Romance #3

For most of my adult life I've believed that if you wanted to find the real poetry of human writing (and, indeed, human existence), you would go seeking the places where words are written for the smallest audiences. Love letters, revenge letters, lusty or urgent texts, angry emails, absent minded scribblings or drunken reminders, midnight dream notes and interrupted grocery lists. Of course, words have beauty and grandeur in their formal arrangements - a novel, a poem, an essay, or a letter that the writer knows will be archived. But, for someone like me, who loves baseness, who likes mess and the accidents that come with handmade experiences, there are few things that have the precision and poetry of a letter written in the depths of lust or love. Recently, flavorwire collected a bunch of the best dirty love letters from great writers. The entire collection, including letters from Bukowski, Woolf, Wharton and Hemingway, is worth your time, but I wanted to republish two here. Because. They. Are. Fucking. Incredible. All the shackles of language are loosened to let the force of emotion and desire crawl over the page like some naked hungry beast. Loosen your shirt and let these do their work on you. And, if you're easily offended be sure to read the James Joyce several times over. It's like reading the Marquis de Sade. It loses it's ability to shock after you've read enough of it. And, while Kafka is aching and melancholy and entirely how you hope Kafka's heart would behave, damn, Joyce sure knew how to take smutty letters to the next level.

Franz Kafka to Milen Jesenk, 1921 - 

“No, Milen, I beg you once again to invent another possibility for my writing to you. You mustn’t go to the post office in vain, even your little postman — who is he? — mustn’t do it, nor should even the postmistress be asked unnecessarily.
If you can find no other possibility, then one must put up with it, but at least make a little effort to find one.
Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.
Remembering that one extinguished fire with clothing, I took an old coat and beat you with it.
But again the transmutations began and it went so far that you were no longer even there, instead it was I who was on fire and it was also I who beat the fire with the coat.
But the beating didn’t help and it only confirmed my old fear that such things can’t extinguish a fire.
In the meantime, however, the fire brigade arrived and somehow you were saved.
But you were different from before, spectral, as though drawn with chalk against the dark, and you fell, lifeless or perhaps having fainted from joy at having been saved, into my arms.
But here too the uncertainty of trans mutability entered, perhaps it was I who fell into someone’s arms.”

James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 1909 - 

“My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.
You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometimes too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.
Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.”