The Moral Pornographer

My lover Picasso is going through his Blue Period. In the past his periods have always been red. Radish red, bull red, red like rose hips bursting seed. Lava red when he was called Pompeii and in his Destructive Period. The stench of him, the brack of him, the rolling splitting cunt of him. Squat like a Sumo, ham thighs, loins of pork, beefy upper cuts and breasts of lamb. I can steal his heart like a bird's egg. He rushes for me bull-subtle, butching at the gate as if he's come to stud. He bellows at the window, bloods the pavement with desire. He says, 'You don't need to be Rapunzel to let down your hair.' I know the game. I know enough to flick my hind-quarters and skip away. I'm not a flirt. My editor, Russell Smith, an author in his own right and a columnist for the Globe & Mail, argues that it is both porn and art. While discussing a curious narrative structure, Smith focuses on the second section, “a series of episodes related by various men who are having sexual encounters with her and the transformation she undergoes while having sex with them. It works as conventional, arousing pornography, but, in a way, is playing with conventions of porn written for men’s magazines. You could call it a post-modern book because of its fragmented style and lack of literary convention that requires a clear setting and characters, but also because it’s a cross-hybrid of low- and highbrow genres: the lowbrow pornography and the highbrow small-press fiction.”