Between happiness and grief.

I keep thinking that I have a self

And in that

Do not love.

My burdens

Are a fiction.

What there’s been

Is non-stop being.

It’s Friday.

I gather to an end

Memories –

I have a narrative.

I commit to it. It’s painful.

I collect because I have

Loved pain.

It’s glorious.

And real.

I just

Know about it.

Apparently.

So if love

Is a technology

For sex

How betrayed my body has been

By my confusion.

I like it to be wild of heart and happy.

I like it to be happy.

Who am I

In this essay on the failures

Or inadequacies

Of sexual optimism?

It’s radical

To take the essential good out of sex

The essay says.

I know that’s very stupid.

I feel it is stupid

Deep inside my pussy.

Sex constitutes my body as woman.

What it means

To require that theatre is personhood.

The condition of which

Is gender.

To fuck

Or be fucked

Is

To appear.

I make clothing decisions

(they’re unsuccessful)

On a Friday. It’s May.

Something pulses around me.

Pulsing

Locates my pubis

As a site of recent activity.

I was a person.

I have an opening.

It’s soft.

Look –

There are crickets in the lizard’s tank.

They make the noise of being alive.

Some of the crickets are in a tower-shaped plastic container.

The kind you put cereal in if you do that.

There are carrot shavings

And a crumpled-up egg carton

In the plastic cage of the crickets –

So they might eat and perch

And live to die.

They feed

To be

Food.

I myself eat shaved carrots in a stir-fry.

I don’t live in a cereal container.

But basically I do.

Anyway I have to live.

An essay challenges the good of pleasure.

I write the person I want to love.

Perhaps I am hasty

Or I am stupid, for

The Sagittarius

Hunts.

I look to her restraint for freedom.

Meanwhile I am love incarnate

All the time.

I came

To lay burdens down

But I don’t have any –

I’d taken memories to the day as a tool for pity.

Pity. An ugly world and an ugly way.

Something with nails holds the couch cushion.

It is a lizard.

Because I get close

Its red eye’s on me.

I have no burdens to lay down

Because I have no fricking story.

I lie down

So as to uncrease

My capable shoulders –

I have shirts. Crisp shirts.

Anyway,

I remember the despair

Duty put inside my night –

I remember a dreamscape

Of a freshly dead mouse at my bedside.

Yeah, how am I supposed to

Dispose

Of a burden?

In the future

A mouse does die.

It lies upon the dusk

Blue of my kitchen floor

Its face entirely semi-human I mean I just

Ran.

The superintendent.

I hid in the hall while he did the stuff.

Two days later I scrubbed from the floor

A teardrop-shaped stain.

It smelled like meat.