Chapter Seven

Jennifer,
We need a wordless letter between us since our words have only failed. Falling back on them again like lazy seppuku when they’ve proven nothing but shortcomings at best sells us short. The truth is you doubt my words, from both my mouth and my pen. Everything I say is misheard, everything I write is misread. Understandable. How could you believe a man who argues for tone over text when he spends his first stirring hours of each day embroiled in words and words and words while he waits for you to wake? Silent quiet words remote from tone. Little words that might disturb you faintly back at your bed as I tap the keys, every pitch identical regardless of letter tapped. If I retyped Ficciones it would sound like this: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. The longest word in the world on my screen is hardly a speck on your cornea from back under your sheets. But there he goes scribbling away words in the next room because he thinks the world needs them. What word fits where, where did it come from, do its syllables convey or conflict with its intention in the sentence, words words and meticulous words and then you wake and the first words you’re greeted with (either articulated or not) are “Baby baby, you’ve gotta love whatever comes out of this mouth, whatever words come out you have got to know they mean I love you. If you mishear ‘x’ as ‘y’ or if you hear ‘y’ and really think I mean ‘y’ when it should be inherent that I could never mean ‘y’, never – all of my actions, eyes, and sounds have proven otherwise -- well if you believe these things then it is your shortcoming not mine. It is your doubt exposed, not mine. Every word from this mouth says ‘I love you’ and rest assured while we walk I will tease each and every one out as apposite synonyms.” Articulated, they may have sounded like “One day the world will read a book by a man who has just made love, not another one in waiting” and get you all huffy. It’s just play though! It only means I miss you while you sleep.
I get your confusion. Here I am spending my days running forward and backwards with words in words making stupid leaps like “inwards? Inwords!” swapping letters when it’s comfortably tart because pleasantly puckered has come to mean smart, and then someone comes along and argues against a word I’ve used because it’s too dark and I mock, “All you heard was the word, choche?” So am I for these things or aren’t I? If I’m not then that means I’ve dedicated my life to a fraudulent art: writing. If I am well that means I am lying to you when I tell you to pay closer attention to my eyes when I talk than the sounds I make. But Jennifer, it is not so easy. I have never lied to you…Honestly, I have never lied to you about anything important at least and what do I do with those times you asked me to lie to you and I most certainly have regretted even the little lies I’ve lied to you that you didn’t ask for. In fact, I am regretting the lie that is the past sentence even as I write it. I haven’t really regretted every little lie I’ve told you. Maybe one day I will, maybe one day I won’t. I would still argue that my love for you is truer than anything that has ever been true.
So you think I’m a madman who flip flops, back pedals, and contradicts to the beat of a song. In one paragraph I’ll say “fair enough” in another I’ll say “Why! What’s the option?! Go find me someone who lives outside this construct! It’s not a construct!” and here we are already mired deeply in the words. Well the best way to go about writing this wordless letter then would be to not write one at all, but that wouldn’t satisfy the “letter” part would it? And Jen, we do need a letter or else our light won’t cross again as soon as it should. So such is the climate surrounding this doomed embarkation, inextricably flawed from conception.
You say, “Chris, stop right there, this is not how you talk to me. You sound like you’re writing an essay or talking to a spirit.”
I break the record, “Don’t pay attention to these words just yet, Jen. This is a wordless letter. Read the whole thing first before you pay attention to any one particular word.”
Instead, in the meantime, think of words as Original Sin. They’re bad. I stick by that. That does not make me or everyone who uses them bad though. You use them, you don’t mean them. We were born with them. They banished us from the garden with their inaccuracies forever scrapping for an atonement plea as the (Clay, Adam, Adem, Etym) Word! Enduring on (Forbidden Apples, aforebitten Appelles, nouns are Names) Word! We are the Word eating the Word, Jen! Word fed by Word. Word banished by Word. Word lied by Word. Etymology is nothing more than the study of where and when word separated to words to help us better pinpoint where they’ll meet back up again in singular. So forget about the apple, why was that first word spoken? That’s when it began to unravel entrapping us in its spin. That word did not convey what it set out to.
“Mother?” I was more mother before.
“Fire?” I was more fire before.
“Hello?” I had never left.
“Jen” well I’ve never been able to say it right. “Jen” does not convey what “Jenny”, “Jennifer”, “Lady”, or “Woman” do and even if there was a word for all of them together it wouldn’t amount to you so every time I say your name I begin with coming up short. Original Sin. They all for short. They’re all unnecessary. They belittle intuition. They set up icons that distract with image. We didn’t need these things. They set up contracts. They gave the wrong things permanence. They ran away from themselves creating words like “liberty”, “man”, and “life” which are their own worst antonyms. There isn’t a single word that stands up Jen, but here we are left using them. Impatience is the force behind words. Boredom makes words. Need does not.
And seeing as you and I are the casualties of each other’s semantic antics we have also been deemed the standard bearers of this Original Sin. We’ve been hit hard. We are its Bannerman – a name that should evoke pleasant August memories of a cruise ship up the Hudson where we slummed it with the Newburghians drinking warm beers through our sweat and one of us said “I’d fucking die to shoot up with you if we lived a romantic life up here of Chinese take out, guitar, fights with each other and then fights with the town when the town comes at you for fighting with me, television, and beer in an apartment over a rib shack in Newburgh that barely lets the light in” while we waited for the ferry out to the castle in the island in the middle of the Hudson built by the Bannermans who we were told were the proud ancestors of the last remaining MacDonalds who donned their new surname after being the only ones left alive able to raise their family banner following the ethnic cleansing of their clan at the Tragedy at Glencoe. Remember the Bannermans! Decimated in Scotland they came to America and built the only castle in the center of the Hudson. Remember holding my hand as we drove through the forest? Well Jennifer, it’s since been brought to my attention that the wars against the MacDonalds were in retaliation for their switching sides from Orange to Jacobite or vice versa in the middle of a battle to gain favor with the British over the Scots or vice versa. Others say they were just bumpkins caught in an international political crossfire. Either way, artifice brightened our day, not facts. Truth perhaps, but not facts. The words led me there again. I’m sorry. Don’t let it mar that day.
You think we should talk everything out. I disagree. I think it’s schizophrenic. I mean we are afterall from the same source of light. A light that began at one point, will end at one point, and has temporarily created parallel lines of itself in the form of you and me and everything else because TimeSpace is curved. Einstein commited his biggest crime not in delivering us the atomic bomb, but in giving us the most romantic poem ever in the form of a frigid geek jingle. Energy comes from you and me and everything else times the speed of light squared. Forget the word “squared” --that’s where he started to go wrong -- and move you, me, and everything else to the other side of the equation. Now remove yourself from the past paragraph and let me start over.
You, me, and everything else are energy over the speed of light moving faster than itself.
You, me, and everything else are energy over the speed of light moving faster than itself.
Jen! There’s little use in debating this! No matter how hard we think, an elephant literally has more light than us and if everything can be reduced to light so can thinking which means an elephant potentially has more thinking than us or any (and most importantly, every) other word you wanna put there in place of the word ‘light’ and/or ‘thinking.’ C’mon, listen with me. We are energy over the speed of light moving faster than itself. Light! C’mon, we’re the same thing. That makes us the same thing. We’re light, bundled light, temporarily bundled light. Knots with leaks and as we leak our light rejoins itself. Every time you talk to me our light is reunited in part. These foul flawed words upon excercision also undo themselves. So give me your flaws baby. I promise to mishear them and I promise not to care. This doesn’t mean I want to talk all things out though. You do that when you’re trying to find facts with words and seeing as words defy facts, talking things out only digs us in deeper. Or you can disagree that words defy facts (an argument would be heard on this issue if we were hearing arguments at this stage) only if you agree that since it’s all from the same light words are both facts and lies and therefore words cancel each other out. Cancel this next sentence out and it may help you make light of our situation: man, this is the wordst!
We talk just to kill lonliness, to fill the space, but since we’re the same thing we’re only talking to ourselves. This nonsense is schizophrenic! It’s a mistake. It’s madness. It’s avoidance. It’s Original Sin, reprimanded through pain. We can’t let ourselves get any madder than we already are. The attempt to eradicate lonliness which created these false words, the Word eating the Word, is sinful Jen, sinful. When we talk we turn our backs on the unknown rather than stare it down with our own fear filled eyes. Talking diverts the conversation; it traps us in us into a painful ricochet. It might not feel like thee source of pain because it builds on bruises rather than punctures but they add up, they add up. There are no words in the real conversation though. It is us looking out of us and everything we know and the puncture is acute, but at least honesty is our salve. Me talking to you is you talking to me is me talking to me which is you talking to you. It’s the same light as it bends and bundles on its passage from one point back to that point. It, of course, is us. As us as the saucer under your cup, the empty wrapper that held your gum, a pixel on the face of a news anchor. It is all you and me. We are as far away from ourselves the news anchor as he is from us. Oh Jesus, I’m not gonna get myself back into your panties by calling either one of us the news anchor am I? It’s been so long since we’ve spoken I don’t know what turns you off more: you as the swarmy news anchor or me as the swarmy news anchor, or maybe it turns you on to think of me as the sexy Eurasian chick news anchor caked in porn star make-up that you’d swap sides with just for one very special night or maybe that just turns me on to which I’m sure you’d reply to all of this with “Nothing is going to get you in my panties now that I know you consider yourself me, you masturbating narcissist. You are not a hot chick and even if you were I wouldn’t sleep with you. I’m looking for my lost man and I hate it when you use the word panties.”
Jen, you’d be close but still off. I’d be taking you home, getting copasetic, putting the light back together, and fucking you harder than any lesser me in this city can, hot chicks included. The truth is, it’s coming back together at some point anyhow so why don’t we help it along now? Link the like charges to expedite the matter, the matter! If all the like charges made twos we’d become ones and match up with more twos-cum-ones and make more ones back to the unbent point we are. Why do you think people who spend so much time together start to look alike?
You and me.
Eleanor and Matt.
Thompson and Prince (sure, they’re happy).
Gretchen and Neil.
Non stop.
Don’t you see it happening? When we know we’re we we have faith to get we with everyone else back home until we are weer than the weest wee and no! C’mon! I’m not trying to get into everyone’s panties with this argument! I see the cogs spinning and the panic alarms ringing in your cap as we (We! Wee!) rap. You think this is all a ploy to sleep with Henrietta. She is after all your best friend, you look alike cause you both have enough faith to let your light bend back that way as best friends do, and you share an apartment so you think that would be the next pairing to wee, but can’t we just cross that bridge when we get to it? My dick may have to remain in your pussy and yours alone to keep our molecule complete and you say again, “Well according to you, you are everyman and therefore deserve every pussy they’re paired with which you have no problem taking because according to you you would also be offering your own pussy up because you are also every pussy.”
Well don’t speak for me. That’s the point of this letter. It only counter acts clarity. What I am trying to say is that I would love to go for a walk with you. Jen, I haven’t seen anything cute in ages. Can we go to the Central Park Zoo? Can we watch the seals being fed? Can we get a sidecar at the Pierre afterwards? Can we walk and can we enjoy each other’s words? Every last one of them? Can we enjoy the ones that confuse the most? They expose the parts of us we couldn’t see the best. When you say something I don’t understand it means I’m thinking that way too. I had no idea I thought that way, how exciting!
Ah Jen, I’m running in circles. I’m thinking about our bartending days when we made loot. Do you remember when we rented a room for a night in Times Square and pretended to know nothing of New York? We walked where our feet led us and they led to the Upper West Side for some reason. They led to coconut margaritas outside at Café Con Leche on 96th in which I professed young coconut meat makes my jizz so think I would spell it “Xoxonoix” from now on, like an Aztec warrior who didn’t know his name meant “nut hugs and kisses ” in the Western World. We joked about wondering where the Bohemians were. We’d heard so much of them, but found none. We went to this fabled Greenwich Village but, huh, where were they? It didn’t matter, we left loving New York. We left the next day to our fictively adopted home, Paris. We spent the weekend there, went grocery shopping, read the paper, and ate dinner in the Latin Quarter knowing there was an errant young Parisian couple who happened to find themselves in their “Times Square” as well when they knew better. They see us, they see we are happy, and they envy us for the ability to enjoy a part of their city that’s dead to them like we would envy the us we were on 96th Street. Do you remember what happened next? I slipped my hand up your dress under the table and you were wet, I slowly moved my fingers inside you to the sign of “come here, closer, this way.” You asked rhetorically and as silent as a mouse, “What...are you…doing? Where…are we…going?”
To which I responded, “My cock was too bashful to talk to your cunt directly so he sent his finger friends first.”
To which you jerked back and threw your fork and napkin down, “Don’t fucking defile me with your repulsive tongue” and our night was over. From Amsterdam Ave to Rue Saint Andre Des Arts and I lost you with one word. One word. You took a cab back to the hotel while I walked and thought about that word. In old England there was once a fluffy little beast of the woods called a cunny, or cunt. In time its name became synonymous with what we now call the pussy. Parents stopped using cunny due to its lascivious connotations. They swapped the ‘c’ for a ‘b’ ‘cause it’s softer and ‘bunny’ was born. Those of us that see no filth in women continued using cunny, picked up the equally cute pussy along the way and within a generation or two (and I might quite possibly start tomorrow) we’ll also be calling it a bunny and the words will continue to run away from themselves, none of them stick. But starting today let’s also stop saying words run away from themselves, maybe that sounds like their frightened and therefore that things are frightening. Let’s keep rolling with this bunny thing and say words just keep hopping along. One day the word bunny will hop alongside its host as consistently as it’s done everyday since those British mothers named it that, then hop right onto a pussy it passes, back onto a certain kind of flower for a few linguistic generations, and then back onto the bunny, which some Tartartians or something called a pussy for awhile.
I thought about the bunny and what it means to “fuck like rabbits.” Why rabbits? How’d they become the poster beasts of virility? Why not lions or dogs or free loving flowers? Why the cute little bunny? I’ll tell you why, because they’re sneaking little liberals who lay their creepy hands on your stressed neck without the slightest suggestion that…oh my, it’s too late, they’re in! Daddy massages your neck because he “cares”, c’mon. The “good guy” and his creepy hand never fails. That’s why we “fuck like rabbits” and that’s why I am proud to be neither cute nor deceptive. I fuck like a lion, let’s keep that clear and I would never change my lack of cloak that’s got me in these high waters. A lion in loin clothe; that’s me. And there you were in bed reading in the hotel room. And there we were with our backs to each other in Paris because I chose four wrong letters laid out poorly, nothing more.
-- C-U-N-T --
While you pretended to read I couldn’t help but retraumatize myself with the incident at the “Glugg Party” when yet another one of our friends took Icelandic Air up on their Take a Break program, picked up a glugg mix in the duty free, and decided to throw a party around the introduction of this season’s exotic mulled drink. You and I arrive to a dead scene in the kitchen where only three other couples stood around the stove while the glugg mulled away. No one spoke unless it was about glugg.
“So what’s glugg exactly?”
“Listen, we gotta make sure it doesn’t boil. After eight seconds all the booze is boiled out.”
“It’s very similar to gluwien, the Hanseatic kind, not the Alsatian watered down sugar trash.”
Everyone was miserable, terrified by socializing, and dead silent so I took it upon my own shoulders to liven things up. Assuming this crowd was as coupled up as they acted I figured it was safe to assume they all had dogs or were in the process of thinking about getting one as a stepping stone to a baby.
“Hey, do any of you guys have a dog?”
A few people shake their heads but even that embarrassed them.
“I’ve just started to wonder what the father of my dad’s dog thinks of me or would think of me if he knew me. You ever wonder? Ever hold a private conversation in your head about what that guy thinks about you? I mean if you’re your dog’s father then that’s weird enough. It would be like a biological dad holding a conversation with the adoptive dad, but what about me? Does my dad’s dog’s father consider me a son of sorts?”
One half of a couple left the room, another couple started filling up their glugg mugs, you poured ours AND you laughed, Jen! You were proud of me for a second so I kept going.
“Bet you guys hate George W. Bush, eh?” C’mon that was hilarious! You laughed out loud.
“Well if the British didn’t murder Dr. Diesel in 1911 and alter his engine that could previously run off the oils of any agricultural byproduct we wouldn’t find ourselves in this mess with Arabia today.”
“Diesel engines are just about the best thing you could do for that ole hole in the Ozone, buddy” softly scoffed some milk toast and mayonnaise. I wanted to pummel his ass, but I was still intent in turning you on the right way, Jen.
“’Tis true, ‘tis true my friend, but it wasn’t always that way. Dr. Diesel’s first engine ran on peanut oil. Imagine England choke their cholesterol up when they heard of this thing. Not only did America start the auto industry, but if they also held all the fuel – peanut oil -- to run the cars every other nation’d be relegated to Third World status overnight.”
I filled my glugg mug up and looked over at yours and realized you had barely touched it. That made me drink my new fill even faster. None of this had any effect in helping wake our crowd up though. So as I drank more and more and got deeper and deeper into the oil conspiracy the lack of pulse from the entire room made me exaggerate mine in caricature.
“They needed to play catch up. Oh surprise slurrrrrprise, World War I kicks off only a few months after Dr. Diesel is murdered, tossed overboard into the British Channel, and surprise slurrrprizznise it ends with England and France carving up secret little land pacts in the Middle East. Where was America in those deals?”
Well what, we couldn’t leave yet. We hadn’t been at the party for more than an hour. What else was I supposed to do, Jen? You could have become a buffoon with me. I witnessed the change in your face. What began as a turn on was quickly turning into a turn off. You wished I’d just shut up and let this night sink on its own rather than bring it down myself.
“Hrrrrmmmm….so how do we get to this oil with clean hands Blighty says? Divide and conquer! The Brits planted the Jews back in Israel to aggravate the Arabs. It worked for them during…it worked during the Opium Wars and by golly it worked for them again.”
When I said ‘Golly’ you got scared cause now you knew it was no longer me really talking . Your eyes were on fire. You knew I was capable of muttering anything once I let ‘golly’ out. So I stared you down and drove the nail in just in case it wasn’t clear, “By golly! No imperial army has ever gone in without dividing and conquering first. Doesn’t anyone read anymore? The two ancient enemies get back to their clan wars over the sanctity of Sarah’s seed and a bunch of sand and voila! The pipes are surrrrrrrreptitioously sunk, the black blood converts to sterling, and England lives to see another day aside yet another imperial giant, the United States of America. Blame the fucking Brits I say!”
“Blame them all guy. And I think you’ve had enough to drink.”
“I’m sorry, I’m taking him home,” you said.
Jen! How did the night go from impressing you amongst fools to turning you off and embarrassing you in front of people that are worthless in every other way except to embarrass you in front of? How? A few words and the whole thing is shot, for what? To postpone our light reuniting, that’s all. It’s like those tardos you always complain about that sit across the bar from you. You hate them. They never say anything you agree with except when they tell you they saw me across town with some slut. You believe that without questions.
It’s the same light Jen. I’m talking about the ill words now. If we’re the same light and the ill words stem from me which is you then you too are the ill words. You’re running from them like bunny runs from cunny. You’re running from them like they run from the things they represent. You are every ill word and every ill thing it falls short of representing and every compliment at the other end and forget that -- I am too, so is the next person you lay your eyes on. Oh Jeez, so are the twats at the glugg party! They don’t stem from a different light. Unleash it all and it will head together back to the same point though.
Don’t you understand that makes me the DDT that killed all but one resistant grub and the offspring of that grub who will all but one be killed off by next years hybrid pesticide and the Creationist farmer who is speeding up evolution on a daily basis with every new crop dusting of the ineffective pesticide? You are France’s chardonnay vines decimated by phylloxera in the Nineteenth Century. I am the resistant chardonnay planted by the Huguenots in the Hudson valley two hundred years earlier grafted back onto the sick French vines from which they initially came. You are French, American, and the Belgium in between. I am phylloxera just like you are Newark, New Jersey’s Cherry Blossoms given as a gift from Japan after Commodore Perry opened them up to free trade. I am Japan’s Cherry Blossoms singed to the root by World War II. You are grafted back onto me and I whisper as our wood meshes, “I was also the bomb that immolated myself!”
You are the multiple sclerosis that attacks the nerves that were killing the brain.
I eat well during the day to heal my organs damaged last night by the excessive amounts of booze I consumed to heal my nerves which were damaged by my body at day.
You are busy making things. All sorts of things.
I may not be the virus yet, but these are still primitive days. You already are. You’re AIDS. Oh, and therefore I am too. You’re your own vaccine and I’m the next plague festering inside a sliced snake deep in the heart of Hunan. You’re the fly testing me out. I’m the enzyme in the fly’s stomach that had the chance to knock you out, but was too busy munching on that piece of snake shit.
You are both the first cell who divided to make something and the lava spewing up from the depths of hell providing the soup that created the tragic divide.
I am both sides of the quarrelling couple peering into each other’s eyes mystified that neither one can see each other.
I am both the poet who wrote you

‘Pursued Through Ladders and Shoots
Isis is Isis and here is the Proof’
Followed by
‘The Middle is ddddddd……’

Apparition Love confide in the lost lover
“Il est isi, lay easy; the syllable il est las-bas – it can never be caught!
But like grass it’s a blade and if nipped at the tip and held taught in a tuck
It can be blown like a Porto Allegrian tickling his tongue
Into the heart of the word he knows can’t be won
Or if left to stretch undisturbed in the earth, careful
Dance along its rim as the chanteur skims, the Jesus lizard swims,
As the Ming’s majesty messenger becomes the wind!”
Implicit in this wisdom is an acceptance on both ends
He would need to be reminded again (and again)
But for this moment at least he’s complete to tempest out his Incomplete
Forget about the reach, resign to reclined defeat
Sweet
So she was right…
Until a pause produced an argument from lack of desire
Which is to say, having nothing on our minds thereafter
Brought us close to the wire
He fired
“But the W(iz)ard told me ‘The Word is
As in: It was were, it has wered
In other words it is Is”
Isis?
“’Tis!”
Which is also to say it goes and it goes
Hence we’ve chosen the letter O
“In(betwee)n ‘be twee’ “he said quietly
“S(til)l m(il)es to go til il me is e(st)e”
“He lies! He lies! He lies!” Apparition she cried
Hands folded in prayer I took my cue and dived
He was right too
She knew

And the asshole boyfriend who threw your cell phone against the tree, but buffered by leaves and cushioned in weeds it didn’t break so I picked it up again and hurled it against the schoolyard wall and spat in your face when we were young.
You are both the fat black woman who hobbles and the gentleman from Bond Street who visited Bourbon Street on business and can no longer recall the fat black woman who hobbles.
I can see you.
You were the sea faring Bernardo O’Higgins, Irish Liberator of Chile! I was your Argentine wife slaughtered by Spaniard Royalists. My ashes became your ballast which slowed you down to make those bastards think your warship was heavy with cargo. You were those bastards. I was the ballast cut loose when it was time to make light and attack. My ashes lay scattered about the entire ocean. You are the sea bass civiche in Valparaiso blackened with my bones.
I am the mule, the hinny, and cross-eyes.
I am the fantastic idea of monogamy, nothing more than another fantastic idea.
I am the one hundred year old eel that’s already changed sex many times in my lifetime because I can. You are a female eel that dikes out with me because we can.
You are merry old England only truly as old as its eldest citizen who is a woman with blue hair carrying a wicker basket of plastic flowers on the bus to tea in downtown Bradford. She’s one hundred and two. Her sister, me, is also still alive. She is one hundred and one. Old for people, not for nations.
You are the bacteria e coli, color of alabaster. I am all the darker colors on the piece of shit you feast amidst, yet it is you that makes our unsuspecting host sick when it is my browness he identifies his sickness with.
Oh Jen, I am also me, the failure who flips through Zagats with his ex-girlfriend who also happens to be you in search of a decent restaurant in Kips Bay to have dinner at with his ex-s mom on Thanksgiving. The three of us in a city that’s vacated to the suburbs for the night. Both of us are your mother. As I move from me to you and you to me during the meal we meet in her body, good thing the waiter sat her between us.
You are looking at me.
Now.
You might not be able to hear my voice shaking through this tight print, but Jen this thing has been gutting me, gutting me from the inside out, which is conversely what’s given me the guts to write this.
I am the lunatic you thought you knew who found a girl that looked exactly like your mother and fucked her and fell asleep next to her thinking I should knock this chick up. I thought “Man, if I knocked this chick up I could start all over again, make another you and raise you without flaws knowing that my little you would find the younger me some day. If the pattern of reciprocation continues, which it will, the young me will come highly flawed. I will sit that regret down and straighten him out because I will hold the key to all his shortcomings. My baby you and the young me will then make the baby you and I were meant to have and I’ll be the best grandfather ever.” That makes you nuts! But I’ll still love you.
You are both faster than light speed and whatever its opposite may be. It’s got to have an opposite. Therefore, being an opposite, I will one day be able to pass myself the speed of light, see where my light was, what hidden alleys did it descend upon, what couches did it rest on, which directions it flowed in parietal lobes like the dead stars we look at in the night. Their lights burnt out thousands of years ago but they’re just reaching us now. You will expose all your own lies as your opposite. Everything is under my camera because I am everything. And I am this opposite which means I will undo my exposure which in turn will be undone and all my fly eyes and every athlete and the duty free shoppers and the orange of the carrot will be called into work.
I am also both sides of the Polish/Hun couple we share the flat with who cook huge meals when we eat out, who watch tv while we dance, who leave the dishes undone and the tv on while they’re both passed out on separate couches when we finally stumble home into the kitchen abutting the living room for a night cap.
Oh man and I’m the other kind of poet who misdirects his energy with

Our Lady of the Severed Aorta

I won’t think you’re a whore if you lay me
I’m not the type to abhor pretty ladies
Taking it into their own hands at night
When they’re surrounded by boys whose joys won’t alight

Look, I can see how this topic must drain you
But listen, the more you give it up the more you make room
For anything other than this song I croon
Or are you afraid of what’s beyond
Your body’s swoon?
So you siphon your love into a skipping groove
And you’re right ‘cause you’re safer from danger
When you can not move
But you’re wrong because when it atrophies from lack of use
And contentness becomes the opiate soothing ruse
Won’t the waits aggravate? The sitcom syndications sublimate?
Will you reserve the word ‘Divine’ for fine chocolates
On the Upper East Side?

Let’s face it, the role of cloistered seed
Will not befit you with a steed
And though your boy is from New Jersey
The gigolo also bleeds
Yes I’m on to you woman, what truly gives you pain
More than the whistles – we all agree they’re profane
Is a silent construction site
A nude beach where skin reflects like sand
My cracked lips still crazed for your wrinkled hand

When I could have just said, “I am the silence deafening. Quit ringing my ears and say something” and been soft light.
I am brevity because I’m anxious to get on with the show. The seals are getting hungry.
You are the flower. There I said it. And I am the man that just said, “You are the flower.” Can you deal?
You are also the petty thief born without a conscience who’s just pulled the trigger on the gun he’s holding to your head while he looks away, his attention more attuned to the lack of cash in my wallet, but not the life he just took. You are. I’m the first useless business card from a forgotten exchange he discards before he guts the whole thing. You are the rest of the wallet at the bottom of the trashcan on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, a borough bigger than Paris at our own doorstep that we never visit.
I am an industry sycophant who has no idea that he really does love the thing he was told to love so he can sell it. He made it. I am distress looking back at myself the sycophant with envy for asking so little of life.
You are confused because we’ve never lived with a Hun/Pole couple, but yes we have. I lived with a Hun/Pole couple with my last girlfriend who I also was and seeing as you were me you did too. You are a better lay than she was, which means you are also a dead lay. Can you fucking get into it a little please for the sake of the me that’s getting a dead lay across town as we speak?
You are the rude reader yet to break eye contact with me, the word. Have you no shame? In any other situation it’d be rude, odd, queer in the ancient sense, and downright insane to never break eye contact with someone and yet you follow me from page to page, word to word (even when I repeat words like I just did), while I stare back at you. You! I move, you move. You read, I retell all the while never breaking eye contact. You repeat my words only a fraction later than I read them to you. When you blink I’m right back staring at you when you open your eyes again. I mean, you’re back there staring at me. I’m making you uncomfortable so you pick up another book and I am still there staring back with a new mask on. You pick up the society rag and I am fixed back at you wearing another mask yet! I am the caption to the beautiful dress. I am the stock quote. I am the fine print of the advertisement. I am the headline at the bottom of page thirty-six. I am back here because you cannot escape. Don’t give up and look at the cobweb in the unreachable corner of your room, you are the cobweb and I am the dust caught in it. It may seem far from this vantage point, but you/it thinks you/it are far from it. So you accept my masks and never break eye contact either! When you scribble I am there again. Go ahead try and write something that’s not me, scratch, erase, and scratch and it’s still me and you made me and therefore I am always you and if I am always you then you are always me and we are both always wearing a mask! We are having a staring contest through two masks! We wear a mask when we examine ourselves! Look at me! I am looking at you through a mask and when I win this contest, since I am you, I will stroll through the fresh air with you. That is to say, while we are both both masks despite these masks I will also be the fresh air with you blowing in my face.


Yours,

Christopher Damien Leo