on a shower

i happen to have a weirdly vivid mental image of what a man ought to look like when he showers thoroughly. i try to live up to it, as much as i can. sometimes i am successful, which makes me proud and happy and cheerfully overjoyed, but at other times i am not and it can be dissatisfying and seriously unsettling beyond words can explain. today, however, i was determined to have a picture-perfect thorough shower. so after i finished reading The UnAmericans, an NPR-recommended title that E gave me for Valentine's Day, i walked over to the bathroom sink, took off my clothes, flossed my teeth, examined an itchy red spot just chilling near my left nipple, pinched around my lower belly to detect any unfamiliar ounce of fat that may have made its way to my abdominal stucco during the weekend's binge-eating spree, manicured my scruff, made a U-turn to the bath tub and pulled the plastic shower handle to let the water flow. it took me seventy two seconds to adjust the temperature, while standing by the bath tub, leaning down, and wetting my finger tips periodically. the pivoting back and forth, between sizzling hot and bone-chilling cold takes away, typically, a good deal of my patience. especially with unfamiliar showers, figuring out the mechanics of getting the perfect temperature is nothing short of a mental marathon, a brain sweat that manifests itself through after-shower erraticism, temporary bipolarity and awfully bad mood swings.

with the right temperature in check, i hung the bath towel on the hook above the edge of the tub, and inched into the shower: right toe first, then right heel, then left foot, then calves, torso and finally, head. i flinched, immediately, when the spray of water beads touched my torso, but after a minute of getting used to, stood directly under the shower head. i got wet, in a matter of minutes, and it felt exceptionally good. the sight and sounds of falling water are quite remarkable, if you ask me, and you should take a moment to observe if you haven't done so already. sometimes, they look like concrete mercury dollops or pellets of Rogaska crystals clinking in the steam, or like copper crowns swirling in the heat, making a constant shh sound, and whistling down the strings of gravitational water veins. and at other times, they look like little pearl drops forming and disappearing, clanging and thrumming along the way of the riser rail, before crashing at the base with exhaustive thuds. then they pool around the base of the feet, chirp a little, like grasshoppers in a pageant, lilt and sway in a strong physical tension and wiggle down the bare-open rubber gasket of the shower drain.

after about three minutes of standing under the pouring shower head, i took a dime-size dab of shampoo in my palms, added a splash of water, lathered it slightly and applied it at the crown of my hair followed by my hairline. a strong aroma of caramel and honey curled up in waves, and sweetened every corner of the room. i scrubbed my hair and scalp, gently at first and then really vigorously, to make bubbles. small to medium-sized macro-spheres to micro-spheroids, transparent and prismatic, round and plump-looking bubbles, revolving in nano-orbits, and giggling at each other like little children in a yellow bus, with tummy tickles and cartoons. the ecology of bubbles, the frequency, the magnitude, etc. all add to my vision of a thorough shower. i don't know why, and i don't know how, but it's an integral part of my showering scheme. the same happens with body soap, or body butter, as i use it to rub and scrape my skin vigorously, lathering up to the extent of the frothiness of histrionic mythological floods, and feel a new sensation of cleanliness nibbling at my skin tips and tickling at my sweat glands. There is this re-dawning of freshness, that is hard to explain. this feeling that someone has used a squeegee in whopping arc-radii, and cleansed every milli-pore of skin to twinkling specklessness. i feel calm, re-energized and light.

i had a lot of thoughts when i was in the shower today. various topics, various concerns, impressions, cravings and ideas. i thought about the fact that i haven't spoken to my parents in over six months since falling out over being distracted, wasting my life, and Eli Reisman. i thought about what my life would be like if i went into mainstream design writing, ten years from now or even twenty. and then there was Mary McCarthy's Libby MacAusland and the disheartened likes of Evelyn McHale sipping champagne at the Carnegie Institute, flummoxed by the appearance of Giacomo Puccini. somewhere in the middle of it all, there were thoughts about Bikram yoga, about red lentils, Naples and rainbows. and finally, that recurring thought about belonging, about fitting right in, about the profile of a minority. the fear of otherness and living as a category dishearten me sometimes. but i suck it all in, when the beans spill, and think about the positive side. the relentless pursuit of assimilation, to be just another one of those, to be a part of the mainstream, has its own status of non-scrutiny, its own stamp of consolation. to be a part of the ocean, to refine a niche, to blend into a majority growth wing, has its own array of rewards. Sarah Hellerstein asked me the other day, while i was waiting for the bus in front of the Juilliard School, why do people forget their roots? the way they evolved? i didn't bat an eyelid and blurted out because sometimes those roots evoke images of horror, sadness and disappointment. sometimes, and only sometimes, temporarily forgetting those roots gives a chance to begin, to re-form, to re-discover from scratch. the tailoring and laundering of identity politics, of stitching together and rehashing a dominant persona, sound easier in theory than done. and i have struggled with it a lot, and given it less and less thought over the years. sometimes all it takes for the complaints to trickle back down is a run-of-the-mill comment. don't get me wrong, i am not wallowing in depression. neither am i sitting here, ripping hairs with a glum face. it was merely a thought, and it has passed.

sometimes i want to scream, sprinkling colors of sounds all around me. sometimes i want to cry, with patterns and cuboids, stenciled on my face. sometimes i want to breathe in the melody of Bach, the rollicking of Brahms and the rockiness of Liszt. i want to learn how to Salsa, sing Rusalka, own a tuxedo and make a basket. i want to run to the mountains, eat vanilla beans, roast coffee and read. how the mind wanders, speaks, dances and spins, in the simple space of a shower cubicle is absolutely fascinating to me. where poets have composed, and lyricists have imagined, and scientists have dreamed of ambitious discoveries. in splashes of water, percussing on the body, in stains of bubbles, melting away, in the innocence of steam hissing at the ears, the washing away, the deep-cleansing, the therapeutics of water works is a critter of wonder. and shall remain unexplained. 

Diana's valentine letter

Diana,

it's been almost a year since we last saw each other at the Cindy Sherman exhibit up on the 6th floor in the MoMA. You were too busy prepping for New York Fashion Week, i remember, with your lacquered nails and bouffant hair, or was it a crown braid? i complimented you on your breast augmentation surgery, your black Tafetta dress from Coco Chanel, and your McQueen ankle-wraps; ah, how beautiful you looked! i wasn't sure, however, if i should call you Diana or Leonard or something else. if you have a preference, please let me know. i did not mean to offend. 

i heard from Henriette, who i bumped into the other day at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle first and then again at the Minskoff Theater on 45th Street by Broadway, that Susan isn't doing very well. i can imagine how difficult it must be for you -this change, this new identity, this new life, the stares you must get and the slew of explanations you are expected to provide. but Diana, if i can help in any way, please please don't hesitate to contact me. i'm here for you and your well-being is important to me. forget the nasty things they wrote about you on The Sophian; i've always disliked that group from Smith anyway. you deserve much better, and i know you will get out of this slump. 

well, the reason i'm writing this letter to you today is that i wanted to let you know that i have been seeing someone for the past nine months. we met, shortly after Stacy and i broke up in San Francisco, at a library. it was kind of a weird encounter really; awkward and strange at first, but it glided into place within minutes! finding someone to love all over again, to rebuild a faith, to rebuild confidence and assurances is always really really hard. every time you're tossed away because there's someone else who's better than you, you tell yourself this is it. i want to lead the single life right now, drama-free, care-free. and things will eventually fall in place, if they're meant to be. and then the reality of your solitude hits you, the sporadic nature of your new found conviction bears its fangs, and it slowly depresses you, as it slithers through your veins, diffuses through your mind, perfuses and effuses through your moods and hypnotizes your satiety into a vacillating feeling of comfort and emptiness. you feel dizzyingly numb, you feel uncharacteristically hopeless; to a point, where you start questioning the worthiness of your self, the value of your contribution to this gimmick of existence. am i deserving of happiness? you ask yourself. and knowing the rhetorical nature of your depressive quandary, you feel displaced, like a swollen pendulum bob, swinging on the apices of emotional extremes, dissatisfied at once, ecstatic at once, spiraling in a rut of neurotic outbursts in between. 

loneliness had become my dependable aphrodisiac. i had a love-hate relationship with it; mostly because it gave me the independence i always wanted, but pinched me to tears from time to time. when you are lonely, you have a lot of time on your hands and more often than not, find yourself mulling over personal histories, memories, day dreams and promises. it feels as if you're going through a catalog, a sheaf of paper, a bundle of circumstances, and re-living bygone moments. and you tell yourself that you were tired, utterly exhausted, of being the appendage, the second option, the could-have-been. and when that point comes at the pinnacle of your recollections, you recoil into a state of quiescence, where you exist without living. you survive without feeling. you continue without meaning. and then you learn to love this new existence, to live in the new reality, leading the cues to a complete makeover.

your mind begins to bark, slowly, at sounds of silence. it becomes a juxtaposition of the empty slots of a crossword puzzle; like the blank checkers of a scrabble board, filled and re-filled with alphabets of consolation. time and time again, you develop this strong companionship with your inner loneliness, a voice only you can hear, a voice that only makes sense to you. after you slide downhill, so easily, so smoothly on the course of negativity, it now becomes a new defense against accusation of carelessness, a new weapon, a new instrument of body politics. but you see the positive side of loneliness; the independence that comes with the lack of accountability and the focus on the self. for a while, you learn to live that non-committed life, the altruistic one, but then a craving engulfs you so suddenly, that you don't know what to do. this rousing voice unfurls within you, like an awakening tendril of a garden pea, and says, i want to be held, i want to be loved and i want to be wanted.

i was ready, both mentally and physically, before i met E in the library. you know, it felt a little awkward at first, a little forced and queasy; but we broke the shell within a minute. we shook hands, exchanged greetings, and smiled, for a while. who knew you could read so much from a simple smile? or maybe i had just forgotten what smiles meant anymore. but we ended up at a restaurant on 105 Street and Broadway, pouring liquor, clicking nails, brushing our legs under the table in gentle bumps and smooth glides. it was easy, despite the nervousness, to speak out again, to put myself out there again, to someone who would listen. and over the course of nine months, Diana, we have grown so much together, literally. with someone who has an open heart, an edge of crisp, a magnetism so smooth, you feel nourished when you enter to live a life together. i feel that with E, despite my occasional discomfiture. never in my life have i felt so loved, so cleansed, so beautifully held, and so richly infused with emotions not involving harrowing negativities, as i have in these months. the genuineness of a bound chemistry, seethed in trust, simmered in a spectrum of romantic notes, oozes in me a distinctive calm. like a powerful propeller, un-mechanizing the thrust of routine existence; it helps with a social evolution, even a personal revolution of turning over, of un-becoming and re-becoming a better person. 

my pride does remain in the identity of a sex radical, and this point has caused a lot of altercation between the two of us. i am a proponent of sexual exploration, even in the midst of a conventional tie, learning and experiencing ways and cravings of the human body, the human mind. there is love, and there is lust. the two intersect in the caricature of a Venn diagram, but their identities do not meld. and neither does mine -in my role as a practical anarchist, in using my body to test the limits of sexuality. i have no shame, and i do not blush at the ideology of body-selling. i have no judgment reserved for the hoochies and hustlers. through breaking the limits of operational elastics, the normative dicta of institutional morality, i take pride in myself, in, what i consider, extreme liberalism. the cross roads of love and lust is not clear-cut, and the quest to self is highly unwarranted. we need a middle ground, Diana, and we will work towards it. with E, talking is easy; and conversation flows. everything feels so natural, and so delicately together, that i sit and tell myself -i'm glad the hollowness ended. 

i hope that sometime in the future you will get to meet E, the person who brings so much contentment in my daily life. that gift of thought, that gift of desire, that gift of being wanted -oh how enriching it is, i cannot explain in words. to think about, in moments of silence, that someone else is thinking about you, is the greatest gift i could ever have.

i hope you have a wonderful valentine's day, Diana. i'll stop by Cheryl's tomorrow night to drop off a few envelopes and tell her you said hello.

all the best, T. 

dear janet

dear janet,

how are you, little plum? i left off, in my last letter to you, at the point when i went to the holiday market in Union Square and drifted off to Berry Park later, on the collar of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, only to be depressed at the sight of shrewd circus-goers vandalizing a car, a porch and a by-lane. i got on the L, hurriedly, came to Manhattan shortly after, and took the 6 back up to the Upper East Side. safe in the clasp of my neighborhood, i went to bed feeling absolutely naked; deprived, somehow, of the energy to revolt. i am a wuss, perhaps, but i felt terrible inside of me.

i am curious what you are doing right now, as i sit on my bed, by a column of lights, listening to my table fan mumbling by the door. maybe you are singing, or writing some poetry, or dancing on ice or having an orgasm. or thinking about cock, about being a hoochie, about Darla's appendicitis or Warby Parker. maybe you are showering, or wringing your thongs, or sewing your socks, or pinching your nipples, or yawning or burping or drinking coffee. i can only keep guessing, but i really want to know. i have to find a way, perhaps, to peek into your daily life and keep myself restrained, like a prisoner of reality, in a carton of milk. but i need to be sensitive, considerate and aptly articulate as your ex-affiliate of sorts, drawn by the strings of etiquette, conscience and logic. if i over-step, or if i go too far, i hope that you will bring that to my immediate attention.

come to think of it, i have been here for almost 2 years now. almost 2 years. i guess it is not considered, by most people, a very long stretch of time, but it feels almost like a century has gone by. maybe because my city has a curiously high rate of turnover, with flopping businesses and flailing commerce, moments simply whiz by. memories parachute from the present to the past in a matter of days, or even hours, leaving me wondering about the subtleties of transactions, advertising and marketing. it is as if the city molts, every trimester, like a cicada in despair, or a mischievous snake, and dons a brand new look. reasonably fresh, temptingly smooth, and passively electric; soulful and blue, tingling and cool, prickly and prim, like that muslin feel of fresh-out-of-water. ready to begin, to re-ignite and to re-inflame a second throe of adventure. 

it is winter time, little plum, and so far it has been quite severe. Hercules and Janus, the polar storms of January, have swept away a lot of lives, of trees and humans alike. my heart folds in pieces, like pleats of a skirt, when i hear the beggars roar in pain, and chatter their teeth, violently and uncontrollably, to generate body warmth and vigor. one 47 year old, the other day, was standing at the corner of 96th Street and Broadway, and seizing almost, was pulsating and yowling with every thrust of wind. it pinned on to him, like a wave of needles, like a hurricane of claws, like a symphony of blades, burrowing through his eyes, his ears, feet and thighs. i ran up to him, gave him my knit hat, and asked, are you okay? in the dimness of the streetlight, i saw his eyes roll, several times, after which he flung it away. why would you want to help a man, like me, live on like this? i did not know what he meant by that. i was trying to be nice, to be compassionate, but i felt completely and utterly dismissed. are you sure, you don't need it? i asked, hoping he'd reconsider. he shook his head, lifelessly and aimlessly, and squeezed the words out of his lips, repeating it twice. this city has defeated me, completely.

it snowed that night after i got back home, untied my shoes and doffed my coat. a warm aroma of spice lingered in the air, where pie had been baked an hour before. i poured myself a glass of wine, clipped my nails and sat by the window with a book in hand. it was sizzling inside, intensely overheated, to a point where i could almost hear layers of my skin crackle and crunch in the immensity of heat. i re-set the thermostat to 70 degrees, turned on a podcast on relaxation meditation and passed out in a matter of 7 minutes. before i slept, alone in bed, i thought about the homeless man again. where is this man? what is he possibly doing right now? did the police find him a shelter? give him some food to eat? may be they did, may be they didn't. it is possible that i will never know. he has escaped, perhaps, the embarrassment of defeat. a well-deserving man, greater than a disposable.

the next morning, around 7, i jolted out of bed and walked to the park to catch a glimpse of a still, January dawn. and what can i say, little plum? it was, indeed, the wonderland of my childhood fantasies. brilliantly white, dazzling and shimmering in the soft rays of the morning sun. my erotic city, my New York, lay curtained and shrouded in a veil of snow. so energized, so rejuvenated, i could cling on to the flecks of water, kiss the lips of dreaming cones, and play with birds by the reservoir with the passion of the maestros, the old geniuses of art, the linearity of babies, forever. the frozen lake, so delicately slick, lay bubbling and cradling in the temperate winds. a soft thrumming of marathon runners rose and fell, like doppler beads, in an abrupt emptiness. the trees in the colonnade, terse and glib, held hands, and kissed, and swayed to the winding melodies of La Boheme, wriggling and fiddling through vibraphones from the one solitary physicians home, snarling in wonderment at The Eldorado in the Upper West Side. i felt so enriched, i felt so full, i felt so emotional that i needed to pace myself, to make sure i was breathing. i was living, as if, in the interior of a snow globe, at once in vacuum as in winds, watching a race of twinkling gems, falling and fighting, ripping the brains of anti-gravity and dancing with the centers of a billion galaxies.

all of this made me miss you so much. i really wanted to, needed to, share my joy with someone at that moment. at that very moment. anyone, would do. anyone. but no one was around. and that made me sad. it made me think of the time when you visited me. in my second-floor apartment at the heart of the West Village. and how we trundled down Jane Street, by the Lilac Chocolatiers, by the wine shop on 43, swiveling with chirps and fluffy giggles of new-age couples holding hands. remember that time on Hudson Street? when you spotted Aaron Liebowitz, your high school crush, kissing a tranny in front of Pet Portraits? and how you laughed for ten minutes, your face turning red the same shade as in stop signs, puffing like strawberries, swelling, uncontrollably, like dough on a humid day? and then we walked to Minerva, saw Earp Dunnington and Cayla Epstein, drank three bottles of wine, ate olives and artichokes and talked about life? in the silence of mid-day my city slept like a baby, while we trekked through lanes and by-lanes of the historic neighborhood. we waved and smiled at Hawthorns and Ginkgoes, nestling to the sides of expansive homes, and ran home, chasing bikes and squirrels at the pinch of afternoon. with a cherry wine sky, at the cusp of dusk, we made love by the pane of the Western glass, pushed against the softness of my aluminum windows. rattling and tittering, squealing and moaning, we came at the end, together, our hearts united, our minds spinning with the dizziness of violent orgasm. we got dinner after, at Extra Virgin, on the east side of West 4th Street, and relaxed in the evening, as night came spinning down. bringing along a tea-gown of fresh, awakening stars, tinkling and glittering against the spire of the Empire State. 

i am in love, janet. in love with a city that dreams with me, holds my eyes and breathes with me. cries with me and sings for me at times of loss, and sadness. while he is away, studying to be a doctor, and my heart seethes with clumps of ringing memories, my city brings me joy, leads me forward and gives me a chance to reinvent myself.

i hope you are well, janet. send Harry my wishes. i love you both. 

T

my encounter with w lieberman

my workplace, a picturesque hospital from the era of Roland Flint and Irene Glascock, has a curious basement cafeteria. it is moderately populated during breakfast, intensely busy during lunch, surprisingly jittery during dinner and frighteningly vacant over the weekend. the workers are mostly Hispanic; strong, olive and supple. there are a quarter Haitians, a speck of White and a granule of African-American men and women, all lobbying for low blood pressure diets. obesity is not uncommon, unfortunately, among the staff, especially in the section of French Fries and Cheese. And the staple is fried plantain, Cheesecake yogurt, spinach pizza and soda.

the families of patients who visit this earthy, low-hum cafeteria always have an array of peculiar expressions. tied to sorrow and worry, a lot of the times, they forget to smile, forget to breathe and forget to eat -as dust and globular microbes settle on the crusts of soup, pie and meat loaves. the Jews sit in the North corner, the Arabs in the left and every one else is in between -flat, unsound and peculiarly dazed. perhaps they worry about a loved one dying, a non-fatal accident, a cousin's childbirth or colon cancer. or maybe they think about stealing food, homelessness or the irony of prayers. i smile at a few of them as i carry my tray across the unsettled, peach-colored lobby area, ringing with the sounds of climatic catastrophes, CNN fables or who wants to be a millionaire? but they never smile back, or open their lips or make any sign of eye contact.

i walk out through the set of double doors in the south side of the cafeteria, balancing my lunch box on my right calloused palm and holding a bottle of Fiji water on my left by the white, corrugated cap and take a sharp right to the docking site. the walls of the hallway are a pale shade of yellow -somewhere between Aureolin and straw-colored if i had to take a guess -and covered with palm smears, coffee stains and wet outlines of muddy shoes. they look like butterfly wing prints, or pineapple skin or a congealment of miniature moons that no one has bothered to clean in seven years. the hallway itself is about 500 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide and at the edge of 400 feet there is a sign jutting out that says medical physics.

on the left hand side, before the docking entrance, are two rectangular, spacious rooms. the doors to these rooms are sometimes latched, sometimes pad-locked and sometimes left open for transport. i noticed a pair of sky blue stretchers by one of the doors last Tuesday but did not bother to wait around and investigate what was going on. i was already running late for a Strategic Planning meeting for the College and being even a minute later would result in Rosemary Silverstein, our associate consultant, going up in arms about punctuality, unprofessionalism and faulty HR hiring policies. Diana Rosenthal and Heather McRae, the Dean's assistants, would riffle through a long line of courtesies, incredulity of the GOPs tax policies and giggle, cheekily, until another ten minutes had passed. everyone would collect themselves from a maverick of emotional hangings and then proceed with the agenda for the meeting.

today, however, there is a small body bag lying on a stretcher in front of the first door, completely unattended to despite something being inside of it. i spot it from a distance and begin to slow down as i approach it from a hundred feet away. a mild musty smell darts through my nose,wafts through the entirety of my facial cage and tingles my brain with a violent swoosh. i tiptoe forward, and move closer to the body bag. my adrenaline alarm pulsates the outer coats of my circulatory system, making me hyperventilate and roughens my skin with goosebumps. five feet away, and i finally spot an ID card lying on the floor.

name: w lieberman

age: 3 years

cause: neuroblastoma

time of death: 12:34 pm 

my mind goes spinning across the table of a hundred questions, doubts, remorse and shock. is that a boy or is it a girl? what is the pattern of its current disintegration -the effects of rigor mortis, the banquet of flies, maggots and burrowing spirochetes? what is the father doing? is the mother alive? did it have a pastor or Rabbi at the time of shocks? did the nurse cry?

i fall into a daze of alien existentialism. as if shuttling on a plunger between a wide parallel macrocosm and a white, fenestrated micro-cosmos. as if living through the eyepiece of a wide-eyed telescope; burrowing and slithering at 100X magnification on the brim of a crystal jar. as if hauling, in exhaustion, in a game of tug of war between the past and present, distance and proximity, impact and dismissal, knocking on the bell jar of slipping time. i am transfixed within the mesh of a silk cocoon, writhing and playing with chaotic pendulums, snapping my wrists and drumming the beads of molten seeds. i am paralyzed in place, pinched with forks of brazen stones, cold and vacant in the slant of daylight. i am gripped with fear, gnarled with hate and spun with words of reckless grievances. what am i to say, to the empty souls of flesh cubicles? what am i to say to an orphaned jewelry box, motionless and staunch behind the moonwalk of zippers? what am i to do in the world agape, running away from a dead history - frivolous and lunatic in the situation of times? 

i give it a moment, and walk away. through the docking site, till the end and take the elevator to the third floor. back into my own reality, in the queerness of my office space. my mind separated from my body.

for Schwartzberg

do you remember, Cayla Schwartzberg, when we first met at your second floor duplex apartment on the 21st of September? you probably do not. but i do. vividly, serenely and rather embarrassingly. you were wearing a black and creme, crisply fluidic A Line dress, a sequined belt with mildew-colored plaits vanishing down your waistline, a starched ribbon turban stretched across an uneven semi-circle of your anterior head cavity, and retro stackable turquoise rings on your index and middle fingers. the laced bow-tie of your bra was giving your upper breast a supple firmness and pushing your nipples up to the crown of your trimmed collar-bone, giggling playfully through the air barrels of your poplin-tulle fabric. you greeted me with a smile, a cigarette breath and a bouquet of hyperbolic enthusiasm; a general rise in emotive atoms, sprinting through an autumn air, colliding and elasticizing, swaying and lulling to the low trebles of Ella's gramophone discography. i stepped on the threshold, scrubbed the sole of my chain-leather opal Zanotti's vigorously, against the erotic bristles of your Magritte doormat, and proceeded down your hallway.

it was tremendously white, as far as i can remember. you had painted the door moldings a burnt gold and tattooed on them the anatomy of fireflies. you had lampshades of raisin, spatulas of ivory and chandeliers of tallow wax, dandelions and aluminum. bottles of cognac and Spanish wine hung from the ceilings, upside down, with cracked necks, acrobatic lips and breathless apnea. posters of Lolita, Marx, missionaries and pornography lay squatting on your bedroom walls, peering over the mythology book of Aphrodite, sleeping across your window ledge. a condom wrapper by the sofa-set lay diddling in the air, laughing at the aroma of searing spices. it was disturbingly black, julienned across the tip and shriveled with creases of phenomenal age. the topology of the Americas remained squarely displayed across the beige plywood wall of your dining room, and photo-prints and postcards hung disproportionately near the curling curves of the ceiling. you lifted two wine glasses from the kitchen counter-top, the excessive thinness of the stems projecting an illusion of dramatized fragility, and poured copious bundles of Pinot Noir into each of them. the sounds of the trickle amplified along the curvatures of transparent wind columns, resonating and gurgling in the interiors of my ear. a platter of Brie, walnuts, figs and cloves, paralyzed and footless on the teak-wood of the table, joined our smiles in awkward company, in a shawl of contemporariness, frivolity and friendliness.

you introduced yourself as a distinguished photographer, a blossoming linguist, a careful interpreter and a Dali aficionado with an obsession with neck-ties from Attolini and Harry Rosen. you are twenty two, with mocha-colored hair and a smattering of Tuxedo Red lipstick. you giggle at consonants, laugh with your head tilted fifty degrees to the air, gawk at vowels and lisp like the hiss of a neonatal chameleon tumbling and burning in respiratory distress. your fingers are soft, your lashes are brittle, and the shape of your waist is frighteningly similar to the keepsake of an ancient Egyptian cremation urn. your mother was a revolutionary phenomenon of the 80s, erupting in activism, rioting like the Teamsters, and reshaping the grounds of working class literati. you know less than little, however, about Ira Schwartzberg, your dead father, who walked away from your mother's kiss when your were the size of a marble pod, boiling in the age of lonely gestation. you are an immigrant, a second-class citizen, a subject of comedy, modeled like a tumor; a supplement, lacerated, displaced for an extra. despite the politics of an uncompromising government, who disregard your status at the cost of talent, you have managed to stage an act of happiness without a trace of doubt. in your first letter of our correspondence you wrote, i have never lived in a small town, and i feel depressed. and i traveled from Back Bay to your rural residence to provide a formal introduction, relieve your awkwardness, and provide a means for careful assimilation. 

from the very first time we met and carelessly flirted, we became an odd sensation in the binoculars of our neighborhood. we aided in the gentrification of an orchard-town, driving past the city hall, down the intersections on Marcy Avenue, and opening at the northern edge a new pastry shop named Mayefsky and Maldonado's. we talked about sunshine, laughed like parrots, danced like peacocks and dreamed like clouds, aspiring for entrepreneurship, success and education. one Saturday night you said to me, can we fuck, please? i need it badly. i refused. the next Tuesday morning you requested again. i laughed it off, oh come on! i'm not feeling it. and this cycle of lies, these packets of hush-hush excuses kept piling up, one on top of the other, leaning over, gripping under, shaking violently in the humiliation of a bawdy discomfort. the following Saturday you walked into my room, peach colored and virgin, put down a pile of books on the mahogany breasts of my corner table and said, i'm not letting you go if you don't do it tonight. i'm telling...telling you, i will go mad. and sensing your tone of flamboyant desperation, sensing the frankness of your sexual request, sensing the ease with which the words erupted, you broke into silence. and then you cried. and broke into a fit of amazing hysteria, convulsing violently in the middle of piercing ululations. you held my hand, tightly, as the candle by the bed-stand vanished into air, and demanded an explanation for my useless behavior. for the leading on, for the merry rides, for the songs of love we spilled across, for the nights after nights of dizzying words, reading poetry, cooking, clinking Bordeaux stems in vortical shades. what was the meaning of assistance in the holocaust of a heart break? what was the purpose of bed-shares if it meant absolutely nothing? the time, the effort, the collusion and bending, the tripping and gripping, the showiness and sacrifice -for what?

but i never got a chance to tell you, two years running, that none of that was for you to blame. none of my dispassionate front-twirling, hand-swinging and theater act had anything do with a rejection of you. it was me. it is me, Cayla Schwartzberg. it is that i loved solitude, Aaron Keisel, on the foothold of denial, the strawberry tutus of the jewel ballerinas, Brody Saltzman from a night at St Regis, Garvey Einhorn from the polyester store, and above all, the diary of Warhol. you were the palette of breath, in our small town charade, buckling and bending the physiology of time. for this, and the love of man, i welcome you again into my temple of paint, the masquerade of hens and the philosophy of kings.

a part of Joshua

my name is Joshua Brubeck and i am a creation of my illusory imagination; like a fictional man, with confusing facts, multiple personalities and a fear of foreignness. i am twenty-six years old with coffee colored hair, a passivity to glamor and self-regarded scholarship. i buy four dress shirts per year, one pair of gray trousers, a woolen muffler from a local yarn shop and three sweaters. i wear orange-striped tennis shoes to work in my laboratory that fit my twill socks perfectly around the diameter of my heels. and my other material fascination is with fragrance and perfumery; a musky aroma from Tiffany and Co. that i carry around in pockets of my pits, the atlas vertebra of my neck and the two leaves of my shirt collar.

i like to improvise on the piano when i get tired of playing Mozart or Gershwin or Berlioz, for that matter; typically starting in A minor and invariably ending in C major. it usually involves some intense trills, some discontinuous arpeggios, elaborate scale runs and irregular chord patterns. i will admit that i have an odd obsession with the way crescendos sound. the way they erupt in the belly of my cochlea and spiral springily to the webs in my brain, i feel entirely dumbfounded, humbled and muted. my other infatuation is with an arrhythmic pulsing of my finger tips on the ivorine plastic of piano keys; when i feel my heart beating erratically, puzzlingly, discontinuously and forcefully, as if creeping and crawling out of a gooey salt marsh to leaping on a quintal of air beds and sprinting to the brink of an outer stratosphere.

the critical passer-by or the experienced bourgeois will compare my music to that of the dead geniuses. the Remsburgs will say, it sounds too much like Liszt or Sharla Romer will remark on the elements of Bach-so-and-so. but i am not thinking about Liszt or Bach while i improvise the tune; coincidental similarities are not necessarily causal influences and should not be my concern. this melody is the procreation of my neuronal circuitry, the embellishment of my ulnar sockets, the epilogue of my creative art; this is a slice of me. every note, every rest, every modulation and modality is an outcome of my brain cells firing, toggling and warbling with each other; an outcome of my pulsating arteries jiggling and jittering in the temperature and firewall of a compositional milieu streaming directly and consciously from the crown of my identity. i feel the chaos of compressions and rarefactions against the dents of my lateral sphenoids; the pressure pulses created by my resonating motifs gibbering to the sky, humming to the corner automobiles and preening on the patios of churlish neighbors. restless with confusion, dreary with monotony, i re-give a personal cheer, one of my own, bare-exposed to the gnarly fangs of greed and malicious contempt. in creating, i will admit, there is an unexplainable comfort. there is a snug sense of monopoly and self, attached to the skin of the final outcome. this is, perhaps, a consequence of a monophasic desire to be singled out and remembered, to be held in an eye for the unique experience. to be given an esteem-able valuation and set free on the edges of a creative furor, gyrating and discerning behind the silence of a glass wall. i am not apologetic for this penetrable craving, but perhaps it is the voice of the fictional man.

when people ask me where i am from originally, to some i say Cambodia, or India and to others i say Indiana or Delaware. when people ask me what i do for a living, to some i say, a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley, a dual-degree MD/MBA student at Columbia University or Psychology graduate student at the New School and to others i say, a philosopher at Crown Heights writing a text book in Informal Logic on the virtues of argumentation from an amoral analyst's perspective. this hibernation and circularity of identities, this duplicity of personal history is an exhausting game to be continuously playing. the weirdest and most surprising part, however, is the naturalness with which the deceitful concoction perfuses from the tip of my tongue. it starts with a warm, insidious spark in the right corner of my hypothalamus and leaks into the embroidery of my cavernous cerbellum, from where the itchy, cable-car electricity flairs to the root of my cranial florets, slides down a bundle of narrow, vascular arterioles, knocks on the mid-riff of my mucosal pharynx and darts to the tip of my punctuate taste receptors, biting ghoulishly at musculature to reach the tip of my tongue. and from there the words, the sounds, the graphemes and phonetics dive into a thin nest of huddling dust rings, bugles of air, and pools of fluorine in a smoky, mercurial splash. the sound is gone, absorbed by hair cells of radiating frequencies in the innermost chamber of ear anatomies, triggering a re-rattle of particulate matter and fueling the wheel of infinite resonance. this is how my biographies travel, from person to person, time to time. this is how i am a thousand people, little edges and speckles of put-together puzzles on the road of a parallel existence. keeping track of my many narratives comes with its layers of difficulties, adjustments and unrehearsed spontaneity. there are tears involved, quite evidently, along with severe heart thumps, geysers of adrenaline, tattletales and lies. but lying becomes the new convention, the new trademark, the new reality, molded synchronously, tied quizzically, like spinning reels of basket weaving, formulated in my brain. the lie becomes the new truth, the architecture of a new reality; like an overlooked memory hauled from the ancient book of self-history. it is a tangible vernacular; it all makes sense and has meaning to me. but i am not apologetic, and never will be.

none of this is to say that slips do not happen. Stacy Sullivan, for example, saw me at a Madison Avenue bodega last Monday and shrieked palpably, in her normal voice, about her imminent confusion when she discovered that my LinkedIn profile listed me as a lawyer at Braverman and Associates. she has known me as a medico-business student for fourteen months, and has been curious to know if it was an internet 'mistake' or she remembered the crucial detail incorrectly. my stance has continued to remain unquestioned, however, and the double standards of this situation brings on my face a satisfying grin. Callan Koster, the penthouse manager of my tenement apartment, mentioned something enticingly similar after my sprint in Riverside Park last Tuesday. Carter Capehart and Bryne Danziger caught me off-guard during Shabbat Kodesh at Temple Emanu-El, questioning my confessed atheism, nonchalance to Judaism and the lineage of my immediate family. and Irene Cohen, last Friday, broke into a fit of unstoppable perspiration when she saw me leave my apartment door holding hands with a boy, instead of Edna Gerstein -my marriageable beloved. while collecting mail on Sunday, we locked eyes, awkwardly, and she hesitantly asked me, almost with a splutter, by the gilded banister, was that your true love? your real love, Joshua?

when you lead a duplicitous life like mine, poking and prodding, creasing and hoarding around the gentle edges of your social fabric, how do you answer the question of whether your love is real, whether your love is true? perhaps, you cannot. perhaps, you are unable to. perhaps you make yourself believe that you do, right now, at the snap of an instant, but it is an ever-morphing phenomenon with its multiple shades, facets, hues and colors. even with a poly-chromic life and irreverent biography, the piercing twinge of longing and desirability, deeply mammalian and evolutionarily primal, continues to burn through my house of blood, my emotive pitch, the intensity of my hominid luminescences. i am learning to love, i am learning to sing, and i am learning to speak about one stanza of living, that is genuinely true, crystalline real, and outside of the theater box.

a short recollection

one use of social media that remains behind the limelight, in a mechanical hush-hush, is that of the conveyor of death news. overtaking the job of the elusive postmaster from the golden era of paper mail, this avenue, rather, this route of social media is a bold spin-off. uncalled for, perhaps, but in careful existence; brash alertness and dreadful alarm, matter-of-fact and dispassionate.

the rabble-rousing, ruminating siren went off before my eyes, Tuesday night, with the circuitous rollicking of elegies, outcries, outpourings, down-pourings, remembrances, confessions and hysteria. Christopher, my chum from college, is dead. his blood cells were awry, imposing and misbehaving to a point where they needed help from brother cells, and in spite of a temporary fix, the hullabaloo never went away. this led to severe physical constraints, mellowing of humor, a daily worry, indecent consumption of ATP and glucose, perhaps even bodily nitrogenous substances leading to a severe internal atrophy where the boy became, merely, a conflation of chaotic biological processes capped with the essence of a personhood. but the liveliness was unfazed, the spirit of cheerfulness untouched and the population of smile preserved. when physiology and pathology collide in devilish throes of chance, the foundation of routine disrupts. the needle of the spinning top, keeping alive the breaths and pulse of a nurtured existence, slip and slide, against the effect of lawless gyroscopics, and come to a halt. the cartons and crates of the human machine fold, in and of itself, into a tidy molecule, to be later stowed away on the sleeve of a memory. and that is the end of human x; now a statistic, a collage of photographs, a foliage of thoughts, but above all, back to being a part of Nature's maniacal carbon treadmill.

you may call this train of thought inappropriate, belittling or even inconsiderate. you may emphasize the point that x is now in a 'better' place and you could possibly be right. i cannot, however, make that visceral separation or, rather, transposition to a heaven or a hell that does not exist in my closet. to maintain a serene sense of tangibility, then, x gets recycled in Nature's machinery and continues to exist in my planet as carbon sub-structures; perhaps as nutrients for bacteria, plants or crustaceans that cradle up the food web in conspicuous bellies or as fuel for volcanoes. who knows? i do not. but this non-other worldly existence brings about in me a sense of closure, while minimizing a feeling of ungraspable loss, division and piercing numbness. when i think of x, i look at a lump of clay and find in there a peaceable home for an ex-presence, with nanometer arms and whiffling aromas percussing around its amorphous boundaries. perhaps the idea is semi-humanoid, this envisioning of a person in the middle of an organic soup. but the broader scope lies in explaining the origin and demise of human animals within the spectrum of a touchable, liveable, adventure-loving Nature. this brings me comfort, composure and an impetus to carry-on.

the financier

my mind is whirring on the collarbone of the public transit vehicle, during my afternoon commute from Pink City to White Marsh. it has been a prompt take-off from the South corner of 11th Avenue and we have driven past a pair of bicyclists, a homeless Bencini, a Carolina pantaloon, a frayed Bengals pennant, and a pregnant mother chewing on a grilled shrimp sandwich. for reasons even unknown to myself i am carrying a postcard from 1923. it is Klimt's tree of life; with curious brown concentric circles twiddling against a parched canvas, bulletined and patched with tremendous speckles of humanity, love and Egypt. somehow, the botanical connection of mammalian evolution and the simplification of a leviathan conceptual complexity of the history of humanity to the level of a tree, has left me dissatisfied; to an extent, largely unfulfilled. in science, as in other areas of specialty, too much emphasis is laid on perfect explanations, simplicity and a tidiness of theorizing. the world, and life at large, are messy and anyone who says otherwise makes me nervous. makes me feel an artificiality in the thread of reasoning, and i sit down and agree because circumstance and inevitability compel me to do so. many of us are peculiar neo-Darwinians -prattling on a self-effacing circuitry of a godly creationist, a Proustian recollection and Dawkins -but without reason, rationale and conviction. we are led to believe by either the hounding Right-winged man or the country libertarian on the brink of a rolling collusion, clashing and exploding in the temperature of disagreement to only be left with a hymn of pleas, obscurity and semi-truths. this is an aside, however, but an important seed of my neuroticism.

the sky looks a little unsettled today; like my favorite Kandinsky art of the white dot. a patch of stratus clouds are meandering on the left field of my myopic panorama, in a slovenly turn of an incomplete 9, whispering to a rainbow, perhaps, and singing a Pebbles song -mother army- to the nearby cosmos. on the right ring, is the unison of a cirrus pattern; like a tertiary brigade devolving and frittering into a half-eaten doughnut, wheeling and carting in high-frequency whistles to the point of exhaustion. but the drop-ules, like drop-lets, never tire in their duty to a mathematical infinity. the rest of the clouds form a network of guitar strings, reciting aloud, to a bolting airplane, the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. what peers through the triangular wiggle of the central emptiness is the right eye of a sunset, almost 76 years old, fifty feet tall and ten feet wide.

there is a Joe Bertrand sitting to my right, listening to soundtracks from Bonnie & Clyde, loudly, on large Bose headphones. i imagine he is not a day older than 28, but has a certain maturity about him. a dark brown Elvis hairdo, artificially whitened teeth, ultra-thin nose, delicately crusted cheekbones and cobalt blue eyes make up the facial particulars of the young financier. he is playing Candy Crush Saga on the large screen of his phone and occasionally screaming out, 'what a fucking idiot!' after 24 minutes of one-sided banter i turn to him and say, when did you graduate college? interrupted and violated by human interaction he says, two years ago from Stony Brook, what about you? last year. and then i pause, and smile, and scratch the scruff of my dotted orange left sock and say, so what do you do now? he produces an answer with a spectacular amount of jargon from which i can identify the words equity, interest, profit and loan. he sounds rather metallic and non-spontaneous, quite tacitly rehearsed. the goal is to work with a select pool of people to make them wealthier; it comes with a lot of perks, you know? yes, i know. and i can imagine the 'perks' of your polished limousine, the silver tickets and platinum memberships, the specialist terrain of Melville living, a credit chauffeur, a hand-laden Ferris Wheel of glamorous twinkles, and with it the shamelessness of profiteering, the dissolution of a fraudulent magpie, the irrelevance of a hunger crisis, the cold-shoulder engineering of a green Utopia, steering on a monumental disgrace of your personal multiplication, your self-lionization and cantilevered stardom at the arrest of universal suffering. to me you are a sly, self-aggrandizing thief who displays arrogance in the name of professionalism, deceit in the domain of conviction, fraudulence in the name of customer service. your heart is of a burnt polyester, ribbed and corrugated around the edges, hardened with sulfur, and dipped in a Burlington opioid of sinister luxury. 

i am restless. i am angry and in the middle of a civil pretense with my fellow financier. i feel the insides of my brain fluttering with spasms, whirring like a hurricane, hissing like a serpent, bleating like a sheep, shrieking like a widow, and screaming and shouting to the roof of my skull. i sweat through the pores of my inner skin, oozing resin, salts and camphor oil. i am harrowed by the mono-molecularity of a corporate vision, triumphing over the cause of a microbial venule, slithering in a door of violent collapse. you cannot be so selfish, so self-righteous, so self-sufficing to think about the upgrade of a privileged eternity, sacrificing with your hunger a usual love, a celebration of dimes and the pedagogy of orphans. 

to all of which you say, money is what brings us ultimate joy -would you agree? i am smiling, courteously, and wishing you the very best in your future of stealth. my eyes shift focus to the cumulus Kandinsky; trotting to the tune of a Sunday mazurka repelling in the embrace of a Southern sky. 

castleford

i have moved to the city of new york three years ago from Castleford, Idaho. a small, rural, empty town of three hundred people, persistent dissatisfaction and negative aspirations. we are evenly gendered; with a modest household income of thirty five thousand and forty seven dollars. there are seven churches of three denominations, a deserted synagogue and a decrepit rectory, which was once the home of Father Cecil who molested a fourteen year old boy in a nearby sanctuary the summer of 2002 and went to jail in Arbon Valley. no one has seen or heard anything about him since then, and it is better that way since he was a brutish individual with an overdose of self-ego who would beat people up whenever he got a chance.

we have our own high school at the edge of town, with a serious teen-pregnancy scare and installment of poor scholarship that pushes our students into aimlessness rather than motivating them to pursue higher education. the football boys want to farm, the swimmers want to be cashiers at the Walmart in Buhl, and the non-affiliates of the athletic bandwagon are left to decide for themselves how they want to spend the rest of their lives; in the shadows of a quicksand-esque familiarity or to knuckle through a hyper-polymeric bubble of unclear establishment on the brink of a new life. art billington, local hero and charity lord, encouraged me to choose the latter ever since my parents disappeared with the drug dealers from Clark Fork to indulge in the trade, and lead better, care-free lives, when i was fifteen. it didn't matter much to me, since i was never close to them. no emotions were ever displayed, and no difficulties were ever talked about. but i missed their presence, and my mother's huckleberry pancakes, Russet fries, and pheasant casseroles that she made every other Saturday.

the motto during my upbringing, after my mother lived through seven miscarriages and a stillborn, was to make of me an independent man; without any community strings, religious beliefs and political hunches. it was always feared that i would run away with a conniving blonde from Hayden Lake, especially the one i had been eying on at Tcby for almost a year, or a jock from Kooskia to either San Francisco or Portland and never go back to Castleford and so my parents needed supreme disclosure of my whereabouts at any given moment in time. what happened as a result of their constant hyper-vigilance was that i missed out on how to read social cues. i had very few social interactions to begin with anyway. my parents had no friends, which did not help. i was the 'colored boy' with potato skin who no one cared to talk to other than during lunch at the north corner of the school cafeteria, a non-resident asylum seeker who was a drain on the Nation's economy and stealing opportunities from the real Americans, and most importantly, that i was extremely obese and therefore must automatically have been lazy, selfish and greedy.

art billington, an ex-Wall Street analyst, forty-five and plump, has been my constant source of encouragement in the withering, ruffling town of Castleford. he spotted me by a convenience store restroom, in the fall of 2004, with my copy of Animal Farm and articulated a friendly chatter. his son had run away to Bellevue, Washington, to become a yoga instructor after a plummeted failure in the fashion industry and his wife had died of Lou Gehrig's the year before. he was looking for a 'replacement son' to coach, with the eventual hope of becoming the father of an astrophysicist or a computational geo-chemist. we bonded easily, since then; discussing philosophy, Proust, geometry, circuits and aeronautics in the evenings on his porch with the clouds unfolding over whistling ocher skies, scuttling in zigzags over the faint pencil sketch of a quivering horizon. he bribed me with fourteen dollars every time i earned an A+ on a test, egging me on to self-educate, self-discipline and to self-motivate in pursuit of scholarship; incentivizing a concerted leap on to the linoleum patch of an angry city, far away from the threads of collapsible rhododendrons by the Schoth's, the tensile zizzing of the Wells' divorce, small talk at the Howard's, and the general consumptive milieu of a non-ambitious stagnation oiling the mechanics of a dead society, pooling and freezing the recoil of minds, the ladder of dreams, and the consonance of desires.

on a tuesday night in September 2010, art takes me to the Starbucks on Filer Avenue in Twin Falls, 24 miles east of Castleford. he orders a Grande dark roast for himself and a Tall mild roast for me, pays it off with a hazy blue-and-white Visa debit card, holds the drinks by the coffee sleeves, sneers at the barista's 'Fair Trade Coffee' button, and proceeds to the milk stand by the door entrance. he pours a little skim milk and empties out half a packet of Raw Sugar on his own drink, and adds some Half and Half to mine, and stirs both drinks simultaneously, anti-synchronously in sporadic jerks and jitters and walks over to our Harvest Cherry colored table in the south corner. he looks very confused, distant and disturbed today and is muttering something under his breath. five minutes later he looks at me and says, Daniel, if someone doesn't appreciate you and love you for who you are, then fuck them. you've got one shot at being yourself, play it out brother. do you understand, Daniel? This is no joke. i want you to be yourself and become powerful and invincible and successful in a way that no one can touch you or bully you or piss on you like they do here. go to new york city and live with theresa and create a new life. theresa will help. i'll call her and let her know you're going. theresa is art's half-sister of Polynesian descent, a double-divorcee and an attorney.

it was his dead wife's sixty third birthday that tuesday night, i later found out, as we drove back into a familiar darkness of everyday life in Castleford, with a symphony of aphids, crickets and pallid-winged grasshoppers ululating in the woods, a mouthful of winds gurgling over the valley, a feminine racket of distant sirens, a collage of stars in the cavity of the night sky, the giggling of water streams, and a temporal shroud of a solitary longing, curried and peeled at the perimeter of my hallucinating township; out in the ream of a divergent reality, beating and baring the venomous fangs of a communal dispossession, a disintegrating rhetoric of progress in the reflection of a broken immunity.

i live, now, in a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park West and 85th Street. The east window of my bedroom overlooks Central Park; i can clearly see a ridgy, shallow reservoir with a fountain spouting water, ten feet high, at seven second intervals, the sunshine dazzling against the metal rims of bikes, shadows of geese, Hollyhocks, Roses of Sharon and Squills undulating in whispers of the somnolent breeze, and a few strollers hopping on the west side pebble patches. i will talk more of my city life at a later day, at a more opportune time, but i want to lean out to you and say, loudly and clearly, that powerful people are not invincible and people, in the rat race, along the spokes of a professional hub-bub, do not love you for who you are. the pinnacle of a razzle-dazzle, feisty and rambunctious cityscape begins in the evolution of a second self, in the molting of a real identity and in the donning of a neo-pathology, a purpura of multiple selves constantly bemoaning a struggle to survive, an unnatural existence and the definition of truth lies so far away that you sit and wonder, often, where am i?  

marjorie smith

the day before marjorie smith died, her son had come to my Midtown apartment to talk about the nature of our flagging business. a pearly white face, long slender stature, tinted blue eyes and disheveled, dark brown hair, jonathan was my enemy in middle school, a rival in high school, a competitor in college and now, a business ally. it is incredibly funny to me how time and circumstance mold the nature of my untrue relationships; catered to, tailor-made, and characteristically assimilated to make a situation functional.

we own a sex shop at the corner of 19th Street, in the west side of Chelsea. it is called Lollie's Erotica and caters primarily to homosexual men. a 25 feet by 30 feet space with high ceilings in a pre-war enclave, the lack of hot water, anonymity and soap have been pressing issues for the past 14 months. there are always a few female customers, an estimated 7.5 per week, who come to our store; disappointed, dejected and frustrated with the dysfunctional nature of their sex lives. they introduce themselves as straight, jacketed and married or in a relationship. i do not have much in me to offer. and neither does jonathan. so they wait in the dingy, dark back room and spend fourteen dollars watching peep shows, leather sex, and live bondage and wait for hours, while texting, for a hetero- or a homo-sexual man to make them moan. in a public booth. so they can go back home, satisfied for the next few days. 

it usually does not work to their advantage, despite my praying for their sexual satisfaction and my aggressive business. lust is a serious, serious craving, i realize, and i sympathize with the addictive gratification of the 43 year old mother of three who comes in every Wednesday and leaves my shop with a wink and a suppressed half-smile. i feel disquieted, sometimes; marginally shady, embarrassed and out-of-place to give advice to a sex-hungry widow. but this is my business, and i am stern. i have learned to align my emotions, over the years, and treat every activity of the world around me as normal, plausible and acceptable. i never believed in conventions growing up, and that definitely worked to my benefit at the thought of dissolving my sense of morality. everything is moral is my motto, as long as no one is hurt. i realize that there are several obvious loopholes in this line of illogical thinking, but I'd suggest that you went with the flow. It makes life easier; for your sake and mine. it makes living more bearable, more fashionable and less concerning. 

the most difficult part of this years' autumn fallibility, perhaps, is that marjorie smith bled to death while listening to Harry Belafonte, wearing a pepper tweed dress, a charcoal Fedora and turquoise Yurman bangles. i read about it on the web link of the Chicago Tribune on a windy Saturday afternoon, uneasy from a massive hangover. an aluminum fist mold had been planted in her vagina. a foot-long dildo with incredible girth stitched to her anus and a leather dog muzzle strapped across her face. the muzzle pegs were painted bright orange, apparently, to signify her support for the No Kid Hungry campaign. and her breast tattoo was a figure-of-8. and her rainbow colored pigtail was completely undone, combed and gelled into the shape of a broken conical flask. a note, nailed to the north west post of her cherry wood bed frame at her private home in Glenview, IL., read i am a human ashtray. jonathan had never mentioned to me that his mother had developed smoking fetishism while in the military, serving abroad, which manifested in her consuming a clump of ash every night. the sensation of a sizzling esophagus, curling and charring in a span of hours, burrowing through the solidarity of defenseless epithelia and the numbness thereafter, was the advent of her asinine addiction. how this ever happened, and why, i do not know and possibly never will. 

i had seen marjorie at my store, twice, coordinated with times when jonathan was away, the year before her unusual death. she came up to me once and said in a frilly, shrill intonation; you know, thomas, sex is easy, but being held is hard. i smiled, without purpose, to keep her going. i meant business. and when you reach my age, and you've had a lot of sex, you feel lonely and used and unsettled to a point where you give in to whatever comes your way. but you're young at 46 and i am sure you could find love somewhere, i told her, almost impulsively. that is no consolation, i realize. when everyone around you says that you will be fine, that you will find love, a lover and 'settle down', the bar has been raised. they formulate a happiness for you, they are confident without any basis. that is what you are supposed to say to make someone happy, to be generous, to sound kind. what if, then, there is an unfair juxtaposition of desire, pressure and outcome from the 'well-wishers'? what if you couldn't live up to their narratives of optimism? what if you never knew the kind of love you wanted? what if your ideal life was a little different, a little violent? how would you explain? how would you find your niche in the world of ideologies to satisfy a crowd, to explain to yourself the origins of your immutable desires? 

she sighed and walked away that restless evening. i saw her unhappiness slip through my eyes, burrow her heart and nuzzle with her mind. and i didn't say anything, do anything or hear anything. it was just another business. 

the diary of a dead button

chapter ix

it has been four days since i lost my thighs. and everyone has been noticing; everywhere i go. strung against a zebra flannel, a bronze talisman, and a camouflage handkerchief, i am half-bodied, inelegant and exposed. at my age of two years and three months, it is not in the Lancaster social conventions to support anyone as hedonic and Bohemian as me. as a result of which, i have developed tremendous insecurities. 

i will not lie and hide the fact that i am insecure about my race, the color and texture of my skin, early-onset pockmarks and my unequaled roundness. i am of an orange-brown, a burnt face, with severe psoriasis and xerotic eczema. to cope under these bitter circumstances, sheila gave me an alter-ego, a beautified intelligence, a twinge of the rational and the virtue of perception. a voice with which i can croon to the sparrows, straddling the lips of burnt azaleas. a voice with which i can speak to my self, unaided and spiffy, and create a shell of make-believe preponderance, to machinate and orchestrate an esoteric living, to beg the humane for civil justice, to prove the inertia of my deceitful alienation --all in a pleat of my menstrual adulthood, in a search for establishment. the scope of my wandering is beyond any containment; beyond any boundary of society, litigation and morality. in this search for establishment, i am in my own power to experiment with sexuality, to appreciate nature and deconstruct my social class. but i am an outcast, a polygamist and a social scientist. a morphometric schizophrenic, with a serious condition that Dr Rigo doesn't know about. my adult baby syndrome.

as a button, i am born with very specific and defined roles. primarily, perhaps, to hold together the shame and dignity of your absolute forbearing. peeking my arms through a lip of cotton, gliding past a corrugation of your fabric, rough on the edges and smooth on the surface, and blossoming, finally, into a full embrace of the pearly atmosphere, a bouquet of clouds and warm, autumn buttermilk. secondarily, i am a barrier to the phenomenon of nudity. or in the use of careful concealment. allium and liatris, for example, use my tongue for lesbian debauchery in a peculiar garage on Cornelia Street -sweating through their nipples, dictating ideologies of radical feminism, and creating of me a spectacular Libertarian. they wear garlands of syphilis, beads of cherries and olive make-up. read Rousseau and Wallace while listening to the Velvet Underground and confess to the occasional identity of confused Beatniks. their seminal philosophies revolve around the performance of concealment -to button up, in a wiry, speculative sense of glamorous magnificence. polished and refined from a wild exterior; but what a harrowing, tumultuous mesh of discordance occupying inside -it makes me tear up. this is the story of today's reality. or maybe my devolving reality. counterpoised and targeted to paint away, to brush away, to melt away the black and white with a whistle and a smile. it is the fad of spectra -everything is purposeful, edgy and charismatic. 

he broke me when i was, only, an amateur wallflower. in a matter of microseconds, behind an accident, on the fortieth page of the Torah. gregory arthur gould. a twenty four year old half-Italian half-Greek climatologist from Wellesley, MA. undetectable, HIV positive. this happened at a clinic on 54th Street. with the delivery of the news there was first a disbelief, followed by an outrage followed by a soul tearing, glass smashing disarray of negativity, anger, dismissal and denial. shortly after, he took me by his hand and broke me into seven pieces. burnt a few of my fingers, trashed a few more, and spared me. i know the pain of severe disability, though i cannot communicate, i cannot speak or write or dance to gould, to explain the fable of brooke atkinson, McNally Jackson or the life un-lived. but my broken state, my fierce bipolarity, my tri-partite insecurities are elements of my existence i am coping with today. perhaps, tomorrow will be worse.  

november shuttle bus

i am reading Canada in a shuttle bus that is patchily air-conditioned, dimly lit and stacked with a unique amalgam of queers, auditors and drowsy people. we are moving at a constant speed of sixty three miles per hour. my head keeps swaying, my shoulders tilting, my legs split in a maneuvering discomfort. i release a cough and look to my right, incline my shoulder and let my shared seat-partner drool and dribble a speck of saliva onto the fabric of my shirt. salmon-stripe, wrinkle-free, tidily hemmed and fading. she is black. speaks Ebonics. a business lady in her thirties. her hair is neatly braided, with streaks of burnt brown, almost chocolate colored, although it appears a peculiar blue in the green lights along the bus ceiling. moments before the drop of saliva lands on my shirt, without a thud, without a ripple, it glistens with a jarring twinkle, rough at the edges with fourteen bubbles. i follow the trajectory of this pearl drop from her lips to my sleeve, carelessly instantaneous, traction-less and unmoved by my breathing. her upper lips are chapped around a plump, waxy tubercle. one millimeter, crater-like dents lining the vermilion zone, extending to the node; coursing its way to the tip of the philtrum. the drop appears from the extreme nodal crease on her lips, gains momentum and falls, gravitationally. within a matter of seven milliseconds, the drop has diffused into the lattice of atoms -- my pasture of fabric, on the edge of my body, in mini-trails and fetal paths, reeling in anoxia, scurrying along in tentacles, riddling and flushing a puddle of fleas, ticking and jogging in bristles of dust, a dying matador, a suffusion in tertiary voids, mellowing and stripping in the tragedy of disappearance. this is the life of a saliva bead as framed in the pocket of a dictionary; a liberated gestation of nanoseconds, to the shared demise of tragedy. a peculiarly universal phenomenon, traditionally unobserved. aimed to entertain on the lip of the black lady, my shared seat-passenger, resting before business. her name is nyomara. it hardly matters.

i fell asleep shortly after. and woke up, twenty seven minutes later, to the sound of a crying infant -bordering seventy decibels, shrill and constant. i get very irritated sometimes when i hear infants cry. it's excruciatingly loud, desperate, and so piercing. i want to jab a pacifier into the mouth and say, can you shut the fuck up, please? but i realize, in the polite society where i live, this will be considered rude, selfish, aggressive and unthoughtful -borderline maniacal. it is a pity that given the constraints of our code of civilization i am not allowed to feel, sometimes, the way i truly feel, especially about a little child. or i am allowed to feel, but shunned from expressing it. the immediacy of concern and my upbringing, best left unquestioned, glides past moments where i bite my inner cheek to maintain the codified propriety. sickening and staged, most of the time.  but i am helpless, and lonely in this domain. if i have a child of my own to deal with and raise, perhaps, my feelings towards a screaming infant may change. till then, however, i will maintain that this development of evolution, this crying to be heard, this congruency of defenselessness, this modality of expressionism of a voiceless, wordless, living meta-summation of chromosomal hiatuses, is no different from that of a barking dog -similarly defenceless, speechless, unable to communicate in a constructed vernacular you and i rehearse. possibly a scandalous analog -the rational and the irrational beings of the one tree of life. but is your baby, truly and decisively rational? answer me sylvia. 

i have the vision of a miniature me, nano-sized, possibly tubular, sitting down, hunch-backed, at the neck of my aorta. the ascending branch, behind the sinus, perpendicular to the orifices of the coronary arteries. en route a micro-systemic shuttle of immunity, complexity and the belligerence of hormones, unearthing a cross-talk, bendable to nature, glorified and typified by the philosophy of adaptation. googly-eyed and insincere, dictating to a self-duo, trafficking and policing the physiology, the morphology, the blueprint of the body worlds. living in an umbrella, talking to my self in a series of echoes, ribbing and rippling the frustrations of a physical circuit, walking in circles, breathing in loops, fashioning and dressing in the renewal of the constitution; this is my internal turnover, this is the photograph of the internal me, unedited and untouched. the relevance of capturing the ballad of my blood cells is something that makes sense to me. it helps me know my other self. my clockwork self, with a mind of its own. playing hide-and-seek with viruses, my nano-me in a nano-world gives shelter to my soul. gives comfort and reassurance to my vitriolic mind, burnt out and charred in the ferocity of my life, in the dielectric of my world; our worlds, perhaps, the shared distribution of economics and pottery. my nano-me in a nano-world, in nano-tongues and nano-views, searching a transition to a hidden life, a floating city, and the meta-soul of screams. 

boston part c

you are looking at me, wide-eyed, from the other side of the glass window, with a half-smile, a crinkled forehead and a curiously bent nose. you are wearing a blue flannel shirt, brown leather shoes, a Red Sox vinyl jacket, and carrying a white plastic bag. looks like a carton of milk and a box of Cheerios, but I could be mistaken. you appear like a shadow, perhaps. a silhouette against the flash of bright yellow lights in the township of Arlington where I am. right now. drinking a decaffeinated beverage, tapping away on my mobile phone and listening to Rob Dougan's instrumental compositions. i have had a fulfilling day; exciting, reflective and responsive. extensive walking, singing aloud and dodging two drunk boys throwing bottles at each other on Varnum Street. you are possibly waving at me right now, trying to speak with your eyes. but i am semi-alert, looking through your body, remembering the weight of my Boston pedagogy. mired in a nostalgia; i cannot explain. the kind where you felt electrified, revolutionized and transformed in the folds of your naivete, and grew, and matured, and ripened in a city that you loved, in a city where you built your dreams, in a city where you saw yourself.

i am in a red city shirt; i've worn it all day in the midst of a baseball parade, a feminist intellectuals convention, a hospital and a library. a disgruntled father cut across a coffee line earlier this afternoon, to buy some for a dying daughter. i flinched, violently. she is microcephalic, tender and perishing. i spent minutes imagining what she looks like; tying a father's face into a feminizing, fetishizing morph. but i didn't have an answer. into the demise of a clouded imagination. onward and into a canopy of fairy tales. a dead daughter, blood gushing, trembling in a dialogue of evolutionary ingenuity. the last impression of a breathing, human epitope of violent laughter. i shook my arms; as if hyper-contracted in a freeze-nitrosylation and sprinted to the Quad. eating on the way a fistful of sunshine, a century of mildew and shavings of marble. relentlessly intrigued, racially burnt, discussed dissected and experimented on.

i was humming a Beatles tune, rolling my eyes, clicking my finger tips on Massachusetts Avenue when norah yelled from across the street. an ex-neighbor, virgin and decidedly scholarly. orphaned in teenage, miserable in her 20s, she became a hermit in training, reclusive and suspicious, with an airy voice, granular and monotonic. the deep-rooted sexual primacy, buried in a chimerical cage, made her wildly numb; an inner tempestuousness breaking the perimeter of promise. back to my world, across the street, spinning tales, lies and drugs. norah, what's up? i asked, curiously. i got bit by a dog the other night, bad baaad Booty, she said arduously, i may have rabies from the smuggled pup. her phone rang. the sound, a piercing cadence, pressing through an orange leather purse. oh yes mom, he drugged the nanny last night and... i walked away, unknown to me the life of the nanny. and my ex-neighbor.

into the face of Virgil and tourists, a garden of bricks, a monument of words and studios, i sat by Straus D, clicking photographs on my memory and listening to the chuckle of an Ivy gay, a Jamaican and a transistor; memorizing history, confusion and Vonnegut. my bitterness about philosophy, beginning on these very footsteps when Russell kissed a frog and said to me, the fundamental crisis that man faces is loving everyone but himself. in truth, in comparison, in the variegation of mnemonic, we argued at the brew house on Dunster Street. appropriating the meaning of 'loving yourself', the outcomes, the placebos, the canonizing and gentrifying, the undulating Harvardian raking in contempt, shriveled in remorse for a resonating hypocrisy; calling yourself a raven, a cormorant and a field star, curling in ulcer and uremia of your brain. i need you to learn to love yourself, first, Russell, and then plead the cases of Curie, Amis and Plath. to compare, to verbalize in the spirituality of Salinger, pompous in your white washed neighborhood. what money and your entitlement did to you was loathe yourself at the cost of appreciating contemporaries, wary of an alternate reality, in a pit of poverty, in the third world of mine. you pointed it out wholeheartedly, preachy, on our second night at Harvard. i have never forgotten, never will. as you continue on your mission of entitlement, privilege and philanthropy, hating yourself, doing good for the exterior of your smile, it is my hope that you will un-click a pittance, a grueling punishment and let yourself rise. in the philology of self, the biology of winds and consequence of minds.

my momentary fascination

i had a momentary fascination with electronic drumbeats, lyme disease and roots of words, today. especially, aleatory and solecism. corresponding meanings are random and ungrammatical. i am a fan of the concept of randomness. for some tremendously odd reason, the imagery of chaos is an orchestrated, romanticized thought chromatic in the deepest venule of my existence. i have been thinking about randomness, a lot, today. unaware of three spilled coffee drops on my pink checkered shirt, a trickle on my threadbare denim, a design on my Keds. shuffling between that and my non-affiliated embodiment of a pro-spiritual, anti-constructivist.

this probably stems from my being a rebel child. a violent, unkind boy at the age of 6, stabbing my sister with a sharpened pencil, disturbed, bemused and unbridled. persistent in the juxtaposition of carelessness, queerness and motivation, the defense mechanism of violence; i have perennially outgrown a soliloquy of emancipatory motives. i have vouched for sexual emancipation, erotic symbolism and polygamy, since i was twelve. rooted in an anti-classicist, shedding reason on the tendency of mammalian carnality, i have advocated for an unconventional incredulity, barking to the passers-by. marilyn escaped the season of sex.

reminiscing the face of krenaline, my bold and valiant lover. asleep behind a shadow. celebrating a time of fair togetherness. with cocoa, fruit and neuroses. with a bucket of my strange psychedelics, hallucinated upon by the whims of colic, reaching out to you. with a tear of dissonance, a breach of distance, parody of those electronic drums. i miss you krenaline. come back to me.