A Promise To Myself From The Near Future.

I had a lingering fear once that I would be lost forever. Something about never really knowing why I was or for what, too often being projected outside of myself, watching myself do things that are unimportant. Also, with this fear, came the certainty that even those who cared for me now would soon realize I truly had no purpose, no reason. I was always trying to show my work, to hear that it was alright as confirmation that my people hadn’t lost interest in me yet, not yet. Whoever turned away, I figured, must know something I did not.

Eventually, we have to decide that it’s okay to stay busy by clutching to our small incomprehensible fragments of waning desire before they have disappeared. (Everyone will at some point decide that, rather than having no direction, you are over-invested in a wasteful purpose, or your purpose makes no sense and you must be crazy, or else stupid. You should know that you are working against a legacy of derision that is hundreds of times longer than your life, but equally spiritless. The know-nothingness of colonized thinking thrives on the evacuated spirit, but in the face-off between a tight grip on what you know is yours and the absence of knowledge, the spirited struggle always wins.) We will find that these ambiguous and duplicitous fragments, these pieces of us and in need of our curation, will grow and grow, and then wane and wane, and perhaps disappear and return. We will find, as we make this thing that becomes Ourselves-in-love, that these flexing and dissipating bits are merely the prop in the performance. It is not them that do the work; it is the fingers curled to fists, holding tight around what’s right – that is the score that keeps the piece activated.

It is uncanny, but my fear dissipated as soon as I learned the score.

The Impossible Task (dances of death)

The Impossible Task:

Go where you never were, meet her on the precipice of her demise, hold her hand like a friend, step inside her body, look back at yourself, and feel what it was like to let go.

Dance it.

Change your mind (there is no changing your mind).

Lose the feeling of the earth below you and fall forward - and now fall backward because you can. Fall sideways and fall up. Taste your skin one last time. Then do it again. Things are moving slowly now, and there is no clock and there is no sundown and there is no earth below you. Fall up. Fall up.

Let your lips part just slightly and feel the short breath come out of you, as if someone had hit you in your stomach - a love tap. Love this feeling of breath coming out of you. Love it enough to hold your breath until you feel you might burst; love it enough that no one will get it but you, now suck in all of that air around you; make your arms wide and pull the air to your mouth and shove it, fucking shovel it in there, be greedy with this air, your breath, your last breath. Fill your lungs past capacity. No breath out. Gag on this air. Collapse on this air. Now breathe out. P-huhhhhhh.

It's a shallow exhale when you've taken so much in.

Ever so gradually you'll feel the earth below you. Whenever that happens, this task is complete.


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Ishmael Houston-Jones and Chris Cochrane and Dennis Cooper made a piece about love and sorrow. It's a real "artist's work," as we all learned early on to quite naturally associate love with very little else but sorrow. There's lots of loss in this piece, but it never quite ends. The lights just turn off and eventually they come back on and we find ourselves standing in applause. So the loss is cyclic. Loss-love-sex-loss-violence-loss-disease-love-loss. Yet the boys also pile atop and claw at one another; they come out of the woodwork; there are more of them than I bargained for. It makes the solos even more apparent (though they are all soloing, it seems). All these boys - there's something building there, too, in the midst of the losing of things. Some things building and losing and building back. No zero sum. That's the economy of sorrow, I guess.