The Pornography Box

Is it only naughty boys and girls who ferret away their self-incriminating evidence? -- The box of porn mags hidden in the attic, the bundle of Polaroids in an envelope stashed in a file cabinet, a disk containing torrid e-mail exchanges, defty inserted into all those backup disks... stuff any fool would rightly burn, but we hold on to the evidence, treasuring in our secret heart of hearts those relics of old passion and thrall.

What is that wildness we're terrified of falling back into and yet desperate never to lose? -- Grainy, out-of-focus shots of an old girlfriend who, on a dare, allowed a camera to catch her with her legs spread wide ... glossy pages of commercial lust, the million fauna of desires poses and demure smiles .... faint-smelling panties and love-letters still ringed with a shade of lipstick decades out of fashion.

All that eye nose and heart-candy retains its headiest flavor hidden away from the disapproving view of wives, mothers and children, like booty stolen from our sea-witchy nights. A creepy, peeping-tom naughty-boy effluvia piles in a fertile loam down in the most secret antechambers of the heart, more permanent, for weird reasons, than stone.

We know there will be hell to pay if all that stuff gets discovered, but how can we let it go? Without that pornography box I've nowhere to go to re-unburden all of my unspeakably hot desires, they portal the house of one thousand fantasies, slake just a small part of the unslakable thirst--just a daily furtive sip and I can be that perfect son husband brother coworker who should not, must not, does not have any secrets.

That's why those things keep turning up in dead men's attics, behind walls torn down years later, are fished up from some deep where they are most treasured, and we most damned. Why did he keep those pictures? And who is he really, when the truth be fully told? What wife or mother hasn't suddenly felt like they've been living with someone who had a secret citizenship in an inacessible world?

Secret fetishes are like a yet-discovered language for love, may be the Eleusinian Mysteries of our age. Of all ages ... Vault of desire, burning, the invisible reflection of a face in your window. If it isn't in a box, it's beneath the tongue, or buried under these words.

For when shadows are shuttered for the good of the tribe, it's not to say that a dark lens still revels in jezebels and brothels. Some lens must see it all in hard blue, all angles included, no wishes declined.