A sensitive subject
I can no longer do what once I could.
My body has escaped from me.
Well, I'm an old man, right?
Not long before the big seven-zero.
Can't expect to be Jack-the-lad all my life.
I used to be pretty good, once.
Thirteen times, one night.
That was my record.
A stupid, macho thing, I'll agree,
like being able to drink everyone else under the table
(which I could also do, once),
another stupid thing to be proud of.
Hard to believe what a wreck I'd been,
a year or two before,
until she built me up back again
and taught me how to love and be loved again,
my lost love who died in the hotel fire in Cairo;
there's not a day goes past when I don't remember her,
with love and passion.
I'm in pretty good shape, for a near-septuagenarian:
eyes a bit long-sighted,
so I need glasses for reading my computer screen,
hearing shot by too much rock'n'roll
(upper frequency industrial hearing damage),
blood pressure: normal,
I do a regular workout and can still cycle home up the hills from Bradford
without collapsing en route.
The desire hasn't died:
“The fire may be low,
but still there's a glow,
and it bursts into flame whenever it can.”1
I was in a pub in Dublin, with some young fellers,
and the talk turned, as it will among men, to sex.
What they wanted to know was:
Was there sex after sixty?
Sure there was, I told them,
and it gets better all the time,
especially for the woman,
'cause you come slower.
What about impotence? they wanted to know.
Impotence is all up here, I said,
tapping my forehead,
all in the mind.
It's because we're fixated on orgasm.
We get anxious:
will I come, will she,
was it good for you dear?
Love is love, I said,
naked or with all your clothes on,
and the best loving is a mind-fuck.
I need to remember what I said, these days,
because life is turning theory into practice,
the way life does.
It's a guy thing, in my experience,
this anxiety over performance.
Women are different.
It's not so much that men are from Mars,
women are from Venus,
as women are of this earth,
men are from off-the-wall,
playing some Hemingway fantasy
in their heads
of grace under fire,
the hurt matador wounded in the groin,
Lord Chatterley's balls blown off in the war,
the whole nation sickly because the fisher king is dying.
But I'm no mythic beast,
no capon fed on empty air;
I don't need to do a Minotaur roar
to make the earth shake.
I am a man,
and men get old.
Eventually, we die.
That's OK.
Each life needs a frame round it,
each story has an end as well as a beginning;
everything changes,
but love endures.
So this is just a rehearsal for an eternity of impotence?
The question loses meaning
as you frame it,
like the guy talk in the Dublin pub.
Is it to prove something,
this taking a woman into your arms
to unclothe your inner selves?
Is it something different from what it is?
Is it exchange of body fluids only?
Don't ask me.
I'm as screwed up as you would be about it.
But hear this:
with the right woman,
the real woman,
you literally won't give a fuck
unless your head gets in the way.
In ancient Britain they were headhunters,
and they put their captured trophies up on poles
like standing phalli in the village squares.
Later, they turned them into Celtic crosses.
I'm no standing stone,
and nor should you be.
Viagra is not the answer.
What you need is a woman who'll be Viagra for your mind,
like I have,
like eyesight for the blind.
Viagra for the brain,
like I have,
who'll drive away your pain.
Viagra for the soul,
like I have,
who'll make the whole world rock'n'roll,
with a glance, a glimpse of teeth,
a looking away,
a looking back,
a wave as we part,
a gladness when we meet.
A blessing.
June 5, 1999,
Written on a coach to an anti-war demonstration in London
