Pornography and Martial Arts Movies - Ralph Robert Moore
There are no insects in pornographic movies. Insects occasionally appear in martial arts films, usually in cages. The most common insect found in martial arts movies is the cricket.
There are insects in our bedroom, but we don't know where they are. We sense the insects, circular black lettering atop the gray lightbulb losing the bloom of yellow filament, room dark but for the blue light from the television screen, pixilated bodies coupling, one rising above the other, perfect blue legs sitting on stomach, hopping to face, fingers sliding between lips, hands on wrists, eyebrows rising, tongues lifting towards holes.
Here on this white, wrinkled bed sheet, or the wood-ribbed bottom of this row boat, or this green and white striped chaise lounge bordered by large, drooping tropical leaves, on a backyard patio that could never be located by its anonymous visual clues, the body is allowed to be headless, as if a naked Oriental man we don't know swooped a sword against the side of our neck and popped off our head, the resulting sunburst of freedom felt in the vibration of the ornate silver handle.
Without a head, only limbs matter, the soft, curved inner flesh of them, limbs blooming open to be slapped and squeezed, limbs that embrace, for the sake of the holes they serve, the brain of another.
In pornography, we cut off our head to allow another to put their own head on our necks. A transplanted head that roots down into us, with words, fingers, tongue, cock, cunt. Another's brain seeping into all the holes of our body until our wet spine is lifted and the slowness of true, penetrating sex begins, sex slowed until there is no movement at all, just possession, just eye shifts beneath the straddling dominance of another's bare body above, like the articulated leg readjustments of a shiny ebony insect on a jade leaf.
From the third story window of a Hong Kong tenement row our hero somersaults out, hands around his ankles, landing on the wet, cobbled street, straight black hair whipping left, right in the slanted rain as he assays his adversaries.
Huh!
Whirling up, a black umbrella opening in the wind, elbows bent, legs out, he assails the black-trousered group patiently waiting their turn at him, knocking them over, heels above heads, so many bowling pins.
Criss, cross! His straight-out hands, spinning the bit players against the brick walls of the alley.
Although he is a poor boy, only a clerk in a Chinese grocery where he makes jokes with the grocer's beautiful daughter, who wears short skirts and glasses, in his defense of that grocery when the fearsome gang arrives, he will arise in her father's slanted eyes.
Later, on his journey over the red dirt roads of inland China, and his stop at the blue and green palace of a provincial warlord, its courtyard filed with tall clay jars, watch out for them, the warlord himself black-haired, always in close-up, drooping black moustache, our boy will vanquish, eventually, the supernatural threat from the surrounding hills, old women warriors rising up supernaturally in the air, silhouetting themselves against the gray and silver moon, and will be given a hero's welcome within the main chamber of the palace, jewel-garbed servants hanging off the second story balcony, applauding, yellow palms banging.
When we talk about pornography or martial arts, we speak of the ordinary man or woman, who possesses secret skills.
We speak of modesty.
We speak of eyes turned down, watching the lifting and lowering progress of one's own feet on the dirt road, one's own cock pumping the bottomless well of cunt.
But a body nonetheless confident of its skills.
