Candied flesh is pressed against lush-powdered Lips kiss. Wet tongues touch inside Umbilici as six a.m. creeps in. Sun disrupts our saturnalia! Tell Helios he’s premature and let Effervescence flow Round and intermittently through our circle of love! Fingers once tracing patterns now leap Up to shield eyes from a blazing bitch. Candied flesh retreats from lush-powdered lips … one last Kiss.
I wrote this poem in 2001, when I was seventeen years old. I had never even kissed someone or seen someone else naked in real life, let alone had an orgy.
As a teenager, I only related to or conceived of sex as an aesthetic endeavor.
I started college when I was sixteen, and during my second semester I took an introduction course on creative writing. We learned about different types of poems – including the aubade: An aubade is a morning love song (as opposed to a serenade, intended for performance in the evening), or a song or poem about lovers separating at dawn. (from wikipedia)
For one of my assignments, I wrote the poem above, an aubade for an orgy.
The term xenogamy is a combination of the Greek xeno meaning stranger and gamy meaning marriage. The term is used in botany to mean fertilization of a flower by pollen from a flower on a genetically different plant. I knew the term because when I was fifteen, my friend Caroline and I read the dictionary. We each took different letters of the alphabet and X was one of mine.
The term lushpowder came from a screen name generator tool I found on AOL. The generator took my actual name and spat out “Multiplex Lushpowder.” I really liked both words, but I already had a great AOL screen name: eyephoria — You know, euphoria but visually. As a teenager, I related to most things as an aesthetic endeavor.
My poem originally had the word blazening not blazing to describe the sun. My professor returned the poem with this one correction. It turned out blazening is not a word, although blazoning is, but it means something totally different. (Blazening was just my tendency as a Southerner to add syllables to words. Other examples of me doing this include saying dramaticize and referring to the company that made Pokemon Go as Ninanotec.) My teacher gave me no indication if my poem was any good or not, and I still don’t know if it is.
When I was eighteen, I transferred to art school and one of my very first assignments was to create a pop-up book. I illustrated my poem as a pop-up collage of imagery from the Art Nouveau period.
I went to the library and scanned Gustav Klimts and Egon Schieles and Aubrey Beardsleys and books on art nouveau glass and jewelry. (Remember this was the year 2002; not that much was on the internet yet.) I printed the images out on one of my prized possessions: my Epson inkjet printer.
During my first year of art school, I kept wondering when the beautiful orgies would happen. Why was no one inviting me to one? Were they not happening?
I tried to orchestrate them myself but it never worked out; people say “no” when you ask them if they’d like to have a beautiful orgy. I realized I would need for people to be drunk, and then I could maybe gather them in one spot. This worked. I managed to host my first group sex situation during my sophomore year.