Robert Sward

Part 2 of Sex and TV with Aunt Miriam can be seen in issue #10.

"Always wash your hands after you've played in the backyard with those leaves and things before touching yourself," said my aunt, beginning our affair with this public service announcement.

"Yes, m'am."
"Eddie, I'm going to show you how broadminded I am."
"Okay."
"But first I want you to tell me what you do with Lenore and her sister."
"Nuthin."
"You spin the bottle?"
"Yeah."

Luminous brown-eyed Miriam abuzz with heat,
My left arm around her, my right hand
in her right hand
    "Kiss me     love me     feel me, Eddie..."

I'm a pleaser. But... what was it she wanted me to do?

        A sixth grader, I'd been held back a year at school. "He tries hard, and he's smart about some things, but..." Anyway, I was right in there for a while with the slow learners.

Four thousand feet down in a North of England coal mine,
I'd just have grabbed a shovel and gotten to work.
I'd have known right away what to do.

Holding me with one hand,
marking with the other,
D-I-C-K, wrote my twenty-something aunt.
Hmm. It felt good.

She finished by drawing some arrows and a bull's eye on her own body.

What was it like? It was like television, "informative and entertaining."
Never to have been fucked and never to have watched television either,
and then to be fucking and watching the evening news
on one of the first TVs in Chicago, and the Atomic
Bomb going off and the war over all at the same time, I think...
the truth is, I still don't understand.

The diagrams and the lettering helped.
I like seeing things labelled.
I'm so grateful.

"All art aspires to the state of music." That's true. I know that. And even at thirteen I loved Gershwin ("Rhapsody in Blue"), but I knew real music when I heard it. "O fuck me, fuck me." And that's what I went for. That's what I learned at thirteen. And that's what I'm grateful for.

O Miriam, say it again. Tell me where you want it. Draw me a picture.
Ah, dearest, how helpful it's been having those letters printed on my dick.

        How many times have I been told, "Eddie, you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground"? More times than there are stars in the sky. And I hold my head high. At least I know where, O Aunt Miriam, O Miriam, to look for my dick.