Exquisite Corpse

You don't know that you're in love with me until after the operation. Even then, it takes a while: coming around from the anesthesia, you alternate between calling me a gorilla-woman and a whore, but I know you don't mean it. It isn't until after that scallop-pink skin starts to stretch back over the wound and my kidney starts to settle into your guts that you start to realize it. 

So I ask you to do me a favor. You don't know that I'm holding the knife, but when I hear you say Anything, when I see the way you look at that severed finger, then at me, than back at that finger, I can tell you understand. 

It's your idea to bribe the doctor. It's your idea to trade all of our fingerprints next, then entire hands, until people double-take when they see the mismatched stalks of us growing from our shirt sleeves. By the end of the year, we're brushing each other's teeth in the bathroom mirror, glancing one another's eyelashes over our still-respective cheeks, touching one another in the dark and in the day and always, always. By the time we switch tongues, we don't care that we'll never taste again, that our mouths will probably never root these foreign muscles down and we'll never get to say each other's names. That first kiss is too exquisite to pronounce anyways. We'll carry notebooks or get Stephen Hawking machines, learn how Mimes say I love you.

Photo by Roman Singer.

Rabbit Holes

The thing is, when I miss you, the walls bend. I'd say it's an acid flashback, and I'd probably be right--at least, you're stirring the same soupy, primordial part of me, dislodging the same sentences from billboards and broadcasting the same shadow behind everything. It's not constant, and it's not even really all that bad. I've had some good times that way, willing the stucco on the ceiling to grow a hundred humming faces, hallucinating your dumb accent over the subway announcer's neutral vowels. But there is a time and a place for this shit. There are three particular songs, and the cold side of the bed, but otherwise, I'm sealing up the rabbit holes, giving up this seventh-grade style recreational longing: drinking, yes, and probably a lot. 

Jeff Koons made a giant puppy out of flowers and I think that is okay.

The Church of

I've never been much on religion. But there's this tribe in Africa whose ritual masks I saw in an art museum once, and I guess once a day they sacrifice a jaguar just so they can absorb its psychic death energies--that is really what the museum plaque said, by the way, "psychic death energies." Isn't that great? 

But where was I going with this. Jaguar sacrifice. I mean, I think there's something to that--not the animal cruelty part, really, or even the sacrifice part, but that reverence for death. The last time I watched a starving man play saxophone for change on the street, I kind of coughed in his general direction and hoped he would translate it into what I meant: I am sorry, I would tell you I had no money if you had asked, but really I do and I'm saving it to take this girl out. I saw my dog die once, too, and I'm still guilty about how little inner turmoil I felt over it. He just sort of yawned, but with his whole body, and eventually his soul just crawled out with the breath and that was that. 

I'm starting my worship tomorrow, in this church of Anonymous-African-Tribe. When I wake up, I'll go straight to the mirror and try to see it: the absent stab wounds and eventual IV scars, nostrils, mouths. I want to think on where my soul will escape, to plot out the places where I will pour out of myself. I want to be teeming with something, and if I'm not, I want to damn well know it. 

Photo is Denis Darzacq again, surprise!

#4

I saw my apartment in an action movie the other day, right behind a half-naked anorexic assassin and her unwitting protege. And I kind of liked that--the unwitting protege used my ATM, he stooped to tie his shoe on my stoop!--so I started crashing movie sets and impersonating a set dresser. So far, Angelina Jolie has simulated intercourse with Antonio Banderas on my 500-thread-count sheets, at least one of the Olsen Twins has blown-dry their hair with my blow dryer and when Haley Joel Osment found the water-logged photo album that revealed his true paternity in that stump in that one movie, the photo on the second to last page was--wait for it--my sister's fuckin' third birthday party. BAM.

I mean, I've never really had any designs on fame, and I'm about 90% sure that the ozone layer will implode sooner rather that later and fuck whatever half-sentence I've got in the annals of human history. But Mary Kate and Haley Joel and all of them, they're gonna go too, and who do you think the Martians that harvest our half-incinerated celluloid will give a shit about? The squawky little blond getting her throat torn out by a zombie front and center? Or the subliminal message in the dust cloud, the suicidal flying monkey's corpse hanging off the light rig in the background, my toaster oven, bathrobe, and if I get ballsy, my naked blur, a flash so small that there must, there just must be a reason why universe remembered it?

Photo is Denis Darzacq, again