[preface]

6 6 6 5 7 4 1

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At a certain point I should admit

That getting published under the wrong pen name

Is probably my own fault

For

Having too much fun

With pseudonyms

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Yet I'm still splicing off new burner emails

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body.made.of.god.plus.e

@

gmail.com

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(You can reach me any time)

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In my nightmares you'll show up in my inbox

Accusatory

Saying my brand's too inconsistent,

The jokes not gelling with the tone I strike here,

or,

The avatar reading a little off the mark

Now that you've got some recordings of my face

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“&& y does she type her tweets like this 4 if shes

trying 2 seem grammatically club0rrect in her writing”?

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I suppose I'm the only one

Thinking about it much

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My second bad habit: taking different sides

Just to play Pontius Pilate for myself

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The real issue is overexposure to cameras

(More on that later/for the rest of my life)

But I misdiagnose myself with an obviousness –

d/i/s/i/n/t/e/g/r/a/t/i/o/n

0o0o0o0

[face]

My full narrative begins, of course, going the opposite direction –

Coming together

I'm talking about memory in its first startling appearance

Sensations, really points of light, all groping for each other

Points of life

Sensations before they know to turn into a scene

The body born before this, in some bleak moments seeming like a technicality, but it was actually putting in the unpaid work, building up the systems so I could feel these things

Building up a consciousness that would treat it like shit

aaand

Weird little cosmonauts dissolve on me like snowflakes

If I never figured out the reason it happens

I'd never have to worry if I'm somewhat pulling strings

This is what I know about chiaroscuro:

It's the reason that the earliest scenes to stick with me are dreams, or pastiched memories sold off as originals, or DVD footage

This last category mostly had staying power when it encountered me at night, late, and was able to assimilate the blank of the endless outside with the blanks on the edges of the screen, or those in the fades between previews or credits

Space and time remaining somewhat interchangeable

Ways to give the pixelated light a sense of weight

Gunfireflies prickle under my eyes later

I incision those documents away for now

(What Husserl, I believe, refers to as parentheses)

If you can't shove your narrative into a much too constricted outline

You don't deserve to have your innards burst out

Would you want life to be a movie?

Do you want it if it's jump cuts and ending in two hours?

Gone, replaced by a black totality,

Ground for the white text acknowledging the cast and crew

Such a silly dream, but when I re-view my history there's just some reasonings that turn kind of obvious –

Why I'm good at the kind of malicious reduction that would let me look at my past like, say, this:

[face]

The moon wanes placid in a sky that looks blank (because of light pollution caused by “nights out” like this one).  Supposedly it's having some influence on us, reaching right down to touch me and I'm flippantly ignoring – I'm sorry, but my deficiency lends itself towards lack of deep attention.  There's a burst of static from the sound system randomly, and I'm equally not considering the influence of that.  My date is a straight line away, like the moon.  She's telling me something about machine learning and LSD, and I'm spending my last eleven dollars on more wine.  One of us let ourselves get talked into this, maybe both us, actually – I feel dull tonight, and the way my money burns, I should think I'm clearly out of my league.  I'd be partially correct, but what happens next is the kind of moment that my memory's attuned with:

        0 .          /:                            _——>

A white noise sweep ushers in lush synth padding, above which a pop singer works through ~{a hit from the sixties}~.  She's so focused on maintaining a playful lilt that she can't help but flub the melody.  The arc of the emotion comes through collapsed.  For this, we all rush to pay her millions of dollars, given there'd been something in yesteryear's formal songs that we'd been eager to forget.  My date begins to gesture at –

Cringing, I pause what's now a film within a film.  The pop music is good, maybe the moon, but cut the date – at absolute best it's self-pitying and bland, in a way that comes off as painfully masculine.  I'm taking these notes when my childhood self starts screaming “fuck you” from the projection booth behind me, where I've conned them into handling the technical work.

I get it.

I get that they don't “get it”.  I wouldn't have wanted to watch this bullshit either when I was fifteen, especially pre-editing. They only deal in truly heavy-handed symbolism (starting with themself), and they can't conceive of wanting anything else.  

I mean, there was this whole deal they tried to sell me on about wanting to die in a car crash at thirty – some convoluted Fitzgerald reference: thirty as the age of lost innocence, cars as American excess (and, more transparently, just a huge source of anxiety for the poor kid, who felt like hurling whenever they got back from a driving lesson), and then Gatsby is mildly a Christ-type and Christ died at thirty and someone in the book dies by car – not Gatsby, but you know, close enough.  I'm not clear on the details.  I mean, I wasn't even present for this.

I later fact-checked the kid and Jesus was definitely older than thirty when he died .  That also means he wasn't twenty-seven when he started his ministry, and so there's nothing significant in turning this age.  Cobain and such, I guess, but ashes comparatively.  Don't think that I could lose myself in them like in $*~Christ~*$.

The violent path towards subjectivity would be deciding to run with my inner child's deranged blueprint, just make myself significant anyway.  I'll be Daisy driving the yellow car.  I'll drive it all over the fucking facts.

But yellow's such a drab – just honestly

I'd rather die purple to a blue star's grave

I'd rather kiss in velvet or teal until the sexual

Cedes to color all the last drops of its poignance

If I were turning sixteen again I'd go look at a parking garage or something, shuffle my cards around until they're

        club club heart club club club club

If I were sixteen and I'd already bound myself to the written word, instead of “hiding” in music (I admitted this explicitly), –

and say I had like six-hundred spines –

If I was that and here now I would write something like this:

[face]

If you're out of step with the world

Then your poetry's only as

Good as how much it's

Out of step with the world

(A marketing tip, not an ethical plea)

What I'm saying is:

I hope that you'd fuck any stranger

You find giving that look into your eyes

And I'm hoping this as a competitor

Because for me,

Frankly,

Most of the time,

It's the obvious answer to just

““Go home and fumble with different bits of myself””

(Is that a metaphor?)

(Go {ask} yourself)

The only way I could ever show you my

Subset of onanism

Is writing this:

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V

The Hideous in my life treat me like a solid

Then go and berate my sickliest tendency:

The way I fill all available space

Look a little closer at how I behave

Spend a little time analyzing my function

My threat is to never ever make you be the same

                        Honey in cocktail with vinegar

        

                        Hooks in the eye of a friend

Jesus, even, was expansive like this

Needed a friend to help him contain

Himself

To give him

One kiss

Leading to

Three nails

Christian children breath the story

Three nails

Stuck in his hands and his feet

Imbecilic lit crit instincts make you quick to read those as cocks,

Read them,

Read them again

It was three metal nails that he needed to hold

Himself

And even then dissipates

In fifty days (!)

What will I ask from you

If I decide I'd

        like 

To keep some self intact??

        +~!   _ _ . .    ++{O))))))))

                        ::;:;:::::        i7!                    __,

In a year or so, I swear I'll have closed these gaps up

So fuck your nerves and run your fingers, Thomas

In three years time…

[scene]

The director in me has already been distorting this, adding a little personality like her sunglasses (always)(already) do

“Keep the angst, lose the sense of acne-riddled contemplation.  Get those line breaks cleaned up, not like that you idiot, give it some pacing.  Give me some strike throughs and shit.  This isn't fucking amateur hour.  All your (new)old tricks – the audience still wants Jane fucking Judith.  Actually, put the contemplation back in.  Ok yeah, all of it except the tangent on the sacraments.

Good, good, now have the older self speaking it – isn't that just wonderfully anachronistic? – painfully severe but she's dressed like a d-list queer hipster's take on a farm girl.  Quick scribble out a second layer of an intro – there – now I think it's perfect as it is”.

Then she turns the projector in my eyes and I can't see anything and I see the whole reel in it's brilliance.

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– , ' , * + * , ' , –

Anyway, my point is:  Welcome to the new year

There's a new bitch in me who realizes it's Scorpio

Season

Seasoning

Season of the (w)itch

– , ' , – , ' , * + * , ' , – , ' , –

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– , * + * , –

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The butterfly smiles at all that like it's bunk

Like the past's death is just the working out of being who you've been

I used to smoke                

and                

Let myself believe in these naiveties                

Put it on Instagram          

Do it for fun        

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That last line means chalk outlining myself in the air

Do it out of loneliness like “somebody catch me”

Anyway, my point is: welcome to the new year

Is there a new bitch in me               

Realizing her Scorpio…….. …….. .. ……         ?

[scene]