Cyclone

There's nothing I can really say
The world seems so big
The sky is an endless trip

I didn't want you any other way
Than the real way
I hadn't found it yet and I let my ego destroy all
It goes that way so often

he said "just remember that everything happens
for a
reason"

To Know the Things That God Left Behind

I woke up this morning with my arms wrapped around your warm, slight body.

As I opened further into day, memories came back and my body became more wooden beside you. We'd had sex last night; I'd gotten out of my car, eyes still dry and sore from tears shed on the drive back home and gone to your house, into your door and bed. Having sex with you is a form of slow suicide; a deep and scarring violation of my self. I'm on top of you knowing that this is what I am supposed to like, to do, this is the central tenant of what it is to be a girl. I wake up hating myself and say as much, softly, and you don't really mind my saying that. You cuddle with me and I struggle between enjoyment and resistance; to love this sensation or to love myself?

You answered all of my questions honestly last night, even though you must have known you'd lose me by doing so. Yes, you are completely and utterly straight; everything you've ever done with a male person has felt wrong or awkward; if I had the same personality, looks, and so forth, and different genitals, you would unquestionably not be in the same bed with me.

"I need ambiguity; it is the space I use for my imagination, so that I can feel turned on; I use these little things about you to pretend just enough."

"I know, and I know I just took that away from you, and shot myself in the foot by doing so."

"Would you have sex with an angel?"

"It depends upon the angel."

"I want to know if you have just enough ambiguity to be with someone who was not entirely female, who was in some small way not a girl. If I knew that I could be with you entirely; to know that you wanted all of me; both halves, although they are not really separate but are one; I would like to really be here with you, to be whole."

He looks at me quietly and with an essential sadness and a love that has motion. "You're beautiful."

A Rock to Turn Over in the Roof of my Mouth

I don't mind the fucking. I don't mind our sleepy bodies wrapped together under a blanket, kissing. It has none of the pornographic attitude to it, and so puts me in a mindframe of a kind of equality. Neither of us are very big, so in moments like this I pretend we are living in a sort of innocence, where we are humans before we are genders.

Most heterosexual men remind me of me, of how I have been in the past, with boys, the boys who remain uncounted and remembered mostly for the curves of their hips, asses, their faces while they came, a brief sensation of silk on fingertips. The pornographic quality was what I was going for; a hypervisual concentration on skin, rhythm, the way they looked with me in them. It was an ego trip, a seamless indulgence, absolutely enjoyable, and empty.

You laid me out naked in front of you, you were between my legs on your knees and I was somewhat in the air, my back and head resting on the floor. I am completely and terribly naked. I experience this briefly, and then this is replaced by another sensation. I feel like I have been severed by a knife; there is singular, blind, forcible shutdown of my presence on a level akin to shock. I am conscious and yet not conscious; I experience my body as a sensation of pure violence, during which I am present somewhere in the background, separated and unharmed.

What causes this? If we consider that gender is a point of attention on a vast continuum of experience, and there is a discontinuity between the gender experienced on this superphysical continuum and the gender perceived on the physical continuum, a tension is created between the two points, a ripping and rifting. It's hard to know much about it, because of the tearing that occurs and the way that I stop feeling, reacting, thinking, for a moment. I would think its nothing less than a roundhouse kick from physical reality rendered to the delicate incorporeal spirit.

I think I rolled over and wrapped up in a blanket but I don't remember for a while after that moment. In my traceable memory, there is a block of warm darkness etched over the next five or ten minutes. I know that you wanted to know what, why, how. What do I want, how do I want it, what can you do? I am flustered and vacant in the face of your insistence, my mind is some flair, some rushing of mechanisms, reminding me of an abstraction of a circus, whirling and crashing. I want you to stop asking. I'm begging unconsciously pleasefortheloveofgodunderstandthatIcan'ttalkrightnowthatIamnauseous
thatIamdamagedohfuck

I try to speak. "Please...this is extremely hard for me, please. I'd like to explain, but I've already told you everything and you're not satisfied. Please try and understand that this is extremely hard to say and I don't think you can understand it when I do say it, I'm sorry, but I cannot say this right now, I am too vulnerable."
"Yes, but this is kind of extremely important."
"I know."
"It's kind of really important. I need to know what you want to do."
I'm thinking to myself only that what I need is to not talk about this. If we don't have to talk, it makes it less real. I don't tell you anything except "I don't know"s. You jump on them and tell me it's not alright to not know. I wish you'd give me a moment, a fucking moment to think, a minute to say 'I don't know' so that I can tell you. I want to die, I want to die. I can't breathe and I am choking and I can't breathe.

We Speak Absurdity Here

"Being."

"I was as warm and moist as a spring sunset on an applecart."

Jesse returned and hugged me and petted my hair, having had the break from me necessary to recontextualize our experience, to leave all awkwardness in the past. He was more attractive in the conventional sense than before, having let his surf-blond hair grow in wide stripes of yellow down past his eyes, sticking out under his baseball cap, and I found this disappointing. We quickly ran out of things to say to each other, and I left him sitting outside, talking to Sam.

"You will go to the moon. But not all of you will go to the moon.
You will leave behind parts of the rocket that have held the fuel you have burned.
When you arrive at the space station, you will be in just the tip of the rocket."

I dream all night of sex, hours of sex and tangled bodies. The bodies are friends' bodies. All day I am chaste and all night I dream of sex. In the morning, as I wake up slowly, I feel exposed, as if during my waking one might peek in and see what my thoughts are.

"After a time, you will depart again in the moon lander. The moon lander has no means
of self-propulsion; it will get a push from the space station. That big push will send the moon lander all the way to the moon."

Lost dances in the kitchen and I listen to her tapping. She is cooking Popeye's chicken in the microwave. It's so odd for me to meet her, me who had considered her existence before meeting her in the flesh. I know so much about her and she doesn't appear to know anything about it. She told the administrators here that her name was Hallie Burton. She went down to the Block to get mounds of food for her "seventeen hungry children." She's the headmistress of the house of Lost Boys and Girls. I wonder what it means to be lost, in this sense.


"Once you get to the moon, you will not have any means to get home."

Poetry Doesn't Want Anything Except the Death of Everything We Love

New dream in my dreamjournal.

Considering the many ways of being here, with friends, in the world; of being here, period; of be-ing.

Ted asked me what my most abnormal belief was. I was talking about how artists, through their art, express sentiments, beliefs and experiences far from ordinary, things that were they expressed in daily conversation would elict strange looks and gossip; in the workplace or other professional environment these expressions would be simply unacceptable. Art is the only sanctioned venue for extreme oddness. Ted suggested making art on that very subject, but I see that as very much done. If art is created to address the issu, as it has been, that art is immediately permissible again. The viewer will not and cannot grasp the subject matter except in the forum of art. An understanding that goes beyond that would require a paradigm shift in the viewer. This is, to me, similar to the way most people understand being transgender.

Many people will profess to support transgender people, will feel like allies, will be angered by any perceived affront coming from others, and will be as kind and as lacking in judgment as can be. Yet they will continue to see an FTM as a woman and (less often) an MTF as a man, and see genderqueer or third-gendered people as their birth sex, too. Their understanding remains solidly in the original paradigm, just as someone who doesn't allow what they understand from 'art' to truly cross into everyday life, even if that is the point of the art in question.

The paradigm shift needed in the transgender arena is to refuse to see the body as empirical evidence; that is, the body becomes secondary to something more incorporeal. It is much more common to nearly make this paradigm shift. Even if the idea of physical reality being secondary to something else is apprehended conceptually, it is still apprehended within a conventional sphere; thus it remains a concept.

It would follow that anything one could write or speak or paint, etc., is already nullified by virtue of its medium.

The end purpose of art is our liberation [the destruction of everything we hold dear or sacred.]

Ill Feelings

I can't learn. My body hurts...I feel wrong...I am twenty years old and I have no skill. I have no degree, no college education. I can't play sports, run, ride horses, kick ass, or build shit. I cannot fix a bike if my life depended on it. I cannot build or repair a computer, I have not made much art worth looking for. I can cook okay. I barely have enough energy to get up.

My skills are not anything that exists in this world. My body is small and my bones feel like they are full of holes. I am a black sun setting over desert.

I cannot think of a single person who has less skill then I do, who knows less. My main creative urge is to slit my wrists.

I ran as hard as I could toward enlightenment and nobody can see the difference;

Sometimes I think I am an explosion;

no-one i know cares as much as i do. I lose my lovers because

I am as soft and vacuous as a banana going warm and moist in the summertime,

as a creampuff sun setting over a country tract house,

I made art and no one called.

The Cold Wet Dirt Reminds Me of Home

We sat on my tailgate outside your apartment
and our twilight words were dripping in my tears
you were skirting the cage of the tiger
that i keep locked up in my body: i asked you to be with my flesh
to nestle your head into my shoulder
together, let's ignore the bloody segments
of limb that we followed to get here
to your adobe house in the desert where i picked
the bones clean

I want to be everything: I am coming unravelled
like the spoon wrapped in cloth caught in a tiger's mouth
i struggle to make my words seen
i don't want your pity
i want to feed the world to lions

CUZ YOU HAD BLOOD IN YOUR EYES
"it ripped right through our flesh, the children of the moon,"
IT WAS THE SAME

I don't know how much longer I can go explaining
that i am broken and slit from throat to dorsal fin

I want the deaths of all my childhood birds back
wrapped in the endless white cloak of winter
"and the strangest things seem...suddenly routine."

I want you to see who I am not

I am not going to...
let's throw a big party

"suddenly i'm Miss Beehive 1963."