AUDIENCE WANTS ME EATING FROM THE PALM OF THEIR HAND so I’ll give it up. 

I’m terminally obsessed with marriage. I want someone to want to marry me so bad they whimper. I don’t like pretending to be a good person. As a liar, my body is massive and glowing. A silkworm. I contain badness. Once I was compelled to thrash my limbs til they bruised themselves. I sat squat atop a heating vent and allowed my oversized shirt to billow about myself in an attempt at containment, my borders and limits swelling in pursuit of that sweet thing, warmth. 

WHO IS YOUR PUBLIC?

Speak up, baby. Pulling the weight off Ella once the man fucking her has passed out, the smell of alcohol and delirium filling the small room, her body first still then suddenly shaking, writhing without going anywhere, somehow compressing and expanding in an incomprehensible horror show. 

WE’RE GONNA KILL HIM.

Sorry, what? That man’s name was Mark, and he was pretty dumb. He moved objects in two distinct stages: the first jerky and the second smooth, as if he had reconsidered the hastiness of action. The way a man moves objects tells me everything I need to know about him, and thus it was with Mark. I know that when he is alone, as he often is, he allows violence to drip out his pores like a poisoned lullaby: of the woman swaggering by on his lunch break, he might mutter, YO GORGEOUS WHAT’S YOUR NAME I’M SPEAKING TO YOU I KNOW YOU HEAR ME. And then later I can say the same to him, across the dusty inches separating us, because I know he moves objects in two stages and I saw him with Ella and so I surmise, correctly, that he contains violence. From above him I spit my proclamations: you’re disgusting, be ashamed, I know you hear me. And I can demand things of him because he wants me, like oh Mark you should shame yourself in quietude, you’re writing a letter to the quiet in penance, it is that which you must answer to. Dear quiet— I’ll even start it for you— it goes like– 

DEAR QUIET MY NAME IS MARK AND I AM BAD. 

In address then I said simple things like this, of Mark who was taller and bigger than me and inhabited rooms like a god while evening birds went on their way out the window. He could break open the egg of me if he wanted but he was too nice to do that, except to women who weren’t me, he wasn’t nice to them. And witnessing his rudeness—well it turned me into one of his cronies. Like every little tweeting bird who could see the lying twist of his neck while he laid away from me in bed and smoked a cigarette, the way I thought people didn’t really smoke cigarettes in bed—but of course they do all the time, and the sex wasn’t even that good but he needs any excuse to be something and somewhere, to be scripted. THINKING ABOUT PUSSY TOO MUCH MAKES ME PARANOID Mark said, with his head still to the side like that, so the birds out the window would hear the sweet tone of him and I didn’t know or want to know if he spoke to the birds alone or if it was all for me. The cigarette hung between his lips waggling around, a third observer. At night his skin looked softer than I knew it to be and this prompted me to believe more truly in illusion. Sometimes in a near sleep state of real love I would whisper his name until the sound became sound like it always was, devotional, in the syllables. 

MARK MARK MARK MARK MARK 

But then I speak my own name to myself silently, and remember that we exist out of time and decency, because he was inside me and going like, you want me to kill you, don’t you. You want to have my babies, you want to start a family, you want me to kill you, you want me to kill you, you want my babies, I’m gonna put a baby in you, you’re such a gorgeous fuck, I’m gonna kill you with my baby in you, I’m gonna fuck your cunt til you’re all pregnant and soaking bloody meat then I’m gonna kill you and you’re gonna thank me for it, and then he comes and collapses and I start crying and we start laughing because, yes, it’s horrible and it’s like being killed and again and again it just doesn’t really get old, how is that possible, is it possible? It’s horrible.

Ahistoricity is the measure of both youth and wealth and I have at one time or another inhabited both. Of course, we are killing history too.

OH THIS GRACELESS SEDUCTION 

When I paint I worry at the hangnail of my twin desire and hatred. At least this is what I tell Ella now, under the spell of shitty barbecue and nonexistent face-painting. We are both disappointed, but not enough to leave, because we are spellbound by presence. She is a painter too, equally amateur, captured by the quick drying textures of acrylic on wood. I ask what she paints and she says, you know, this and that. Stripper poles and seagulls. The river with a splash of galaxy, at night. But, you live in New York! I said, slapping her shoulder harder than I meant to. 

She smiled at me and said, but I used to live in Vegas. 

Well, there’s even fewer rivers out there. Like, none at all. 

I know, she said. That’s why I’m fixated on them. 

I CANNOT HOLD IT IN ANY LONGER. 

Late autumn warmth, the end of my life, swaddling insistence on marriage as a metonym for death, I expire. In the arms of someone who says they love me, I am ended. 

I NEED TO BELIEVE IN DESPERATION. 

Put another way—we are laying in bed together with dryingness all over our bodies, which are slicked together somehow. Your hand is limp on my ass and you laugh and say, we’re killing it. What is it that we are killing? There is something we have murdered with our sex. I don’t smile or move—I don’t even look at you. In this moment I am absolutely certain of my ability to murder with conviction, in cold blood. But we are warm, I am warm with you, there is warmth between us in this chilly October bar while we rehearse our vows. My love—ever since I saw you I knew I wanted to kill you. Anywhere I’m wrought invisible—anywhere my obligation to goodness fades—I imagine people’s faces destroyed. I picture the way they would twist and snarl, twist and bend, the way their songbird lilt would rend their throats and gurgle to a stop. The everydayness of violence. The meaninglessness of conversation, the beautiful swell of a pregnant woman’s body. 

I WANTED TO STEAL THINGS. 

Eat it, I say, eat it right up, the way we are killing things in the postcoital cigarette haze, yet to burn holes in the substratum of our bed. These words, stolen. My obsessions recently, as sex is concerned, are with killing. As conceptual reality is concerned, we kill language with our very languor. The languor that can only be created in the moment of death, little death, clenching so tight I might actually fall into a hole from which there is no exit, trapdoor, false exits, switchbacks. 

YR ALL DUMBASSES WITH FAT ASSES. 

On the walk home it started misting, and I pushed my glasses up my face so they would soak against my hair instead of my eyes. She looked over at me and said, wow, I hadn’t really gotten a look at your eyes. How beautiful. My eyes push outward to her like a knife. 

I HAVE EXPANDED TO FILL THE SPACE OF THIS ROOM.

I am not cruel but I misunderstand my own power. I have had to learn to say, I know that I have power over you and I swear to be careful with it. One time Ella was against a wall on a rainy night and she bit my lip hard enough to break the skin, and said—be so fucking careful with me. To ask someone to be careful is already to be wounded by their uncaring self that pursues pleasure above all else. 

DESIRE LIES ORTHOGONAL TO VIOLENCE. 

I’m just saying what I think, my personal persistence—not the truth. There is no truth. More properly, I do not care about the truth because there are as many truths as there are angles from which to perceive. I won’t find truth in my comforts. I won’t find truth in seduction. I won’t find truth in wavering. I won’t find truth in the smallness of observation. I won’t find truth in avoidance, or love, or resistance, or violence, or my blood or my sublimation or my own destruction at the hands of someone stronger with hands that make choices. I might find truth in movement. But not in stillness. Though I am able to spend a long, long time in stillness, and get many good things out of it. One day I sat with my hand to my heart on which was inscribed, miraculously, nothing—and I said to the air, there is something contained in the blankness. I tried to tell someone, but the telling ruined it. I realized then that I had to practice the art of self-seduction. I needed to seduce myself into the creation of truth. 

I AM PURE. I AM INNOCENT.

The problem with metaphors is, I start to believe them. I’m skilled at their construction, can wave my hands and create anything I’ve ever dreamt, right in front of me, laborless and immaterial. I am coerced by the solidity of a mirage. My reality testing fails. One day, as a child, I walked with my father to the piers near our apartment. He matched my slower speed. His hat was askew and its brim waved in the river breeze. The sun was setting. Despite the wind, the water was oil-slick smooth. He leaned his elbows on the wooden railing, and we watched the play of the light. My legs shook. They always have. I said something like, the water is solid with the sun on its surface. He didn’t speak, didn’t even move. I thought he hadn’t heard. Then he bent down, picked up a pebble, threw it, watched it splash and sink. He waited another beat, let me squint while the insane bouncing of sun settled into bordered ripples, then said, but it isn’t, is it? It’s permeable. 

I turned away. The penetration of the water’s surface; smoothness shattering incoherently into painful light—that was how he taught me. 

THERE IS NO LONGER ANY MORE OF ME LEFT FOR THE TAKING.