Orgasm in an Asylum
“But I shall have neither the merit of dreaming up, or in cold fury of seeking to invent, whatever may cause the venom I intend to use all the more poisonous. The deep well within me will furnish whatever I need, I shall harden my heart, let all the mechanisms of revenge do their worst, and you may be sure the venom I shall spew forth will be fully worthy of that unleashed against me.”
S.
Trauma as love’s lost subgenre,
irregular heart lines wind calligraphic
tracings around an ECG as
a signature my pain signs
in pixels of liquid crystal
instead of with a pen
in lurid giallo hues, one
of the first links in
my chain of gold vibrating
with sacred pulse at 3.14
Hz, I feel like the
wrinkled clothes the convict I
love who doesn’t love me
back might have slept in
had he crashed on my
couch after breaking my heart
after having gotten out, racked
not with guilt but ravenous
with a hunger for cash,
currency torched in the frequency
of how many times I
clash with him in my
head, my eyes ashen-ringed as
cigarettes my pupils burn through,
O.
oracular sighs of ocular smoke
shouting away dawn with sapphire
light the lapis of my
lost night lacerates, whipped lashes
flecking showers of gilded tears
as I blink into mourning
glimpsing doubt, fighting off my
urge to dissolve, seconding no
future in sight, along the
life line’s crease, my mind
is a mirror that’s been
dropped on the floor, bury
me under the weight of
a Florence and the Machine
lyric, please (I need it),
cognizant ever of your malady
and attendant woes, a jewel
you might wear regardless of
swelling appendages, my woundless bandages
each possessive, each noun sensed
tense, regressing into active aggression,
each bled crevice token of
my friendship and affection, no
less discredited by this necessity
D.
of poetry to let inhabit
you its absence of resolution,
of conclusion, of relief from
the Muse’s bruises too soon,
loosening your lasso’s noose-hold, Sappho,
you must reassure your Boston
Wife of my homosexuality with
every posture of pathos and
attendant sorrow, tell the firecracker
not to worry—ours is
a long and storied courtship,
the boundaries of which have
always been blurry, transgressing pedestrian
decency and mere courtesy, for
fear of leaving a naked
flame unattended, I wax pedantic,
emphatic at having attracted that
echo of what I thought
was his Yes, less a
rejection in prismatic pretension than
contentious as this digression of
mine bending toward oblivion, noting,
à propos of nothing, and
for no one else, for
O.
no reason yet comprehended, that
on an intellectual level, wanting
to be yours is a
great manifestation of commodity fetishism,
envisioning my mind consumed by,
as much as my mind
conforming to, those ideological positions
you hold, the way I
want to be held, to
be undone by what you
deny you do, precocious and
precious as the seed I
sow in ashes, as an
orgasm in an asylum crashes,
blemishes those stones my shadow
collapses against, throws out cold
gropes no modesty clothes, goes
about wearing personas as though
we’re both in the theatre,
personæ non gratæ gifted the
luxury every night to get
up and go at it
again, re-offend an audience our
presence commands, a competition against
M.
coincidence whose participants we offer
nothing but the chance to
contend with this addiction to
performance, vagrants entertained listening to
what’s behind the ear, its
cadence dancing through the prism
of dialogue, invalidated chivalry not
working for a fee but
driven only by a belief
that it belongs to me,
fed by a need to
be noticed, known for owning
this, in a fit of
syncretic fury, blasphemy blurring my
contempt for your god with
those of the ones I
once loved, desire from a
moment beyond truth resurrecting a
sacred text of sexual awakening
cleaning the mirror of my
skeleton, explaining how the stain
of concentration boned stole the
Scarlett from O’Hara only to
get stoned on my ashes.
