I wanted to punch her right in the mouth and that's the truth.

After all, we had gotten from the station of the flickering glances to the station of the hungry mouths, from the shoreline of skirts and faded jeans to the ocean of unencumbered skin, from the perilous mountaintop of the apartment steps to the sanctified valley of the bed--

the candle fluttering upon the dresser top, its little yellow blade sending up its whiff of waxy smoke, and I could smell her readiness like a dank cloud above a field,

when at the crucial moment, the all-important moment, the moment standing at attention,

she held her milk white hand agitatedly over the entrance to her body and said No,

and my brain burst into flame.

If I couldn't sink myself in her like a dark spur or dissolve into her like a clod thrown in a river,

can I go all the way in the saying, and say I wanted to punch her right in the face? Am I allowed to say that, that I wanted to punch her right in her soft face?

Or is the saying just another instance of rapaciousness, just another way of doing what I wanted then, by saying it?

Is a man just an animal, and is a woman not an animal? Is the name of the animal power? Is it true that the man wishes to see the woman hurt with her own pleasure

and the woman wishes to see the expression on the man's face of someone falling from great height, that the woman thrills with the power of her weakness and the man is astonished by the weakness of his power?

Is the sexual chase a hunt where the animal inside drags the human down into a jungle made of vowels, hormonal undergrowth of sweat and hair,

or is this an obsolte idea lodged like a fossil in the brain of the ape who lives inside the man?

Can the fossile be surgically removed or dissolved, or redesigned so the man can be a human being, like a woman?

Does the woman see the man as a house where she might live in safety, and does the man see the woman as a door through which he might escape the hated prison of himself,

and when the door is locked, does he hate the door instead? Does he learn to hate all doors?

I've seen rain turn into snow then back to rain, and I've seen making love turn into fucking then back to making love, and no one covered up their faces out of shame, no one rose and walked into the lonely maw of night.

But where was there, in fact, to go? Are some things better left unsaid? Shall I tell you her name? Can I say it again, that I wanted to punch her right in the face?

Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness. As long as there is desire, we will not be safe

• from Donkey Gospel

Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents' summer home, Bruce's college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until he grew fluent at the nuances of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening, more inspired than he ever was at algebra, beads of sweat sprouting on his brow, thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye, the quadratic equation of her climax yield to the logic of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed the bulb from his apartment ceiling so that passersby would not believe a giant firefly was pulsing its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood two inches from the wall, in darkness, fogging the old plaster with his breath, he visualized the future as a mansion standing on the shore that he was rowing to with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him: met someone, aprËs-ski, who, using nothing but his nose could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked to get good at something we have no talent for, or we excel at something we will never have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex, costly, beautiful, but secret. Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down, full of bodies wearing faces, are full of hidden talent: enough to make pianos moan, sidewalks split, streetlights deliriously flicker.

• from the book Donkey Gospel. Read it!

You want a social life, with friends. A passionate love life and as well To work hard every day. What's true Is of these three you may have two And two can pay you dividends But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends-- Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends-- To find the time to have love, work, and friends. Michelangelo had feeling For Vittoria and the Ceiling But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets Wrote all day but had no lockets Bright with pictures of his Girl. I know one who loves and parties And has done so since his thirties But writes hardly anything at all.