We were holding hands by the fire, listening to Erykah Badu. It was one of those times when I recognized that Miss Badu was teasing of her body by different plays in the lyrics. This is in the album that I like the most, Mama’s Gun. She talks about her titties hanging low and her nebula hair being short and shoulder-length and shit, I understand all kinds of things like that. Do you? With your Eyes low. I’m eyeing you. Of course you would never understand, not even through me, which is how I’m able to exchange love with you so innocent. Oh, I love how your jaw connects to the pinions in the back of your throat that make your voice work. You are distinctly not a little bird at all. You could be a monster if you wanted to be. The thrill runs up the back of my neck and I have to suppress a giggle. It’s not funny, but it’s hot to be scared. Women say, “It’s not funny…” and crowd-work scan the room because they know by their heinous little giggles. Yes, yes it is so silly girls. I always loved the phrase: peals of laughter. Yes.

Oh, yes. This is something here, chaste and bumbling.

The bed of the truck rumbles to life and the trees that float by are full of life…they’re lifeless to us in our submarine, though, because we’re inside of a vehicle. A machine! Our feelings toward each other could be mirthless and hostile but still the mechanisms of the vehicle would hold us separate from all of the highway’s Others. The road is hopelessly expanding like a ventricle, creating berths and verisimilitude and little isolations. Here’s our car and here’s the rest of the world. Making love is like, here’s us and your penis and then there are other people who do this as well. We’re all of them when we do it together. I’m reading Sartre so I wonder if that’s God, when we know we’re all one and separate the In-Itself and the For-Itself. Can you believe it? Are you For-Me or is this passing slicing fruit and mouthes? Our eyes briefly meet as I watch you drive and you roll you eyes, beautiful pony who loves attention. Your jaw is loose because you’re singing, and you’re happy. The exorbitant price of this emotion! But you’ll pay. You get the kind of aggrieved that is born out of delicate insecurity but the salt of you sweats it away. You get the kind of rosacea I think is sexy on your face and you always have bits of it when you’re happy and the sheer cost of that emotion. You give it away as though you have nothing left. I like it though, whatever. For how long. I watch your eyebrows blanch different shades of colors. In lecture, I’m briefly stunned because a woman’s hair is so, so beautiful — soft chestnut tumbling into creamy blond, and all curly and spilling forward from the back of her head like a fountain. Aspirants know that a woman’s neck is a column and the nape is the temple. My hand touches the cool metal of the building’s austere handles and the ghosts of the institution appear. They cry together, beautifully, “Become a member of the bourgeoisie! Embrace academic privilege! Let your beliefs in a radiant new universe melt into published books, settled salaries!” Here then, appear the sciences; here is poetry, here is Spanish literature, here is mob relief, here is black pepper, here is your beating heart. Here is logic and here is delusion; here has become puerile and so we must start writing our radiant future. Together.

Didn’t it make you laugh, when digging into a falafel bowl, there was a whole wedge of lime, but seasoned with sazon of all things — or it could’ve been Tajin, but it was crunchy and OD deep-fried like it was intended to be a vegan sausage or something — I think bad writing is often greed because it relies on the writer’s life being a lilting cartwheel to work. What I mean to say is don’t get caught up on making everything try to look like a lush little department store catalog, and we’re all hunching over teeny granola packs with our thumbs up our asses. Bumper sticker headass you think your life is supposed to be a movie. I’m more like the evening you and your tribe decide to rest for a blip in the refuge of a marble cave and a wolf comes in with a strip of his flank missing but he walks in like a dancer and laughs like he’s not crying. He knows that the wound will heal. I’m like the wolf. I’m like the dense fear in the cave. I think Thoreau was a little greedy because he was surrounded by a lot of natural glory that has been generationally eroded by industrialists so I’ll never get to see it the way he saw it — I think he was a little greedy because he had all that beauty and of course phrases were coming to him so orgasmically that he was a wooden medium, vessel, oscillating and oscillating. He had people coming over, too, all night long. Not every night. I’m becoming politically quite atheistic but subliminal things in that way make me connect the dots. I was thinking about X so I saw X and now I believe in X. Conspiracy is poetry and the schizo void is Saturnian in it’s discipline. Everything has to be fascinating in the narrative of the life of the author, one must be a great writer. One must be a great writer, suffering is the bracing wilderness. The wilderness is fascinating, one must be every thing. One must be in the narrative, fascinating.