Sex

This poem explores my felt understanding (and hope) of sex as something far more expansive than simply physical pleasure.

I feel sex can be a form of sacred intimacy: a meeting of bodies, vulnerability, pleasure, trust, and spirit in which two (or more) sovereign people allow themselves to become deeply known.

The poem moves toward the paradox at the heart of that intimacy—remaining fully oneself while, for a moment, experiencing the boundary between self and other as something more permeable.

Sex has never felt casual to me.

That isn't a moral judgment about how anyone else experiences it. It is simply the way sexuality makes sense within my own body and worldview.

And there is something vulnerable I think it is important for me to acknowledge before going further:

I have not yet experienced sex like this.

This poem is not a description of an intimacy I have known. It is an expression of what I believe sex can be—and of the kind of connection I hope one day to experience.

What draws me to sex is not merely physical pleasure, but the possibility of profound intimacy:

“The ultimate undoing
Through shared vulnerability”

“Undoing” feels important to me.

So much of ordinary life involves maintaining ourselves as distinct people. We manage what others see. We decide what to disclose. We protect vulnerable places. We maintain physical and emotional boundaries that allow us to move safely through the world.

Sex, as I imagine it at its most meaningful, can become a consensual loosening of some of those protections.

“To be nakedly seen
With nothing repressed”

Nakedness here is obviously physical, but it is also much broader.

It is the desire to be witnessed without shame—to allow another person access not merely to the body, but to desire, vulnerability, pleasure, emotion, and parts of ourselves we may ordinarily keep hidden.

That is part of why the word sovereign matters so much in the second stanza:

“The sovereign ritual of
Skin upon skin”

Surrender means something very different when it is chosen by people who remain sovereign over themselves.

The intimacy I am describing is not the loss of selfhood or the violation of boundaries. It is the freedom to consciously soften boundaries because there is sufficient trust to do so.

And that is also where this poem meets some of the more painful realities explored elsewhere in the collection Unbecoming.

In Betrayal, I write about what repeated failures of reciprocity taught me about the danger of relying upon others.

In Touch Deprivation, I confront what some of those experiences have meant in my body: I can desperately want intimacy while still recoiling from the vulnerability required to receive it.

Those experiences complicate what I am describing here.

Trust is not abstract for me.

Neither is surrender.

To allow another person close enough for this kind of intimacy would require precisely the vulnerability that parts of me have learned to protect most fiercely.

Perhaps that is part of why this vision matters to me so much.

• I am not longing merely for sex.
• I am longing for the kind of trust in which this degree of openness becomes possible.

That distinction becomes even more important in the final stanza:

“Letting boundaries dissolve
Between Other and One
Both separate and same”

I am interested in that paradox.

Two (or more) people do not literally cease to be distinct individuals. Each remains a self with their own body, experience, desires, and agency.

And yet I believe intimacy can create experiences in which separateness no longer feels like the whole truth.

Breath mingles.

Bodies respond to one another.

Pleasure becomes relational.

Attention moves between giving and receiving, self and other, until perhaps those distinctions can feel less rigid than they ordinarily do.

The poem calls that:

“holy communion”

I use religious language deliberately.

Much of my earlier relationship with sexuality was shaped within systems that treated desire as something requiring restriction, suspicion, or shame. Reclaiming Eros as divine reverses that relationship.

The body is not an obstacle to sacred experience.

Pleasure does not necessarily pull us away from what is holy.

Eroticism itself can become one way of encountering it.

That is where the final lines move beyond sex alone:

“And discover in each other
The Self beyond name”

I don't mean that another person completes us or contains some missing part without which we are incomplete.

I mean something closer to recognition.

There are dimensions of ourselves that emerge specifically through encounter. Another person can reveal capacities for tenderness, desire, surrender, pleasure, trust, and presence that cannot be experienced in precisely the same way alone.

And I hope there is also the possibility, in moments of profound intimacy, of recognizing something shared beneath our individual identities—the strange experience of being unmistakably separate people while participating in something that feels larger than any of us individually.

That is the mystery this poem reaches toward.

Sex as pleasure, certainly.

But also sex as vulnerability.

Sex as reclamation.

Sex as communion.

I have not experienced that yet.

I don't know exactly what it will feel like if I do, or whether reality will resemble the language I have given it here.

But I know that this is the kind of connection I want to explore: intimacy deep enough for sovereignty and surrender to coexist, for my body to feel safe enough to soften, and for another person (or several) and me to meet each other with nothing essential hidden or ashamed.

Not sex merely as access to another's body.

Sex as the experience of being deeply trusted, deeply received, and deeply known—and offering another person the same.

That is the intimacy I am hoping for.

And it is the intimacy I am still seeking.