vignette: the many loves of ramil alonzo

One

Kim, the cat girl, was the first. I met her at the supermarket, attracted by the peculiar things in her shopping cart, as well by the way her brown mane was held in place by an unruly ponytail. I liked the way her sunglasses never quite slipped down her forehead, leaving her green eyes unobstructed.

“I’m throwing a sort-of Halloweenslashbirthdayslashdespididaslashbook launch,” she explained, in the aftermath of a fast friendship at the checkout counter. “Listen,” she said, flashing a smile that made me hard. “Why not come over to my place tonight?”

After meeting her friends, eating the food, listening to the sampled music and helping her clean up her tiny apartment, we fucked vigorously on the Japanese-style mattress on the floor, her tail entangling our legs and arms.

Bliss lasted for all of two weeks, before the questions began.

I arrived at her apartment, a little late for a visit, and she asked where I was.

After watching one of her chick flicks on DVD, she asked if I think of family as important.

After a good fuck, she asked if I love her.

I looked into her eyes and realized that the only correct answers were the answers she’d already determined in her head, and that there was no painless way to tell her the truth. So I said some things, and afterwards watched her brave, brave face crumple and crumble.

Later, inspired, I wrote:

never question the reason
I question where you
were last night

sand does not carry
the truth of footprints;
the wind rearranges
every grain as if
you never left
my side
(that's the riddle, really)

listen

I need to know if
you loved me
as a girl
as a woman
or when my breasts hang dry

if anything
ever mattered
as much to
you as it mattered
to me

repeated words become
hollow (it isn’t what
you say but how
you say it) all that is left
between us is how you
answer the question


Two

I fell in love next with Karen, when I heard her sing at a videoke club. I was at the bar with no one important when her voice, amplified and echoed by the sound system, permeated everything. I tried to follow the melody, entranced by the promise of the husky tone, and opened the doors of every room until I found her. She was in the Grotto, splashing her mermaid tail in the shallow pond as she sang into a wireless microphone.

I smiled and she smiled back without missing a note, and I thought at last, this is it. I pushed my way into her circle of male admirers and sat on rock. So what if I got a little wet, I though.

Karen was slippery as a fish and she favored me for all of an hour before another man smiled and she smiled back at him.

In retrospect, I must have been out of my mind.

You can’t fuck a fish.

I wrote a poem for Karen too. I began to think maybe I had something there. Perhaps a collection?

excuse me, but you
have to move over
to another rock

I'm sorry if I led
you on but you see
another ship is nearing

no, don't give me that
look, as if I promised
something more than a song

what we had was lovely
for a time but as you
well know, all songs end

(every singer has to take
a breath once in a while,
long notes notwithstanding)

now, please, give me some
room, I don't mind if you
listen but understand

this next number's
not for you


Three

Every man has a twin fantasy and Erika and Aida were twins, so I was half-in-love when I met them at a coffee shop. I have to admit though, that they were very intimidating at first – beautiful women are like that – and it took all of my resolve to approach their glistening body.

I took it as a good sign when, in the midst of the usual getting-to-know you segment of things, Erika’s serpentine head twisted close to mine and said “Do you think you can handle us at the same time?”

When my only response was an idiotic grin, Aida’s head laughed and extended to close the gap between us and said “Better men have tried.”

“I think I’m love,” I said happily, thinking I had hit the jackpot.

They took me to their room, a cavernous condo. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was the most frightening fuck of my life; it was a wonder I was hard at all. I wasn’t into biting and bloodletting and asphyxiation and domination and all I wanted was to get out of their embrace. When they sat on me, when I felt the weight of their single body crushing my bones while their heads coiled and uncoiled with their eyes open, I had to admit it was exciting but I knew it wasn’t my scene.

At least I got a poem for the collection (if you can call three poems a collection).

I am the faces that you flee
the many to your single one:
it boils down to sex as mystery

I hunger but do not beckon
wholly of many holes
too many for you to reckon

with - yet you try, all of you,
to fill me thrill me kill me
weeping when I chew your muscles

into strips of red and bone
as you pass by in your mighty ships
in an odyssey to chart the unknown.

a bit of advice: when you plan
a voyage of discovery be aware
of the monsters within the span

of your desire's latitude:
for I will find and devour you
and bask in your terrified gratitude

or you can choose to flee
the deep roiling emotions
engendered by the fathomless sea

claiming that sex always has victims;
how it was a simple matter
of you or me