was a good bit older than us and he’d often come over to sleep at our place on a Saturday night. Once I heard these noises coming from my brother’s bedroom. I went in, flicked on the light. My brother was on his knees, this other big boy had him by the hips and was giving him a royal humping. I think I said something like; you dirty bastards, that’s what girls are for! I think I also grabbed something and beat my brother across the backside with it. He knows I saw him though we’ve never openly spoken about it. See, it was just like that and do you think things have changed? Are you saying that I come from a family of mental cases? (So, who was humping you…?) I’ll tell you one thing, though: it doesn’t smell the same…

I am as I am
And it’s right that way
What more do you want
What more must I say…

(preview from Verses Nature, first published in The Red Room )