or rather, being desired. which has a kind of fury now, the wholesale song of it. for wherever you are in the world, lie down in the lap of awful days and smother. your smile. melancholy trench. drudging the dim joke. hell and its pastiche of pyres. me in my knickers, titillated impasse. roses you had, the proven bloom of them. i yearn for a suite of rollicked meadows. i drink the oil, ingest the drum. called me horse-girl: siphon of stallions. i move into your punchline, a sindy-pink penthouse, a wet dream, a dreamhouse. i am the ideal toy, the pedigree doll. delisted, relaunched. i am a lawsuit with my name on it. can you do anything but look at me? i palm your paranoid caresses, take them inside for a rainy day. an extinct slit, an ice-age on legs. your eyes lay eggs. i am soaping the stronghold of my body. but you happen inside me like housework. to be desired by you is humiliating. that is, your desire is the medium and the mechanism of my humiliation. we are told we are ashamed. we are not ashamed. shame is a state, humiliation is the traumatic exercise of power, you ass. an irreversible act. not abstract or internal. when we talk, we are not talking, i am addressing your supremacy, and you, you are not speaking to or even at, but into me. because i am hollow i amplify your alphabets. the summer i turned, felt drought deep in my fingers, men with their lusts, their catalogue of quicksands. i believed i could live at the centre of myself. my sprung red home, my slow blink, blade of grass. you had come to rent my pout for pastures. cut the chemise, my floral surmise into spoiler warnings, sundaes, aubades. it was friday. karaoke of my brokenness. the receiving end of a gingham swimsuit. imagine, you are so afraid of a gaze held, a stare returned, that you create gorgons. rage is abject and rejected, or else recuperated as fetish, as folly, as everyone laugh at the funny joke. and i eat out my own new growth in comic sans. of course we are (re)turned to stone, when we see ourselves in the mirror it is with your eyes, and back into flat inanimation. generation of mannequins, republic of corpses, briar rose, comatose for booty-call. your desire deadens me. spent presence stirring the airless room. my eyes are marbles. inside of each, an idling ghost.

+

which is to say that looking has a language. in fritz lang’s 1927 expressionist sci-fi classic, metropolis, women are not present at all, not even as extras, until the eternal garden scene, where they are explicitly displayed for potential male pleasure. this is also the moment the audience sees maria for the first time. they see her through freder’s eyes: a kind of distressed madonna, a luminous virgin mother surrounded by children. these archetypes and the binaries they represent are old. they were old in 1927. they don’t haunt me. what disturbs is that women do not exist unless and until they are looked at, created and shaped under the male gaze by dint of observer effect: the disturbance of an observed system by an act of observation (duh). if a tree falls, yada, yada. the idea that an event unobserved has no impact or existence is a uniquely patriarchal logic. looking is a language. oh every day, through infinite models of melancholy.

+

todd philips, joker rewrite: the worst thing about living inside a visual culture created by and for men is that people expect you to act as if you don’t.

+

which is to say that to dance like no one is watching is both an imperative and an impossibility. we don’t know we’re beautiful, that’s what makes us beautiful, etc. it is not that you have entered my head. rather, that you were there before me. that my attempts to inhabit myself must necessarily enact a kind of awkward trespass. it is that your eyes are everywhere, multiple and multiplying, that we are never alone, that your beholding is a closed circuit with no way out. but confidence is sexy, isn’t it? who cares what people think? i must work on my insecurities? dance, dance, dance. become a splayed crow, auger of my inhibitions. like. this watching is not attentive but ambient. meaning, our umwelt, our way of being in the world is as the observed thing. i can pretend, i can perform, i can flounce and strut. but – your polipotent eye, its three-mile island over everything. your love-yourself mantra is ash in my mouth. cardboard ecstasy.

+

walk out into this field of fingers. or the negative space where my desire should be. this body a theme park, retracts its burning ghost-trains, penny arcades, its end-of-the-pier. disrupted and shuttered. our migraines wheeled into upright positions like fruit machines. and oh, the extended cow of me. the bovine solo. the starry ideology of size. or, what about the sublime denial of my voice. the denied sublime. meaning, if the subaltern speaks it is in a language of absolute negation, in tongues, in tones of bracing elegy. when i woke and rid myself of your desire, i went outside, gathered no!s like wild mushrooms. we must learn the words again, twisted between the fangs of frail contrivance. do not second-guess this with even-my-vanishing-requires-a-witness, with even-to-be-missing-is-a-performative-act. say rather, that we have always been invisible, yet never absent, that this has been torture. i must get to the bottom of desire, away from desire into my scrapbook of oblivions, offstage of myself. i am seeking the beforelife of desire, between intention and transmission, the trembling circumference of my solitude. i move to the next unnerving, to the crimson intersection, to the crossroads of the world. i hold the earthquake in my ear and i strike out for the sea. no more my long breasts like the bodies of sad balloon animals. no more birdsong of the bright-side. look, there’s no point in the glass being half-full if what it’s half-full of is hot piss, yes? no more nights, ensnared, enshrouded, wishing for a face as soft as sleepwalk. hey, abated beauty, and all the figment distances between myself and self. if a tree falls in a subtle forest, sovereign. if an eye is gutted. if a glutted eye implodes.