i is Haunted

it crosses through us like a goddess. we cannot capture it. it makes us teeter with emotion. it is in this living agitation that there is always room for you in me, your presence and your place. i is never an individual, i is haunted. i is always, before knowing anything, an i-Love-you.

we have acted out the war of everything in a private event. you and i are a structure that is singular and dual, both of us, bound by a double braid. we were enchanted by not-sex calling it “sex,” by not-rape calling it “rape,” by not-love calling it “love.” to tell the truth i trap each element in quotation marks.

i longed to reject “dating,” its trend, its code, its cannon - paid entrance, men as a conditional source of affection - that dried up the mystery of all things. i had already heard your lies, every instinct knocked up against another layer of mistrust, instead of doves i sent out daggers, they climbed up over your chest, another heart coming to attack its like. i handed my body over to you at your first sign of indifference.

we must be a numerous and coalescent personality, both finding comfort in distance kept, needs masked by seductions we both meant and meant not to make. our intercourse was a calculated accident. my kingdom is the instant, of course i am not its queen, only its citizen,

a couple: a pair of opposition, his entrance, his exit, a passages, a tearing a part, disturbs her, changes her, finds its resting place at the boundary of self/other, where energy soars. i came up the stairs laughing, well oiled with adventure, robed by the allure of penetration;
you - form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress,
me - matter, concave, ground, holding and dumping, ground.

some delicious coat of danger i coated thickly upon your memory, yet from start to finish we both acted out in a way painfully characteristic to our gender; that perversity of sexual difference, logos/pathos,

i the single-focus, schizo-obsessive feminine “u r my 1 + only” and you its foil, the logical, “2 + 2 makes 4” 1,003 lovered don juan. he who relies on a form of love geometry that is true, definite and clear. she with her magical psychosis, her fantasy of continuous union, a way of transforming real into perfectly focused hyper real. both encounter a wild fight, one to and one from reason. for both, real contact is crisis.

i tried to erase it, cut the electronic thread that linked me back to you, 9 - 1 -7, but as hard as a tried, 7- 7- 6 , the numbers began adhering 1 - 5 - 0, adhering to my memory against my will, as i erased i couldn’t forget, 1. i would contact you again, tenuous seductions that would float back to shore unopened, beached on their backs singing “fear, longing, hesitation, disgust.”

you’d tried to erase me, 47, 48, 49, blonde, brunette, red head. each brutal pony tail, each milky bosom, every set of tear stained eyes – she, i, they, we are all girls that haunt you, haunt your i.

afterward, as i lay there in your bed, drunk, air-conditioned, sexually satisfied, like a princess in your castle, you the king sleeping outside by the television in a reclining chair, your thrown. but what if we could close together like 2 spoons, would feminism bite her tongue? i wanted to be the whore, she who would catch a glimpse of man at his worst. but what i remember of your violent basement was the sweet bits – clasping your fingertips to keep my balance, you zipping up my baby doll dress, moments when you appeared vulnerable. blaming would mean confusing my own pathology for yours, holding, hanging on to, keeping – that was my standard. cut off from your attention i needed nothing more then what you had falsely offered and would never, ever, give: intimacy, real or imagined, the keys to the castle.

so like children we waited at the edge of our dream, lips poised to drink at the pleasure pipe, genitals excited by terror. we fed on a mystery, a poison – afraid of dying there. the tragedy of the body is that it will speak the trouble of our souls. it is in this living agitation that there is always room for you in me, your presence and your place. i is never an individual, i is haunted. i is always, before knowing anything, and i-Love-you.



*material printed in italics is taken from selected texts of Helen Cixous