CONCEPTUAL FRAGMENTATION
Virahotkanthita Nayika Yearning for her Lover,
Rajasthan, from a Bundi workshop, c. 1770,
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum
I am permanently a bit disappointed by anyone
who doesn’t want to fuck me and I’m getting a bit
too old to be thinking in this way and yet white
shirt beige trousers red lipstick is still enough
to make body out of breathing. It’s April and everything’s
covered in sweat: hair skin mouth even my insides probably
and I would like to create a better mirage of that situation, less
pink like meat and more worthy of the name internal,
flesh like flesh not flesh like porosity, pigment, policy failure.
Crossing wires in my head stretch like furrows, crevice of
mundanity touching the hollow of need, careful lightness
drenched in corrosive substance not unlike blood.
When a bird shits on a person it’s an external insertion of disgust
into a system that wants to be closed. Last year I lay in bed
while being asked to beg and I looked in the mirror so my body
would know it’s mine. Last night I cried because my piss felt too warm
inside me and made my skin curl like rot, begging for a different kind
of release: inside, slower, deeper, like destruction that knows
what it’s doing or a dog that knows its way home or a cataclysmic break
in reality made more substantial by subsequent death, all backwards
instead. This morning I slept through everything bad: I dreamt of meaning
like a child learning to read, a body hurting itself just to know what it feels like,
the process of putting a consciousness together before knowing
where it will live. Inside my head something breaks every day, marrow
feeding lifelikeness to itself again again again, learning addiction
from scratch, I speak every language when I’m dreaming and know
how to say please and thank you. Awake, my hair sticks to my neck like cloth
slick with rain, my skin coarse with desperation for undoing. Each evening
I shut some part of my wrongness and tell it never to come back, and
cry without its direction. Each day the whole world pulls itself apart
like a tortured fly, and some days I wish I were the hands in charge.