Beastly's Choice

Neuroses is a modern form of Romanticism, and the internet is its golden apotheosis. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and if it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality. A heavy block went resting over my fountain, my spring. It was the weight of language. And pictures.

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used
as a body. When I play with perfection, perfection plays back. Hair curled and pinned, fur trimmed, lashes unnaturally long, shades drawn – I was your decorated darling and you my invisible king. Our contract was a floating wish-dream soaked in nightly sun.

I am the dirty skirt in the sludge of desiderata. I build traps. My selections are only stiff and taught. They crumble and bulge. Submitting all my fattish poetry to a greedy cell, drowning in shrill paradise fugues sewing new dresses for new boyfriends. I’ve already burned through that term. Language has destroyed me I have destroyed her back. I turn shit to crack without a wand. I boil kryptonite without poison. I am the conductor of the pain singing in my spleen, my liver, my bile, my Gavin folding back on Gavin folding back on Gavin.

But the fairytale wears a gown that makes a breeze, makes a space between
the feet and earth, wood and rust. I am a girl with my fishtail dipped in the mermaid. He is my garland of calculated danger. My love illusion, my game with syllables and pixel sticks. Gavin folding back on Gavin folding back on Gavin. The disease is the lover. The mind married to itself, copulating with its own inventions. The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. I do not steal from her, I only live in concert with her abyss*

The further I soar into fantasy and live by my selections, the more I
feel the suffocating hand of a nameless anxiety. The further I soar into life the more the tears break through like a quiet, gentle wave. Drawing myself out of the swamp by the pigtail. Sixteen years old in the California mist, sitting on the fencepost, feet dangling in jellies, counting the number of cars just like yours. 1, 2, 3, 4, the promise of protection, 5, of union, 6, intimacy, 7, the promise of 8, the promise of 9, 10, 11. Control as the locus of the bouquet, adrenaline sundaes, ribbons of poop, dead fathers.

Fear of the world produces crystals in writing, crystals in writing produce gems in heat. Art is the great sterilizer. My work is the glowing edge of my disease.

Scrape the gloss off avoidance. I am a great explosive force. I have such freedom in me, such fearlessness. But I build a cell and I decorate it. I never let myself explode. I put all kinds of obstacles in my own way, they are all obstacles, lids, restrictions, all my loves are devotions, services, keeping me from exploding. I almost have drowned my strength. I dipped into perfection again, I came back with scraped knees and the film of betrayal on my palms. I came back with a lesson: Fantasy is towards death. My gown is towards death. She is towards infantile satisfactions and magical authority. She is the tortured cunt. She is release through excess canalized by game rules. She is dirty notes played back in a dazzle shelter.


*Material in italics is taken from Anais Nin’s Diary Volume 2, 1934-1939