“I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me” - Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

I met Sissy Spacek for a gab session at our normal spot. The corner of the dive, right next to the wall, inhaling secondhand smoke and nursing headaches. Beside me a light switch labeled XMAS on the top end and NOT XMAS on the other was flipped up. It was December. Red, green, and yellow bulbs laced up and down the bar, illuminating the bartender’s taut arms. She found my eyes. I looked away. Sipped on my seltzer. Snapped a photo of her. I’d fucked her once. Afterwards I’d stared and panted and said, you’re a good person you make me feel alive. She said, fuck your gooey shit tell me how tight and wet my pussy is. Now at the bar I couldn’t look. I recocked the shutter. Took a picture of Sissy. Aleph. Flashbulb. Told myself to forget about the bartender and her pussy. Kept my mouth running.

GodDAMN, is Ulrike Meinhof fuckable. Something about a woman with conviction, man. 

I thought you were reformed. That’s just garden variety misogyny. 

Sissy, there’s nothing at all to see here. You don’t got any reason to analyze me. Give it up. I just sat here at this table with a hardon and a fantasy. Don’t you ever think about it? 

Fucking the RAF?

Sexuality’s relation to self-preservation; everything anyone wants in life comes at the butt of a pistol. The hottest thing a girl can do is show she’s unafraid. Particularly of violence. 

Girl cálmate. Learn to flinch. It’ll do you good.

The thing is that I came harder than I’ve come in my life last night thinking about Missy Meinhof with her big cock - well, her big rifle - pressed up to my back. And yeah there was a bitch down between my legs with her fat lips wrapped around me and I did have my fingers a few knuckles into her and she was real fuckin wet and could fit me way down her throat but you know what got me was that image of Meinhof with the gun, bruised neck and all, in prison for murder, the whole fucking government scared of her. Fucking sexy. I believe in copycat crimes and I believe in their goodness. I do seek exaltation. 

Whatever man. You’re drunk.

Ain’t had a drop hun. 

Dunno that I trust you an inch, honey.

Ain’t had a drop for years.

Well ain’t you a saint huh.

And you just the sweetest baby I ever did know.

Leaning on that bar like a walking stick.

Presupposing my old age? Spare me the grief. Suppose you gonna tell me you’re clairvoyant while I’m straight sanctified and doomed for my faith in a fucking chamber filled with powder.

Motivations die in dreams. Better a chamberpot than a bullet. 

You saying I smell like bullshit?

Just drop it. You’re gonna piss all over the one good thing that’s happened to you. 

And that would be you, would it?

You know how bad I want to love you? Jeez.  You make it damn hard. 

We smoked two cigarettes each on the street, lighting one with the butt of the other like children playing telephone. Aleph. Flashbulb. Gorgeous, all spread out on the concrete.

“Motivations die in dreams” is an example of a meaningless series of words a pair of lovers might speak into a specific corner in the hope that hearing each other across some interstice could take the place of true intimacy. Every tourist knows the story of the room near the oyster restaurant where you can press your ears to opposite corners of the hall and hear a beloved voice over a distance, crystal clear. Fools giggled into concrete and hallucinated meaning out of the rush of air through steel canyons, fell in false love with the wind. Vanity is beauty, a lover proud of her own pride like a self-satisfied animal sitting atop a nest, unaware her eggs have been parasitized and drained of their fluid. She coos her sweet coos, invokes lies and delusion, thinks about the cocktail she’ll slurp up with her tube beak. I keep her memory safe in my breast. Next to her a precious jewel, my mother, my desecration. 

Romances are all stereotyped. Would rather any imaginable horror and violence than be caught dead in the bed of a man I truly loved. Aleph. Flashbulb. I used to carry a camera everywhere til I began to notice its weight. I photographed a man very dear to me whose hands rested a few inches from his side, raised aloft like they weighed less than nothing like they could have lifted him up. His name prosodic in my mouth, I felt it again. Sssss. Heavy brows sharpened shadows of glasses on cheekbones. Oily hair that managed to be unbearable and sexy. Wrinkles soften lines and corners. Of his name, I whispered it in two stages before depressing the shutter in the same manner, first halfway, then fully, and then whispered it again after the photo had been taken; addicted to him as a gambler to losing. 

I said then, I owe you now Sissy. A pack of cigs, a sucking. We can smoke out the back of your Sedona. Sissy Spacek, smoking cigarettes! What an idea. God, I'm just a genius. Aren’t I?

Aleph. Flashbulb. Shuttercock. Click. My voice giddy to the point of debasement, I wanted him to denigrate me for letting my want show so plain. The obscene visibility of my desire disgusted both of us.

He said, you haven’t said a single thing tonight that isn’t utter horseshit. I don’t know why I still want you.

No one fucks you like that. You were meant for me. Don’t deny it. 

He didn’t deny it but his throat crackled in ur-speech.

Through my camera and my want I enacted things onto his skin. A nearby observer would have been shocked my gaze didn’t write on his flesh like a brand.

No one was luckier than me. In those days Sissy was everywhere, I’d come home from a night out and there would be his voice, looping out my answering machine, the long sexy drawl of it all garbled up with signal noise.

My pockets emptied themselves before the demand for work. That’s before, like - in front of.

To weigh my responsibility to others is the task of a fool; with him I was shameless, a fool. As clarity overtook the two of us like a virus we became inconsolable, one night in bed with our feet touching and nothing else, looking into each other’s eyes as if told we must hold still so a mad genius could thread a string carefully between our pupils and pull, tightening us together til meeting, this prophecy. He was beautiful then, solid like reality, and he was beautiful now, small and delicate with fading vitality, the way that an animal I encountered in a dream one time forced me to confront my desire to kill.

Sissy Spacek said, shall I speed off into the sunset? I mean, do you want me to go away? 

The pain near immeasurable made me blink and recock the shutter, as the stepwise mechanism made its way forward under the pressure of my thumb it reciprocally imparted bravery into my voice, steeled me to his words. Spacek with his eyes all wide in a way weakened me, made me say, no, because if I did not say no I would have said nothing and in the nothingness would have been assenting to his leaving, which was inconceivable as his death, which was to come in a number of years time by which point we will have fallen out of touch and wounded each other more than words could repair. Mere days before his death, driven by some clairvoyance which I had always resisted for fear of its reality, I would type out and send him a letter. The damned United States Postal Service, never any more reliable than the old stink of a lover you’d rather forget, clinging to a nylon long shoved into the corner of your bookshelf, taken out on the rare drunken occasion when his memory had become too urgent to not prompt with qualia. No doubt he hadn't had the opportunity to receive it before his death, then. All the well. 

Aleph. Flashbulb. Staring blankly into his mouth. Teeth like stones punched into the earthen rot of his gums. His gums, exposed pink pillow, sunset softness. Photographs are addicting when they begin to replace memory. I no longer remember the texture of his teeth under my tongue. 

Aleph. Flashbulb. Memory of making it with him in a bathroom, the stall smelling residually like shit and a lipstick cylinder rolling over the floor further than I thought possible before catching on the seam between two tiles. His cock in my mouth with the heft of butchered meat, sweat in my nose, the lipstick watched us faint with the persistent heat of a woman’s intent; seduction. 

Aleph. Flashbulb. The flowering and enrichment of time’s ascension into the preconscious realm gives shape to empty darkness. Soil is loamy when it is rich and dusty when it is poor. A girl sat with a hand to her heart and pain radiating outwards in pulsations that mirrored a speech act. Supposition. Can’t I scream in place of spinning? I wanted nothing but idolatry, via negation. Sitting on my fire escape with black metal rubbing off on my bare thighs I let the nicotine diffuse through me and spring sweat to my skin. I let drool come out of my mouth in long strings. I considered the meaning of the verb to grasp.

Aleph. Flashbulb. The less-than I is the site from which I write these things, in a dream of myself where I am forgiven or perhaps just different, Frank O’Hara was so funny. Most of them are. He left a residue on me. His blondeness. His milk-fed innocence. 

Aleph. Flashbulb. I was obsessive about capture. Then I was obsessive about anger – So:

I learned how to destroy. I was easily coerced into the magic of destruction.

I love to hold you dreaming. I love to listen to you dreaming. I love to stay in your bed, sleeping, and for you also to sleep, or I love for you to read your book and I am still sleeping, or for you to type on your computer, and I’m still sleeping and then you hold me close and I’m still sleeping, and you can fuck me soft and warm and I’m still sleeping, and I am still and peaceful and having so many dreams

Aleph. Flashbulb. Love as being is a force that touches. Love concretizes the moment when the rest demands removal.

CONVERSION PIECE