Fred Sasaki

It's no surprise that a poet could become addicted to or at least have flings with phone sex. Imagine the poet trying to please and seduce the other on the line, alone, self-involved and indulging in self-love. It's a natural fit. Picture Charles Baudelaire pouring himself into the telephone for his Black Venus:

On your dark skin my kisses
will be colder than moonlight
caresses of a snake crawling
round an open grave.

But alas, it was an impossibility.

Romanticism is dead. So is Baudelaire. But there is a prize-winning poet, who shall herein remain unnamed, that loves phone sex. Known for indiscretions with his students, his penchant for the poetess is surpassed only by his aptitude for language. He changed the face of poetry and is considered by many to be the prodigal poet.

Over drinks an acquaintance recounted her days in his tutelage, his encouragements, and his admiration for her superb body of work. They had something, she said. The night they met he was leaving a post at a prestigious university. They were both struck, naturally. She by his wisdom, he by her bosom.

"Would you like to have a ride with me in my limousine?" he had asked her suggestively. A date to the airport laid before her along with the promise of initiation to the academy. Smoky leather, rum and a hummer. "The limo will drop you where you want," he went on.

She passed. She knew better to hold on. She strung out the intrigue and, en route, met some of the best writers of the time, breaking the relationship only when sex was imminent.

"And had I stayed on one month more," she said, "I'd have had dinner with Seamus Heaney!"

"Why didn't you?" I asked.

"I would have had to have given everything," she said.

And so another went in her stead.

"Some young blonde `poetess,'" she said.

"Well what DID you do?" I asked.

"He'd comment on my work, we'd visit museums, he'd raise his eyebrows. It was wonderful," she said with a glimmer in her eyes. "He still calls," she went on longingly. "What do you talk about?" I asked, leaning over my drink, stirring my feeble straw.

"He always tries to have phone sex with me," she shrugged, staring at her Mai Tai.

I imagined him with his ear to his audience, his pencil in hand. And I wondered over this, thinking about what a man of such literary prowess would say instead of, "Oh baby." Would he parrot Pablo Neruda in the land of "kisses and volcanoes" and afterwards play Ezra Pound's "Encounter" and say:

and when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin[?]

At climax would there be something better there than, "Oh God!"?

"How does he initiate?" I asked.

"He just asks," she said, "what are you wearing?"

(2005-07-26)

Also by Fred Sasaki

Animals of the Wild
Summer in the Gold Coast glistens with silicone and inches. It's irresistible. It's expensive. It's excess at its best
(2005-05-24)

The Agony and the Ecstasy
So he comes to the door and we have these two gorgeous women--two classy high-class escorts open the door and bring him inside
(2005-04-26)

Conversation Hearts
My husband likes to call me slut and whore . . .
(2005-03-15)

Mother, May I?
Our Lady of Guadalupe is a glorified vagina
(2005-02-08)

Fiction Review
(2005-01-04)

Nonfiction Review
(2004-12-14)

Okay life
(2004-07-20)

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