..My greatest desire is to be desired.
Zalokar
Desert Hearts
..Disappear into beauty, the desert whispered to me at the beginning of World War III.
Ill Fares the Land
In my dreams, I was constantly losing my brother in the midst of World War III. In despair, I didn’t want to go on, but I’d go on. I’d see him then as he was as a kid of four or five. His sweetness got him killed. Whereas I, even at my worst and most lost, always had an instinct for reality. I’d felt from an early age appointed or called by something. But reality was a minefield, starting with my own somatic experience (failure to be held). Something, some threat in the biological or social world, was always poised to interrupt where I was meant to go (K’s theory early in our friendship about Spinoza, Proust, imperial time, and death, and years later when he told me about what Grace Lee said about James Boggs, how she’d never met a person who could sleep so soundly, the kind of sleep that comes from being a Black man born in Alabama who lives and breathes a revolutionary humanity).
Ashes (& Fetishes)
..The ultraleft poets, former readers of Tiqqun (turned towards moralism, though occasionally they would still say liberals, put a bullet in your head), were bitching about a cringe and morbid poem written by a Seattle doctor about his “friend” the maintenance man, his “friend” Juan, dead of Covid on the couch before he was even fifty: a necropolitical dirge for the working class, a poem written to bury, not to praise, the working class, etc. The good doctor knew enough to ask what right have I to write this poem? But this only infuriated the ultraleft poets more. As did the admittedly offensive and aesthetically appalling image contained in the line I who will not see him in his uniform of ashes (the doctor must have thought he was channeling Paul Celan), which made me wonder if the doctor thought janitors are buried in their uniforms, condemned to the pyre in their subordinate social role. The ultraleft poets were not happy with this poem. They asked when one has the right, ethically, to mourn, in a poem, another over whom one holds power in a hierarchical relationship. I thought it must be tiring to live this way, to create art this way.
The Past Is A Grotesque Animal
Excerpt from the unpublished novel Dzhokhar Tsarnaev I Love You.
After a few years of silence, R began to receive death threats again from Kaveesha, the Berkeley ultraleftist child of Tamil Tigers. He sent her memes of Mayo jars to remind her she was white. This is just sad, R said. If he were getting to some real deep cruel shit, I would be into it. (She was an extreme emotional masochist).
********************
Then he started sending her love poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. He didn’t stop sending her death threats. She asked me to write a response to his ludicrous, dangerous, manic emails. I told her my days of ghostwriting for her were over. (No more eulogies, elegies, birthday wishes, love letters, etc. You’ll have to write your own suicide note, I told her. We all have to write our own suicide notes, at the end of the day.)
Hormones
I (Lust)
Shut up kiss me hold me tight
C was from Montreal and she was married to a pretty famous UFC fighter who was training at a big gym in San Jose for an important fight in Vegas. We met on a kink app used mainly by radical queers (or at least queers who like weird sex) and vampiric married couples at the very end of their rope, looking to stave off the apocalypse of the bourgeoisie, or at least to eroticize it.
A Cuckold Story
The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.
Two Faces of the Sinophile
Les fous sont rois et moi je bois Mao Mao
Going Down (Again) (Wednesday April 21, Trip #21)
Question: How can I mourn the life of Joel?
I am in Joel’s hospital room at Alta Bates, where I visited him so many times I lost track. That brutal winter of 2018. His heart is failing. He always looks happy to see me. I bring him Carl’s Jr. even though the doctor says sodium could kill him. Joel knows better than to believe her. There are certain pleasures we hang onto, a savor to life, that medical science doesn’t know.
Going Down (Wednesday April 14, Trip #19)
Question: How can I live a “legendary” life?
Goodbye-ing
One night in August, while I was watching Cavani’s The Skin, I learned that Jay had died.
Letter from the Coast
Hey B, absolutely been hitting the streets. Here in Oakland the pigs and our pig-accomplice mayor are not fucking around. But it’s being led by kids and tutored by the elder generations (and I like adjusting to being an elder), we got such a tradition here.
Morbid Symptons (Anti-Semitism & Amity Road)
Who else is going to love someone like you that’s marked for death
Intercommunalism (A New Decade of Ghosts)
my delusion is soaking through/makes my whole world wet with the idea of you
Fuck Jeffrey Epstein (Varieties of Necro Leftism)
I was living in a devil town/I didn’t know it was a devil town
A World Without Borders
I just wanna feel myself, you want me to kill myself
Baader-Meinhof Blues
I’ve made love in every way possible, she said. I don’t believe you, I said. In every way possible? In every way, she said, and I didn’t say anything (I preferred to shut up, maybe I was embarrassed) but I believed her.