Picking Up Items and Putting Them Back. Lena, Mark, an Unnamable Lover, and an Unknown Listener.

>>>>>2005.

Lena asks her roommate if he can stay the night somewhere else.

"I have plans here tonight," she says.

Lena's roommate is sad but obedient. He secretly records the sounds that drift from Lena's bedroom walls and sells them to a stranger on the internet. The stranger pays two-hundred dollars for each hour of audio. Sometimes the roommate gets excited by the audio but he is a man of god goddammit and he must save himself for a moral whore. Ten percent of each two-hundred dollar hour goes to the poor, he tells himself goddammit. 

Tonight is a six-hundred dollar night. Tonight will surely be symphonic. Lena has already tossed the lingerie she plans to wear over the armchair in the hallway. It is close to the color of her skin, which makes it very light and almost transparent. The roommate does not mind Lena's obvious promiscuity but wishes she would wear red sometimes. She would look goddamn better in red, he thought. 

The roommate enters Lena's room while Lena is  showering. He walks to her nightstand and places something underneath it. It is a tiny device that can record three hours of audio before having to be recharged in a wall outlet. The roommate sets the device to begin recording at 10 PM. It is 8:40 now.

The roommate is distracted by a piece of jewelry Lena has left on her nightstand, a single bone-shaped earring. It doesn't look like anything she would wear. The roommate picks up the earring and finds it quite heavy. 

"It's not for your ear."

Lena's roommate turns around. Lena has been watching him but there is no way to know for how long unless he asks her.

"How long have you been watching?"

"Nine seconds," she says. "Are you looking for something?"

Lena walks over to her roommate and he notices that she has managed to get into the skin-colored lingerie between the bathroom and her bedroom. She smells like her own cum because she always masturbates in the shower, but the roommate thinks Lena smells like shampoo.

"Just checking if you have any dishes in here before I run the washer. I saw the earring on your table."

Lena smiles. "It's for your tongue."

The roommate blushes in revulsion. He sets the ring back on Lena's nightstand. "I thought it looked weird," he says. 

"That's because - " Lena takes the ring off the nightstand "- you are used to seeing pairs." She opens her mouth and pushes the ring through an invisible hole in the center of her tongue. "Now get out of here Mark. I am barely dressed."

Mark leaves the room and doesn't run the dishwasher and leaves the house and doesn't lock the front door. He will stay at his girlfriend's tonight, even though he still hasn't been able to explain to her why he lives with such a crude woman. But his girlfriend loves the one-hundred-and-eighty dollar shoes he buys her so she asks few questions except "how ever did you afford these?" She will then give him a bad handjob. While she does it, Mark closes his eyes and pictures his girlfriend in red lingerie. Unfortunately she only wears white underwear. It reminds Mark too much of Lena.

Lena is polished when her lover arrives. It is 9:31.

Her lover motions to cup her breast after they have had a glass of wine. He squeezes it and likes how it is the perfect size for his hand.

"You're filthy," she tells him, but thrusts her chest forward and deeper into his grip. Her lover gets on his knees and lifts up her slip to kiss her stomach. The position puts him eye-level with Lena's desk a few feet away. It distracts him.

Her lover picks up several pieces of red-stained paper from the desk. "Your writing is covered in blood."

"It's only wine. I spilled it accidentally."

The lover holds the paper close to his face. The blue inky words bleed into the stained paper. A string of them he can make out: "the satisfied cunt will suffer my trials."

"You're going to kill one of your characters," he says. "A girl."

Lena takes the paper from her lover and replaces it on her desk. "No. She just needed to get dirty. But she'll be alright. You, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. You are filthy."

Lena walks to her bathroom and turns on the shower. "Come here and take off all of your clothes," she instructs. "I am going to watch you clean yourself." 

The shower is clear glass with sliding doors. Lena's lover slides one of them aside and steps in. He begins washing his hair and the shape his arms make when they are above his head does something strange to Lena. She sits on the sink that faces the shower. She draws one leg up to rest her foot on the sink and lets the other dangle. 

Lena begins to touch herself and when her lover notices what she is doing he also reaches for himself. For several minutes they refuse to meet the other's eyes, suspending the illusion for as long as possible that neither knows the other is watching. 

"Get over here," he says finally.

Lena obeys, not bothering to remove her slip. When wet it clings to her body like another skin, so when her lover puts his hand underneath it he feels like he is penetrating her already.

He attempts to pin her back against the narrow wall of the shower. He wants to fuck her standing. but the wall is wet and she slides down a little when her feet lift from the ground. As he pushes harder she slides further down. With her left hand Lena grabs the top of the sliding glass door and distributes her body unequally. She positions her right foot on the soap ledge and her symmetry is recovered. Now her lover is able to fuck her harder.

He does and when she is about to come, Lena's foot becomes dislodged from the soap ledge. A tremendous pressure is suddenly applied to the glass door Lena clings to. Her lover thrusts forward to deliver the concluding orgiastic movement. Lena screams, the glass door shatters, and the two lovers fall out of the shower onto the bathroom floor, still connected to each other and now also connected to several hundred shards of glass that beat them to the ground. 

Lena and her lover quickly survey their new surroundings. Then their eyes meet, both pairs still raw with desire from orgasm. The lover's body, covered in blood and glass, starts to shake with laughter. Lena, equally bloody, equally glass-covered, is equally amused. Lena and her lover cling to one another, closer than any two humans have ever been before, two laughing humans fucking on a pile of broken glass while their blood clots and skin breaks.

"I think about you all the time Lena," he says. 

Lena stands up and brushes bits of glass away from her body. Her slip is torn but nothing is punctured. 

"We're lucky to be alive," she says. Lena pulls off her slips and leaves it in the sink. A combination of water and blood coats her skin. Her lover has never seen anything so arousing. 

"Let's go to bed," he suggests. 

Lena nods and helps her lover off the ground. The pair enter Lena's bedroom and Lena begins to pull tiny pieces of glass out of her lover's skin. They take turns digging out little pieces from flesh and placing them in a coffee mug. With every freed shard comes a gasp of relief. When they are emptied of glass, Lena's lover puts two fingers inside her and she moans at the unexpected sensation of being filled. 

Lena's lover is happy and surprised with how vocal Lena is tonight. She tells him she masturbates to him all the time and orders him to come on different parts of her body. She is louder than usual and he responds proportionately. When he becomes too exhausted to continue, Lena waits for her lover to fall asleep and then cleans his wounds with alcohol. She reaches under her nightstand and takes out the audio-recording device. 

"I miss you," she says into it. 

Lena shuts the device off and leaves it under the nightstand for her roommate to retrieve in the morning. It is 12:57 AM.

>>>>>

desire lines are retraceable.

this part is inspired by a few things. this post, that is. one is red wine, which I am drinking now; this will become quite obvious. others: real conversations with real people. everyone who shares their honest thoughts with me is inspiration. 

1999. 

"Alethea and Her Cousin"

On a warm spring day eight years ago…almost…the sixteen-year-old virgin Alethea enters the bedroom of her cousin.

Alethea is a Catholic and a devout one at that. She attends mass twice weekly and remains vulnerable to the anachronistic orthodoxies of the institution.

"The church updates itself every four-hundred years or so to only be only a hundred years or so behind the present," Alethea's cousin tells her.

Alethea is also vulnerable to her cousin. He is a year older than her and obviously not Catholic.  Alethea is often startled at the accidental profundity of his thoughts and injures herself at night in maniacal attempts to persuade her hands away from her clitoris. Their bedrooms face each other from across the street. Currently his is dark. Currently Alethea's hands are burnt-up with the remedying effects of boiling water.

"What is this?" Alethea asks herself, holding her raw and shaking hands up to the mirror. 

Of all his parts, Alethea likes her cousin's eyes the most. They are the same blue as the Virgin's shroud. Alethea's eyes are brown like shit so she refuses to meet his gaze, fearful a prolonged connection will soil her immaculate soul. 

"Whose soul?" he cousin asks. "Why do you never look me in the eye, Alethea?"

"I don't know."

"It's me. You know me. It won't hurt you to look at me."

Alethea repeats Matthew 5:28 to herself as she lifts her gaze to meet his. The verse goes something like, "you might as well give up trying, because even just thinking about something bad is enough to damn you." The verse's resonance corresponds inversely to the ever-intensifying blueness of her cousin's eyes. The longer Alethea stares the bluer they get. 

"Oh!" Alethea says laughing. "This is easy!"

Her cousin sighs deeply and shakes his head. He puts his hand behind her head to feel her scalp. He pulls a few of her hairs. Out. "Come back to my house Alethea," he says.

She takes his hand, worn unevenly from the constant plucking of guitar strings, she takes it and finds it fits very evenly into hers, hers still burned from the night before. 

Alethea discovers that sex is like the cigarettes she smokes, the poetry she reads. She never knew she needed it until she had it, and now she cannot exist long without it.

Her cousin requests she takes off her shirt but she removes her panties. He puts his hand on top of her skin and she puts it under. He offers her a kiss; she multiples them, over and over, everywhere. She becomes positively helpless when he compliments her breasts and she hears the Holy Mother screaming in agonizing bliss when he discovers her clitoris. 

"I've never done this before," they say to each other, not knowing exactly what they mean.

* * *

Lena pauses in drafting her story, suddenly unhappy with how happy these teenagers are in this small and, in the whole grand narrative of things, relatively meaningless encounter. She arises from her desk and pours herself a glass of red wine. 

Lena is alone in her house, spare a cat, spare the aquarium of fish it taunts every dawn and dusk. 

"I am so devastatingly lonely," Lena says to herself. She calls her friend Jane only to repeat the sentence. "I'm so devastatingly lonely..." Lena catches a fish from the aquarium and tosses it to her eager tabby. The cat pins the fish between the rug and its paw, waiting for its struggle to subside. Before the fish dies, Lena shoos the cat away and returns the fish the aquarium. It is still alive.

"Come over," Lena says to Jane, who has been telling Lena all about something forgettable for the past several minutes.

"Lena, no."

"It will be quick. You can just lay there. You won't even have to move."

"No, Lena."

"Why not?"

"...I'm not like that."

Lena grips the telephone very tightly, and holds it very thoughtfully, before flinging it across the room. "Neither am I you bitch," she screams. The telephone hits a print of Madame Butterfly Lena has framed and shatters its protective glass. Lena rushes to pour another glass of wine. She pours the next glass of wine on her manuscript.

"Are you happier now, Alethea, you hedonistic bitch."

And Lena, frenzied with envy over a piece of her imagination, grabs the now-red notebook and crams it into her purse. She leaves her house and begins walking towards a tower. A bell tower.

"I'll exorcize you Alethea. You're going to change. You can't have all the fun now. I won't have to live vicariously through you, for your life will become dull and mine so very interesting. I'll have Jane. I'll have my cousin. I'll have my father, real Electra-style. And when I'm not with someone forbidden I'll throw myself on the various inanimate phallic objects that reside in my house. I'll have a fucking banana. Then have a drunken baby with the better end of a wine bottle. You'll be nothing, Alethea, just a child crossing the threshold of a single taboo, a single taboo to my dozens upon dozens."

"You'll be nothing," Lena lies to herself, applying lipstick, readjusting her stockings, putting on a face to face herself less fearfully. 

The gates to the church are locked, however, and Lena is forced to delay her exorcism for twelve horrible fucking hours.

fantasticwhore

>>>


or, "The Opposite is Equally True: Lena the 5th"



Lena is not invited to the wedding of her old friend, the virgin bride.

"Why not?" she wonders. She telephones a mutual friend.

"The bride considers your presence a moral detriment, given your past of prostitution and whoredom."

"That answers that," Lena says. She hangs up and takes out a piece of paper. She begins to write the virgin bride a letter. Lena finishes the letter and reads over it before sealing it in an envelope the same pink shade as her cunt.


My lovers and I wait seven hours to sleep together and two years to say "I love you." 


Will you still love him, virgin bride, even after you've had two years to satisfy your deepest perversions of hedonism? The "love" you felt in reality is your bubbling repression of carnal desire. My retroactive advice to you, careless tosser of sacrosanct words, is to not inhibit your desire. Do not let a ubiquitous appetite determine the rarest phenomena of human existence. In popular culture the two are often confused, so I do not blame your for your common misunderstanding of Love.   


Do not practice abstitence. At all costs, do not practice abstinence. 


Lena is satisfied with the letter. She licks the edges of the envelope and presses its folds together. She walks to the mailbox and fills it with her letter. She returns inside to an empty bed.

>>>

this period was different than the rest.

.

.
I am a child bearing hips and I have them too.
Nothing grew, so everything came out, primordial
goo of my D, the ends of my N, the stray A that
one day might live in another body or two.

.

.

Lena meets Alice.

No one knew that Lena was violent.

Those naturally inclined to sex are also naturally inclined to violence; I am not sure why the dichotomy exists but it does.

Now Lena had spent her whole life naturally drawn to sex and consequentially gained much attention for her behavior. However, Lena had willfully sacrificed nearly all of this behavior because of this single man from the deep deep south. Her ample emotional energy, therefore, was redirected from the sexual part of her mind to the violent one. In fact these were the only two sides of Lena's mind.

Lena's natural violent tendencies had always been pacified by a consistent stream of lovers. Now her hands held kitchen knives a little tighter and her shoes were all spiked with pointed heels.

At first the change startled her.

She went swimming one night with a group of Canadians she had met at a birthday party. Lena felt there was something different about her interactions with these men but she wasn't sure what had changed.

"We have a surprise for you," one of them said. "Alice."

"Who is Alice" she asked.

"You are going to love her."

"You will get along great."

Lena hated meeting other women. But the night was hot and she had been promised booze and cool water.

When the group arrived at the pool, they told Lena to undress and wait for them by the water while they fetched Alice. Lena had no bathing suit so she wore only a bra and panties. She removed the outer layers of her clothes and wrapped a towel around herself. She waited for the Canadians to return. She closed her eyes and reclined on a beach chair.

"Lena" they said after a few minutes. "We present to you Alice."

Lena opened her eyes. The Canadians were in the pool and a wet sensation overcame Lena's toes.

Lena stood up and the towel around her body slid to the ground. She bent down and picked up the tiny puppy nibbling at her feet.

"Hello Alice" she said.

Lena walked the length of the pool with the puppy in her arms. She felt the eyes of every Canadian following the two bodies.

Lena did not feel sexy.

Lena felt terrifying.

It was at that moment, almost naked by the pool with a puppy in her arms, that Lena realized the men had given her the thing in order to look at her without being frightened. She had been tempered with soft black fuzz and pitiful whimpers. She dropped the puppy on the ground and stared back at the men.

When Lena arrived home that night she scrawled something in ink above her bed.

Lena smiled. The grip on her pen loosened.

Lena 3: in which Lena Sucks the Life out of Herself

Lena had made no conscious decision to quit her dozens of lovers, but inevitably it happened. She had been enjoying the company of two men (one Irish, one Scottish, she could hardly tell them apart) when a man from the deep deep south was unexpectedly introduced to her. She found him interesting only because everyone else seemed to find him interesting.

Lena was used to leaving men and in fact a man had never left her before. Thus she expected the same to happen, for her to see this man from the deep deep south for several days or weeks and then leave him. But everytime Lena thought she would leave him he left her.

"I know we will say goodbye to each other many more times," she said at the first time she said goodbye to him. She was right and she still is right.

Lena forgot about other men because she wondered about this one. Instead of growing duller he grew more fascinating. He smelled better to her each day. He had a favorite flower. They agreed on fetishes. He had the perfect width of cock.

But as I said before he was always leaving her. He went back to the deep deep south and also went to the arms of other women. Some women were real and some women Lena imagined were real. Lena imagined many women and somehow this made the man even more attractive to her.

Lena lost weight and cut off her hair. She felt her skin go rough so she cut into it with razors. She felt her eyes dry and tough and wanted to cut them with razors too. The less Lena cared about other men the more they flocked to her. The less Lena cared about her body the more men flocked to her.

A flock of silly birds shitting and squawking all around her.

The more she loved him the more she hated herself. "I hate myself because I am no longer myself," she thought.

Her thoughts went faster and less complete. Faster and less complete. Fast and less. She became less and less. She didn't even want to read this story anymore.

Lena was at her least when she met a woman whose named sounded like Advice.

gentleLena pt.II: the autobiography

gentleLena pt. I

* * *

Have I ever loved one? Lena thought once. She counted her lovers on  fingers and toes (a few times over.)

Her first lover she most certainly had loved. He was from down the street, not across the ocean.

Yes, I must have loved him I thought. Lena thought this too. I prefer dark hair and he had dark hair. This must be because of his inital influence on my sexual appetite. Such a realization inspired Lena to graph a multi-variable analysis of her lovers.

I must include all of the most important characteristics, I thought. Lena thought this also. She could deduce her true love from statistical pattern. This all made perfect sense to Lena and to me as well.

Lena wrote all of the most important and favorite features of her lovers. Here is her list.

1. agreeable fetishes

(some of Lena's fetishes narcissism and voyerism. She could only feel pleasure by witnessing pleasure. This is why she would do anything to catch a man touching himself.)

2. ability to make her cum

(Lena only came for a partner when it was deserved. Many men do not deserve to see a woman in such an ecstatic state; many women are fools for revealing themselves too soon. By principle Lena had never fabricated an orgasm.)

3. the width of their cock 

(Lena had realized long ago that length mattered little in comparison with this vital feature of the male sex organ. Coincidentally, she learned from a Chilean lover that a woman could, with startling accuracy, estimate the abilities of this organ by the shape of its owners' nose.)

4. a favorite flower

(Her mother had been a florist. A man with an eye for beautiful things could never be faithful but always be trusted.)

5. time spent thinking about them after, during, and before.

(This was difficult, but because Lena lived in her mind as well as her body she had to think about it. Some lovers, she hardly recalled how they felt but she enjoyed to fantasize about them, imposing her own version of the reality that occurred. Others were fantastic but at once forgettable. Lena was looking for a holistic mind-dweller.)

Documentation took much longer than Lena anticipated. She delayed the final result by composing many silly schoolgirl side-competitions, such as softest-to-hardest and fattest-to-thinnest. Finally she tallied the results.

By god, this cannot be, Lena thought. I am in love with Umberto Eco.

another gentleLena

There once was a woman who traveled the world.

However, her adventures abroad afforded her neither sightsee nor souvineer; the mementos of her journeys were all in her mind and her skin.

As a child the woman traveled in books. Away from the sometimes seasons of her rural surroundings she escaped to and from the Occident. She was alone, the omniscient puppeteer to her self-built planet.

Thus, in spite of her solitude, or perhaps because of it, her life was exceedingly full.

As the child grew (her name was Lena), she grew tall and also away from books and into sound. She had read the world and now wanted to hear it. She knew what all of the cities sounded like. She knew what music the people who lived in them made love to.

Lena wanted to make love to the world now. She longed to experience the musical cities but was afraid to leave her own. She felt alone.

Thus, in spite of her solitude, or perhaps because of it, her life was exceedingly dull.

Lena decided to make love to the world then. She made herself beautiful. She looked exotic even though she wasn't. Finding lovers was easy for her. She knew them all already.

Her lovers were from all different places but always artists. She did not want to be an artist. She wanted to love an artist. She took a job at a gallery where she could always be displayed, a living work of art in striped dresses and heeled boots.

One lover was from Italy. He sent her a bouquet of roses every month. She let them die but let him come to her. He liked knee socks. Lena let him put them on her only to take them off.

"Lena," he said. "I want you to marry me."

But Lena hadn't traveled enough.

Another lover was from Russia. Lena pined for him like she had pined for no other. Thinking of his blue eyes made her wet. She got the chills. They followed him from Moscow, he said. The cold called. She never saw him again.

Lena took her Swede lover for a swim in a lake. He dared her to take off her underwear. She held them in her hand above the water and he grabbed them from her. He lost them and she was lost to him and she had to walk back to her house with no panties on under her skirt. He teased her about that. He put his hand under her skirt as they walked and they had to stop walking.

Lena loved each new lover differently. They were all special to her. She became a woman well-traveled. By her mid-20s she had gotten to all of the continents except one, and most continents more than once. She had a frenchman with beautiful hands and an Egyptian who offered to do her taxes. She invited a German to her bed and a Greek into the bathroom at a bar.

Lena's friends learned about the world from airplanes and eating. Lena learned only with her sex. Because she experienced the world so intimately she took the most intimate secrets of the world into her body. Her body showed that. Every day a new man asked her where she was from.

"Are you French?" the cashier said.

"Are you Polish?" the friend-of-a-friend said.

"Where are you from?" they all asked.

Nowhere she replied.

After seven years of this Lena started to confuse Beijing and Budapest. The scents of her lovers became one odiferous mess. She longed to belong to one place for she was Nowhere. Where is my home? she thought. I will make one of these lovers my home. I will settle into one of them.

Lena tried to settle into one but she could never stay in place. Some glacier or the ocean in floated on always called her away. She tried to ignore their calls but that only made everyone more passionate for the gentle Lena.

She stopped sleeping and only ate things that grew on trees. She disappeared into headphones and masturbated indefinitely to a perfect body composed of all her lovers.

She longed to stay even though she had really always stayed. Like a stray dog Lena wandered the globe underneath her bedsheets, which when touched revealed the perpetual wet of the world.

Dirty Dream no.2

I feel asleep in a familiar place for what was about to occur and perhaps that particular spot summoned an overlapping memory at any rate that's where the entire dream unfolded.

As early back as I can remember we embraced and I clumsily knocked something hard to obtain and costing you money into your lap; you effortlessly saved the prize and refilled the small capsule with what for some reason mattered to us.

Kissing you was desperation and I felt more eagerness from you which was strange because I always feel the more uncontrolled one; not used to feel like this anyway but I do now only with you.

Only you weren't you you were someone else who had came before. The arms which had just clung to your neck like tentacles released - no, pushed you away in disgust. I stared at you in horrible disbelief. Though you appeared identical inside I knew who you were.

You knew it too and smiled that smile I die when I see it I die. Now however now your insides taint that beautiful smile and you keep making very time-specific facial expressions each wonderful in a new and painful way. I want to suck them up for in my other life you are gone so much.

Mmmm skyscraper I love you - ringing in my ears (turned out to be the sizzling of a steak some bitch frying on the tele my god what a repulsive image to wake to my god). Strangled in a blanket (both instances) I fell off the couch.

I thought how to get you out of my house, my parents were upstairs. Hello they would tell you. But it's not really him it's him I'd say, as if this would explain why you weren't where I told them you were and neither were you especially not here.

Not gotten to the idea of hiding you near the furnace I actually woke. Oh god I thought oh god I am never taking a nap again because I dream so deep into my real thoughts, not like a runaway imagination but an imaginative run of real thoughts.

Really I told you though far (you're all far, all far from me) I don't compare I don't want anyone to get into my overlapping mastrubatory thoughts and late afternoon dreams one lunatic is enough one goddamned lunatic was enough and two was unlucky three a fucked up coincidence and four well four, well fuck you god I am starting to think it's me that's fucking you up, all of you.

More Cupcake Outtakes / Prayer Haiku

Hit counts indicate the last one was the second-most popular post on my blog ever. Objectification really works! But don't forget to read my poetry, too. Here's some whore-ified haiku to help make the transition easier. All photos credited to Kendra Schirmer. 



Sweet Saviour, bless my
clitoris with infinite
vibrating power.



Oh God, I know of
absolutely nothing worse
than a flaccid cock.



Creator, I am
not sorry for anything
I put in myself.

Pour Michelle

 to Gertrude, from Alice.




The woman feels where I think I might not feel but for her I feel for her I think for her I would admit art reflects life before art rejects life. Pour Michelle.

Ma Belle, we sprouted purple
kale and coffee grounds for
breakfast before the rest of
humanity sounded. But our beauty
cursed, the broken loyalty left
rotting in their universe: un
hombre, la femme, our holistic
devotion to everything them.

Ma Belle, autumn pointed us a
new direction. Apart literally.
But together again. What sin
ignites desire for less than
perfection? What troll claims
more grace? What cow shows
more taste? What goddamn dumb
human trades ideal for infection?

Ma Belle, we blinded companions
by merely existing. Michelle I
fell where you fell yet here we
are atop the zenith planting the
kale and sprouting some coffee
grounds and watching their sad
submergence in mediocrity. From
up here Michelle it looks nice.

Readily I/Spent a/Flow

Ready/over schism/thighs.

Set, untie riddles wrapped around
rhymes dripping wet.

Go as we draw unending lines of sweat –
a sweat colder to confess than “eyes big love-crumbs;”
abysmal to some, but
he reads allegiance in armored torso and metallic cum.

On Leaving

to Juan Pablo, who knows.

A few things stay the same. Coffee in the mornings, Tolstoy at night. My nails are still the same orange they were when I left but the fingers that hold them are tenser, the hands that hold them are tanner, and the body that holds them traumatized by absence. Who knew hours could be so hard, who knew vulnerability could be so easy. Time and space, my mortal enemies, I am keeping them close. Stitched into my emotional fabric, unravel, burn; destruction of the fibers remains an impossibility. But they are not the only ones committed to orientating my reality.

I am puzzled by my sudden willingness to violate my own maxims, as if I could be the one exception to the very system I erected.

Prose on Logic/A Love Letter

Academic trending of formal logic classes offered in 2008 reference William of Ockham in theoretical execution:

“the simplest solution
is the best solution”

Formal logic parallels geometry in structure and chemistry in method; the former supplies a blueprint of verification while the latter insists success by memorization. Thus, a complete mastery of formal logic is achieved not only by practicing certain rules, but through an elegant navigation and appreciation of their workable environment.

Arguments verified “reductio ad absurdum” (reduction to the absurd) challenge the aforementioned tenets by reducing formal logic to a game of elimination. In lieu of proof by axiom manipulation, reductio ad absurdum proofs seek not to justify a particular solution but to dismantle and negate every other possible solution. An assumption is made, and the logician presents absolutely no evidence of this assumption’s logical coherency except that all alternative solutions are ridiculous.

Proof by reductio ad absurdum is relatively simple to learn. In contrast to classic logical methodology, an adherent to this devastatingly existential strategy needs not even understand why or how their proof works.

The pleasantries of such a streamlined approach sour rapidly. At their ripest, Kelley receives an “A” in logic class, albeit with a residual sentiment of anger; somehow, her philosophical sharpness has been dulled by overreliance on efficiency and underestimation of a 21 year-old woman’s intellectual gauge.

Yet the most disastrous outcome of engaging formal logic reductio ad absurdum begins when pen-and-paper critical thinking forges a transposition into worlds outside textbook exercise. A variety of factors may or may not contribute mechanically or willfully to its mental embroidery – a notoriously pragmatic heritage, an utter absence of celestial declaration, a self-destructive neurosis, my lovers and the death of my loves.

I am in the process of eliminating each philosophical system, every theory of existence, all ethical frameworks and, most tragically, the concept of beauty in its entirety. The longer I live the more negated life becomes. Inconsistencies, fallacies, mistakes and regrets, they atonally nuance my assertion

“x is true”

and they do this in such a manner as to invade and permeate every aspect of thought – people and positions, to me the difference is inconsequential if it exists at all.

I don’t need to answer why this destructive proclivity guides my life or how I even initiated the aggressive quest for complete and total emptiness. My nihilism necessitates no further validation beyond capability.




Anomalies in systems, their presence, it warrants continuing existence.





(my sole relief is poetry.

my sole reliever is the poet.

He’d be
the boy who listens to my fingers speak.)

“How Much Can One Fuck-Up Do For Another Fuck-Up?”

for A.V.

A solution to absolutes. A cherished
equation: one and one, two together.
retracing lines of standard-route
but how about –
two apart, three together.
Two’s a start, but three’s much better.

Or four, for means of further
precision? One me for one;
one me for two. Together we constitute
((((The Quasi-Group))))

Respective to x where x equals time
our figures increase from four to five.
Six for the split, seven with y,
the drunken jump from eight to nine.

Ten for each digit I wrap around his…
– wait.
Redundant to elate. I’m counting
so high; it started at one.

. . . . . . . . . .

the splits were rough, the sex was wrought.

and alone I am.
but alone I’m not.

ha ha sound

ha ha sound.
if there is a joke to be made
it is on you.

ha ha sound.
if and only if.

Aesthetic Guidance Provided by "an item at once plural, yet referening a single item, to be worn around the sexed part of the body"

the dearest canvas pulled taut beneath the
weight and the gravity of my openness surges,
streaming strokes of rare color over peach
armor. Trembling,

enclosed in delicate ebony twist,
we erect the creation, installation vertical – no –
a declining angle – to enhance certain
touches vapid at first glimpse.

a signature, unrestricted to a crook and script
pierces the canvas with the aromatic ink (sweat and sex)
We step back to admire
the masterpiece.

Trials n' Tribs

la verdad, la verdad en las parablas.
tengo miedo, tengo suerte.

or worlds, words paraphrased.

la verdad, la verdad de mi madre.
quiero morir, quiero matarme.

allah, allah,
allah do you hear me.

Figure Studies 1 and 2

The One

Selfhood
swells of pus
where it has splintered,
segmented,
consciousnesses.

one for work
one for play
one for him
one that may

seduce, or confuse.
He moves and I choose
the one that will.
push him.
away.