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13.
How do I “do it” was your question that day, but you didn’t mean sex. You mean live. I eat, drink, sleep, work, and don’t think about it too much. I lose myself in the everyday details of life. Some days, I even have a small amount of happiness over a beautiful landscape, a well-played tune, or a bad joke. If I start to think too much about it, I feel a hole opening up within, a hole of a peculiar shape that I don’t have the right kind of peg to fill. I can lose my sense of longing in a bottle of bourbon, or vodka, depending on how fast I want to pass out, or some random sex acts with a pickup at a bar, so I can feel with my skin, through all the nerve endings that tangle throughout my body to my fingertips, my nipples, lips and dick, the inside of my thighs and up my asshole. To take without being possessed, to have pleasure without joy, do the business of fucking away the lonely feeling of being unwanted. But that’s not how I “do it,” those are only the mechanics of staying alive. If that were all, I would crawl up under some isolated overpass, curl up into a ball on some sub-zero freezing night, and as the occasional lonely traffic passed overhead, slowly freeze, becoming hard and stiff; sleep and not wake up. Let the flame go out. How I keep the flame burning is your real question. What enlivens me is the impulse to take a bloody bite out of the inside of your thigh when I push your legs open. A pump somewhere, not my heart, but deeper, which dredges up the savage will to fight the sewer drain installed in my soul. The syringe of bitterness that lifts me up onto a platform of stinging flames, when I’m feeling like a once nice home now filled with cockroaches. There are days when I feel that one perfect moment of absolute pain, or total surrender, would wipe away the infestation. Then I would emerge with complete repose, the stillness of a frigid winter night, cold and still, with the quiet calm of death.
14.
I had this vision, a sudden sense of certainty, that I knew the truth. I had my camera with me looking for something to photograph and take some pictures I could sell. I’ve shot about everything. Dirty, passed out street-people on corners or plotting along with their paranoid delusions; abandoned, dilapidated buildings with jagged windows, broken pipes, and peeling paint inhabited with rats and the homeless; seething bacteria in Petri dishes: the newest STD making its rounds in the gay bars, or cruising the parks looking for a quickie in the bushes, and the obligatory skyline with the sun’s disk reflecting off the mirrored windows of office buildings with pious money-worshiping corporate bosses and their minions of jaded, hurry eyed, pack of alter boys hidden behind the one-way glass oblivious to the suffering on the streets below. Even innocent nude pictorials of fresh new boy flesh that quickly escalate into hard-core porn from the allure of cash and hard-pressing sweaty stage managers for wide internet distribution into the grubby hands of sexually frustrated middle-aged men for a small charge to their credit cards. That day I wanted to feel clean for once. My eyes were drawn to the tenuous white clouds in the sky, floating mists of cleansing water, and behind them, a pale blue sky. Those clouds, as I stared at them, turned to stone. They didn’t fall but cast hard shadows across the cement sidewalks and the asphalt parking lots, hiding the sun as they grew in weight invading the sky. That’s when I knew. My nerves felt numb, and a vision formed deeper than my retinas could see, an image of God standing at the foot of his throne looking down an infinite number of steps of glowing white light that only God could descend, becoming dimmer and dimmer as they trailed into eternity. Tears came to my eyes because I knew God couldn’t descend them. I could see his foot reach out, on it an ancient sandal that once walked the earth before his exile, and then the foot would draw back. Over and over God would try to make the first step. I felt such sadness over God’s paralysis and immobility. He needed to take that first step but his utter revulsion stopped him. That’s when I knew I had to embrace the violence I felt in my soul; the visible marks left on my skin, the invisible marks on my soul, the battering of tissue and blood, and the stabs and slashes to the spirit. God couldn’t come to save us. The violence that humans inflict on each other: the energy expended on cruelty made a barrier that God couldn’t cross, a force that prevented God from taking that first step. Humans cannot stop long enough for God to descend those infinite stairs: not in a blink of an eye or the eternity it would take. God can only come when there is peace on earth, for there to be peace on earth there must be the death of earth. Violence is the only way out. It struck me so profoundly how the Church carries out Christ’s work of violence on earth. The Father is lost to us, but the Son’s fists, and his arm, the Church remains vital. I saw that to be a saint, you have to be killed by the Church. How one’s humiliation is the greatest proof of Christ’s love. It was so clear to me the necessity of the Church’s rage of domination, its raving impulse to create fear, its bulldozing force into the soul to overwhelm and crush. The whole idea of loving God seemed preposterous to me until that day, loving a fuzzy abstract thing in the wispy clouds that you could be grateful to, obedient, reverential, but not love. But now I think I could love that poor pitiful creature hovering at his throne’s feet, now that his power has been usurped by his son, who now pours out his wrath while not telling you your crime. This usurper who incapacitated and immobilized his father, now lashes out at the world because of the wounds his father inflicted on him to placate his anger. Without his anger the father became docile, and the son took over, unleashing his own anger. Now, in his infantile regression, the son curls up in his virginal mother’s arms.
15.
For you, I tried to compose myself into an unspoken haiku: a fragile hum, an exhale, a slight gesture pointing at a reflection. The arch of my life with you, the widest angle stretching across the sky from the low containment wall to the pine grove, from your tenderest touch to your invasion of my body. Seventeen unspoken syllables: for the kiss on your cheek; the jasmine and the honeysuckle; the hide-and-seek we played from prying eyes; the droplets of blood from my nose; the brothel in Tijuana; giddy moments with glasses of wine; me lying limp in your embrace; the leaping and dancing; your repeated returns; the pleading look in your eyes asking for help. . . the softening, the hardening, the sculpting. Each vibrating the tune of my soul to a new pitch, recasting it in a purer metal, purifying it to a wisp of wind, a vapor hanging over the trees, moisture condensing on the side of a cool glass of water on a warm humid day. And on the days when my soul feels fluttering, less dense, delicate, suspended, waiting, when I am in a more meditational mood: not exasperated with affection, or nursing a sentimental pain in my stomach, or tense with resentment; during a somber moment when the reality of our lives seems most clear to me, I wonder if love is possible—or what it is. I see that for us to be joined, an insight granted by the incapacitated God, it will take violence. Yes, that is what I see. It scares me to fathom if I can endure it (my soul thickens) to join me to your consciousness so I will live inside your skin, in the thoughts that form your mind, and the lenses of your vision, to control the beating of your heart, and pull the strings of your nerves, excite your emotions and incite your vengeance. It’s me in the contractions of your muscles and the depth of your sighs. Your phallus is the instrument of violence, but it's inadequate (with me it’s not reproductive) it needs the force of your hands and your fists and the gift of repressed rage that your master bequeathed you. Otherwise, our love is impossible. In my sacrifice, I will be reborn in your soul, and you will restore me to that pristine realm of ideas as the perfect object of your veneration. You will dirty me up, and I will fall over and over from that state of purity and sentimentality. You have to make it happen. My dilemma is that I cannot act; I can only wait. I cannot make us whole. Smite me.
I wrote you a haiku:
You encompass me
I curl within transformed
Blossom of your soul
16.
I want to be your fantasy. I want you to worship the ground I walk on, the things I touch: my camera, the pillow where I laid my head, a half-used bar of soap, the picture I took of you, a haiku I wrote for you, to be your sacred relics, objects of your veneration. I want to be the one who most perfectly meshes with your limbs, who made you the most whole in our entanglement, even if there is an odd toe or an askew elbow sticking out that slightly mars our perfect merger. Your being becomes one with mine, which fills that strange-shaped hole within me, deeper than skin and muscle. You will be my devotee. Could I ever displace your Christ that whips your spirit, that demands your total surrender to further his elevation and crushes you under his pierced feet? Can you see the glow around me, a halo over my head, that lights the candles of your eyes when you look at me? And I’ll be your soul and your tempter, and my body you will punish with your fists, and with your cock, and I’ll be trampled under the heels of your feet.
17.
You have become cruel to me. You can weep and beg all you want but the handprints on my back, the bruises on my neck, and the swelling black eye is proof of it. You fear to cross yourself in my presence until you wash my stink off you. How do you repent? I’m sure you don’t go to a priest. What method do you have for absolution? You stretch out my arms, binding my hands to the bed frame. You dig your nails into my wrists. To hurt me more, you slap my face and leave red handprints on my cheeks. With your scorpion tail, you were born under that cruel sign, you sting me leaving a black and bloody wound. You mix for me a concoction of pleasure and pain. You fertilize me, but to no avail, I’m not fertile there. You press the base of your fist to my dick and apply rough fingers to the more sensitive places on the underside until I have an organism. There is sperm on my belly; a pool in my navel. You take your first and middle fingers and scoop up a glob of it. You smear it on my lips, then push your fingers into my mouth and onto my tongue, then further back until I gag. Here I’m stretched out for you. I am at your mercy; at your disposal. The thought of being crucified by you turns me on: of being murdered by your hands. You hate me, I know—that is why I assign the task of my degradation and martyrdom to you. I don’t want to live without you. I want the kind of intimacy with you where I can be part of your skin; to be absorbed into your being, or that accursed share that is obliterated by your sacrifice; by your crime when we become one. And afterward, you will bury me in one of your landscape projects, a sacred space just for me, where you will come and worship.
I wrote you a haiku:
You make me a corpse
From the filth of my body
I grow apple trees
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