(I)

I smell your ass on my finger as I smoke your menthol.  Thick and earthy, the smells make me puke a little bile.  I catch it in my mouth and swallow.

When I met you in the library restroom, you told me your name was Joe.  Not that it mattered.  Joe was better than most other names since I could easily disassociate it from you by thinking about the coffee I would drink after our encounter.

Nothing personal.  Any guy could be whom I wanted in that moment.  Modularity is metaxu: neither good nor evil.

I just wanted to be jacked off.

You were so tiny and well groomed; I almost consented to letting you fuck me.  But as we walked back to your dorm room, I decided against it for whatever reason.

Locked in your room, you stripped everything but your black socks with red patterns.  You must have worn them all morning but they had not twisted or bunched.  I lie on top of you, and we tossed each other off.

Not two fags in love, but two fags alive.  We shared a pure moment that we will repeat with others in different rooms.

Monotony is evil, but modularity reconfigures repetition.

Monotony is ever-new fucks, ever-new people.  The individuality of each partner looses coherence.  Similarities are exaggerated and differences forgotten.

Modularity is not concerned with numbers only functions; a singular fuck anyone can share.  Similarities between partners are desirable.  Although differences are not subjugated to them, so long as the function is fulfilled.

You slid your finger up my ass, and I returned the gesture.  We came quickly after.

As I dressed, you took out your menthols.  I bummed one even though I hate the flavor.

I smell your ass on my finger but before I reach the subway stop I don't mind.

Sensual experience slips and drifts contorted by progress and decadence.

Ever since culture forced symbols on experience and existence a need has arisen to view the senses as symbol generators because once a symbol manifests in culture, it assuredly exists.  All objects, events without symbol or significance cannot exist within culture.

The creation of symbols is an act of distance, which starts a process of cultural drift with possible results as cataclysmic as the plate tectonics of the Pacific Rim.

On the train, I see him—a young man with smooth white skin and black hair—wipe his mouth with a dirty white scarf. A beautiful surface.

I imagine what is left of your menthol against the soft meat of his ass; a little steam from the sizzle in the smoke.

What is the urge to destroy beauty?

Nothing endures but the instant when you prevent the page from remaining blank you own the page completely by limiting its potential.

Is absolute potential God?  If so when God exists the universe does not, and vice versa.  God is the reservoir of potential continually expended in the first and final potlatch.

I cannot look away.

We settle for destruction but desire a return to God.  Not that we can ever regain what he has spent.

He is reflected in the window behind him.  The world is reflections: mirrors, puddles.  Man thinks he mirrors the divine; he mirrors the animal.

Start from a point of evolution.  In the Temple of the Pro-Simian, few animals talk, fewer worship a collective figment of their alpha-male as we do.  There are no creation gods, only the stranger across the car from me with his too blue eyes and worn-out converse.

As he leaves, I do not speak.  Some reality has failed.  All things fall; fail.

Nothing remains, except a trace of shame.

(II)

Religion pours milk over her cunt; the law laps it from a melmac plate beneath her.

He worries an old woman will reanimate, scuttle around the floor, and bite into his ankle.  But the old woman is still slouched in the corner.  Dead people don't move; don't crawl.

But why then does their hair grow?

Their nails sharpen?

Their eyes shine?

The jug never ends.  The milk traces through her well-trimmed cleft. He licks the melmac and hopes it will never be clean.

Can we possibly escape their affair to a city in the stars?  Our small refuge?  Would we labor to cross the distance, to pay the fare away from this world?

Emerging from the mines our hair speckled with mica and sweat, we would discover the transport frigates orbit themselves in the visible sky.

I worry.  Anxiety not towards the men I seek or the non-existent God I crave.

A condition attaches to the remaining potential.  A continuos show down between is and could be, rendering each action the authoritative action in the acted- moment.

Our world ends with sensory perception, even when enhanced.  You approach infinity whether or not you touch the young man with black hair.  Pretty in his way, he is not a sun, a center of an orbit.

Imagining his secrets, creates false lives; reconstructs potential rooted in the past, not the future.  He is a house un-entered and now gone, his life cannot be his own.  A vision, I place in a web of what I know about men like him.

Humans are not our own; we exist on our own but are quickly collapsed into symbol by others.

We are assigned coordinates on psychical maps.  A place where we cannot have interiority.  We are like the beautiful city and there is no escape or nothing but escape.

In my self, I attempt to establish a fort, a place of strength: a base, a place of support.  From this point of peace, I attempt to exceed a fundamental excesses.  I lose coherence, only the atomic self remains.

Culture quickly cocoons me replacing personal excess and from this I must worm free again.

My destination will prevent this.

Humans evolved letting each and every failure, linger.  We breathe the impure oxygen of faith.  Next time you tell me what you want to do.

Inside: the door is off its hinges; the hinges are off the wall; the wall has crumbled; the fort is no more; the city is dust.

I must be terrible.  Not to you, but to myself.  I am who I fear.  My ideas; ideals; best, best hopes exhausted into tomorrow.

(III)

If every space was filled, I could love the stranger's body; could know him for Christ.  Maybe he would truly love me, but I am just a body.  My action issues from it alone.

This is not a dialogue of mind against body.  Victory of mind, I fail myself, my body: a page tattooed, black-lined wings down my back, a barbwire tree up my spine.

I keep the stranger as pornography in my mind.

We deprive porn of its beauty; debase it.  Those who admire it, couch their admiration in lascivious terms.  Hot.  Sexy.  I do not want this porn desexualized but perhaps an underlying aesthetic re-emphasized.

I notice another across from me.  He has bee-stung lips and a delicate nose.  As he reads a white book with a spine of colored bands, he runs his hand through his shaggy dishwater blond hair.

I see him, equate him with meat. 

I associate meat with mass and when writing on faith am compelled to write a meatless mass.  This meatless mass being like God, the image of the stranger with black hair.  This other will do and I write my name and number on a slip of paper, which I drop into the book.  I hope the name will be reduced to a desirable symbol because language is drift.

(IV)

There is a moment; reduced to your ideal symbol; will you rejoice?

What if your greatest dreams come true?  Your talents, your skills, all those intangible traits I look past in pursuit of the squirt become what are highest praised by culture?

What if you transcend even your imagined potential: you become Plato or Lao Tzu; you last millennia?

Will you then rest forever content?

Your words, images, artifacts will be co-opted by generations.

Language, vocal and visual, will drift.

Your work will decay; become a husk for new, alien thought to live in.  All that will last will be remnants of potential losing a battle with entropy.

But what if the work promises its own potential?

If the other phones, cum will spill.  Then silence reveals bafflement.  What else could there be?

The urge beyond language, the faulty wiring, too much politesse.

Nothing more than…art is a cupboard.

At the next stop, a fat pigeon chases another bird from a roost under an iron railing.  A city is not loved; is not natural.  It tries to extricate itself from the savagery of nature and fails.  With grace a place without cityscapes is easily the end of the soul.

That place, that vastness, that swollen promise is under a whole new sun.  A sun burning light that doesn't illuminate; a light that prevents theory and reason.

Theory read and believed causes thinkers to cluster around droppings and presume they are tracking prey.  But they draw ever farther from the sought, accelerating drift.  So eager they miss the movements of bodies (like the stranger's) pristine in decay.

They think they have hungry souls, spirits.  An infestation I hope not to be stricken with.  I fail and surrender to a vague identity I long against myself for.  Desperation at this failure, at my limits, I can no longer pursue a sun- drenched plain or the jungle in shower; only the blankness of the page, so quickly lost.

The trembling, fumbling, futzing with a dream-ridden self as I surrender to culture; put my anxieties to work.

I have a vague hope of where I'm going; a land not saddled with self; a drunkenness perpetual through retching; a floating world; a swimming world on the stranger, the prowed god.

I am nervous; no direct proof you are not against me.  Perhaps simple solitude will lead to your reduction.

If too much significance is put on any product, the pressure charges it; it looses coherence.

Slicing the eye, losing space, no breath, no immediacy.  You, too, lose your ability to judge when my finger-noose is slipped over your little head.

My placement of action is not fodder, only the refuse of a tiny escape.  I tunnel; resist; fail.

You push against the text, sort out places of inauthenticity and reality.  You know there is no soul without fiction.  You undermine the walls of my tunnel.

I am left with my funereal disease; Kharms called it Ignavia.  It is not a failure of the sun but the edge of politesse.

We fail and imagine the failure of God.

But God was wasted before we evolved.  The imagined failure leads us back into culture; to a place the alpha, the dark lord of life, still holds sway with a Celebration of the Hammer.

(V)

The train passes my stop.  The stranger gone.  The other gone.  Alone in a noisy silence.

Experience is never enough in that it is too lost and murkied; bland and confusing; a melange too mixed.

My fear of a soul, spirit intrudes.  Alone in the car I want meaning even if just a life lightly meant.

Surface; body; creation necessitates symbol.  We seek, release and retrieve the pre and post conceived notions.  We struggle as creation, the central question, reconstructs.

Lost, I start from a place of imminent failure.

Discomfort.

Forget, I want to start again.  The body marks a certain failure.

Do not breath.  Do not exit the car.  Each act means a motion past failure.

Anxiety, so I start to write not my life but a body of work that communicates with itself; cancels figures; directs the new.  Writing not as philosophy; writing not as analogue, the words on the page differ not in discursive nature; descriptive origin; labeling information; but differ.

The nature of the plural you, divides, withdraws.  We work within the context of others; the gentle fall.

The art of falling, a work never finished, never tiresome; remains human at a steady empty gait.

What breath.

What hope.  Can we manage an escape; an out?

Little words sing, luring meaning as word and character divorce themselves.

Alone, a tightness in my vertebrae; a puckering of my hole.  No escape as gentle as this; so strong as the promise of language.

The act, the fact of production signifies only a re-configuration of cultural product in consumption.  The process of consumption is the most engaging act of failure, mediating between self and stranger; self and other.

These characters are poor automatons not offering an open mechanism; blank trait is in character X's behavioral pattern.

We know their function; we know they're modular; why subject them to the shadow of language?

"You" is just as modular.  You are just as modular.

Words are a medium that can never succeed, since the charge of a word if altered changes the reading of the world; a process of decay.

Read beyond original intent; read in culture but against culture's flow.

Language will be lost but I have no comfort in silence except each way of knowing fails.

How do we resist text.  We do not move.  We deny.  We slip; fall into garbage, filth, fragments.  The I; the eye; it is a charge leaving no world but the past breaking on the etymological present and the future existing as a way or rotting.

You never confess self except to the vast emptiness.

Confession/testament both bleed into the law, into religion, a single false faith.

(VI)

We follow our failures into fallow ground.  Ground to be tilled, claimed, reclaimed, until we fail here too.

This failure is a matter of words; the constructions of symbol; the thoughts of a fluttering myopic who writes without faith.

At Delphi, Apollo, inscribed among other things, Know Thyself.

So know myself? I like commercials but dread the products.  I claim to be interested in the means of consumption but I don't actually know what that means.

Confronted with material I don't understand, I emulate it.

Do not exceed the self; the motion without soul or intellect.

Reduce the self and pursue the shadow.  Raise a corner of the text and wind around the feet of giants.  If not giants those who threaten to dwarf me.

Confused I ride on.

A recorded violin pierces me.  I turn slightly to the listener behind me.

Slack jawed; acne down his jugular; he will do.

Uncombed mousy hair, picked at random; he will do.  Not for a razor drawn across the eye.  Not for a jaw split on a curb, leaving teeth roots and nubs.

Not even for clumsily pounding his flat ass in a dark corner or sucking his musky balls.

But he will do in that at the next stop he exits, minding the gap, to lead a life that may or many not bore me.

Incidents untold.  Motions unmeant.

His limited escape.

(VII)

Escape in small motions.  I follow him to the platform but think I see the stranger leaning against the turnstile.  Now in a blue ski cap and an unmarred black leather jacket.

Only a synthesis of facial features; a pale face, dark brow.  His hair barely poking from his cap is burnt a yellow blond.  A red armband and straight white laces against his black Docs suggest racial violence but one stylized.

Collapsed in culture he has limited potential.  I pass him side stepping a dark cowled pigeon pecking at a chicken bone.

Hope is not a failure of motion, only a failure of threat.  The function is not always the function you see.

The word is not the function of the word; an investment of a gesture home, a state of nostalgia.

The word has other presences.  It makes stimulus-response without stimulus.

The word is void. Cock in khakis.  The other must be approached.

Culture snakes around constricts urges: Bacchus and the Plague god, a seeming end of failures.

Subtle aromas; chemicals and their needs are not less human.

If synthesis follows me I will beat him tender, cut the softest self-lubricated chamois from his skin.  A souvenir, noting it is not itself.

We proceed to a diner whose name reads Golden for dirty yellow.

No voices, we are alone.  No cutting.  No slicing.

(VIII)

Inside: smoke and yellow light.

I am seated in a booth across from a young father. Wavy brown hair and mutton chops.  When he kneels to play with his daughters, a band of skin between his faded navy Dockers and red T-shirt is exposed.

A pre-stonewall desire; the beating of queen's heart.

I order a coffee.

The insect, beetle blue sunglasses of a tiny fag in flip flops approaches.

The cold surface on the pale face reflects me, a text writing itself to failure, circling an end, chasing a narrow escape.

This you sits across from me and I will ask if you want to go somewhere and jack each other off.

text



Nicholas
Alexander
Hayes