With the Kisses of His Mouth by Monique Roffey

Author:Monique Roffey [Roffey, Monique]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857202567
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

We each wrote a fantasy. I’d had a lot of practice, those ads I wrote for CL. I imagined we’d have to read the fantasies out to the group, that this would be a time for me to show off. But no, John asked half of the group to spread out, sit separately in the big wooden-floored room. To make a shrine around us, a place for another to sit. We did this. Lights were dimmed, incense lit. We were asked to read our fantasy aloud, as though reading a prayer or a poem, reading it privately, to ourselves. The others would come and ‘visit’, kneel and listen with utter reverence to our words. I liked this idea a lot. This honouring of lust, the filthy and profane cousin of love.

I began to read my fantasy out loud. One by one, others in the room came and knelt at my feet; they listened to what I’d written. I read my words slowly. I thought of my unrequited lust for Luke. Spoken aloud, the fantasy was released; it was born into the world. It was spoken about; it was passed to another. Like a genie, a jinn, some ne’er-do-well spirit, the fantasy was let out of the bottle.

Then John asked us to circle ten or twelve words on the page. I circled celibacy, menstruate, clothes, well, breasts, words, good, honey, more, flower, black-red, blood, prince, kiss. He asked us to invoke these words, as incantation, as a love-prayer, a lust-mantra, an honouring of the sexual desire. We did this. I whispered the words all run together; it sounded like a song, or something a temple priest might say, sexy mantra-speak: celibacymenstruateclotheswellbreastswords-goodhoneymoreflowerblack-redbloodprincekiss.

It reminded me of those emails I received in the post, waitformewaitforme. And also of The Tryst, the fantasies I’d had for other men, those I wrote about and turned into prose. Fantasy emerges from the shadow part of the self – that’s a no-brainer. We keep most of our fantasies to ourselves. Sometimes, we out them, we laugh them off, but mostly they visit us in the quiet and enigmatic hours of the morning, or when we are in a daydream, a semi-detached state, floating beyond the realities of our limited lives. Fantasy, like poetry, is an elevated form of human communication, our life lifted up. Fantasy is better than life, fantasy is the poetics of the soul, what we could or might be if anything was allowed. Fantasy, while often dark, is good for us. It is an essential form of self-expression. In fantasy we are our super-self; our deepest and most unformed self, which is allowed off the leash, allowed to be itself. If my ex hadn’t retreated to fantasy, where or how else would this darkness have expressed itself?

my shadow cv

Early on, John had asked us to notice and be alert to our personal demons. ‘A demon thinks ‘I’m right’ – that is the symptom of a demon,’ he explained. ‘Righteousness, a sense of being in the right, a zealous crusading energy, that’s demon energy.

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