I am perfect because I can see all this and forgive myself. I am perfect in this light and above this light my dance loves me. I am not bad. I am a rogue ant traveling soft white sheets––how comfortable they are to me! And I am the hero who squishes the ant with two sides of a circular cotton pad, discarded into a raw plastic trash can––tomorrow's dust.
I am perfect because I am human
All we know, all we can know
Is as human beings
I am not exempt from this fact
nor from you
We are at each other’s behest, you and us
Me and you know this all too well
But I know nothing
is something
I know that I am not as bad as I think
I know this light voice and hand
These marks know me
as you
I’m grateful to the street signs for telling us where to go
In the back room of a bar in the Bowery I peer at an eighty degree angle. I pour my vision into the CDJs' little LED screens. I watch "Jackson Walker Lewis" open his Celine playlist. I sense my seeing spotlight his choice. I feel his partnership in my dance as my neck curves forward to occlude other bodies from my visual field. The Paris Review in my bag leaves a rectangular side in my back.
1. From it I read an excerpt from a Robert Gluck interview and a poem about cars. “I’ll read and let’s see what emerges.” Alice is always game. We played Asher’s 3-associations-away game and her own opposite game. We invent, negate, lie, and repurpose. “I’m not gonna correct myself anymore.” An onlooker hears and tells me the Paris Review office is near the New School in a nondescript office building that probably also hosts, like, military recruitment organizations. He worked for an agency that represented one of the artists that did a cover for the Review. What is the reward for saying such things?They walk away. I see people I’ve only seen in image-form.
2. Alice wants to dance; thank god I wore a hat. I'm always happy to dance. I take my place and let my feet head the curve this time. Without dancing I send my eyeballs to themselves and the night selects its door. It's a choice to be by the booth. It's not a choice to stay. It all starts with the soles of the feet, so it helps to really understand the architecture of your bones down there. Layer knees, hips, stomach, shoulders, neck, jaw, eyes, hands. Evidence of your sweat signals the death of genre; if you can believe this while living in the crowd's gaze, you can survive any length of time. My neck looks for nothing but the bottom of the next beat. I wonder if the music has siblings. My eyes slam back into my head as Meg blows her sweet-smelling vape smoke onto the CDJs and Jackson mimes DJing in response. In this room and in the world there are too many people.
3. I sat in Metrograph for a while practicing my spinal curve. I read a few things, always having to skip to the short stories’ last paragraph to see if it demands going back to start. Something about Shakespearean sonnets and coffee entering you like a dark phrase m’ont piqué, donc je ferme le livre and order a black coffee that the waiter forgets and so gives to me on the house. I tilt my head all the way back and up to the waiter’s attention to reveal my face from under the black rim of the military hat I bought at Episode in Le Marais. This hard-won truth slurps around in the back of my throat which is also my mind.
4. I’m living a frivolous, overextended life. To meet new ends I begin to elide my thoughts from myself and look falling directly in the eyes. Blah blah blah. I was in the shower the other day de-spooling snot from my nose like candy floss (I don't know what candy floss is).
5. I tell my students to push into the ground with their hands as they throw their bodies into the air and swing their feet toward bending surfaces.I hoist and chit chat all day with a forgettable man who has settled for $23 an hour. A swimmer with water-less eyes but on me they sweat. Everybody’s so hot in that room always. I give them the option to be in a group or solo. I watch community form around me and seep further into myself, smiling and feeling young.
6. I breathe toward the edges of my incessant burping, stealing words from mixed-up women scared to return bottles of wine. They ask if it’s natural and I curve further in.
7.Without dish soap the need to do dishes becomes secondary to the need to buy dish soap.Which subsides beneath the tides of impulse and drowsy domesticity. Staying in our rooms in New York City we think of ways to use condiments to communicate. I feel grateful in transit and wait for your sign.
8. I miss you, I love you, I can't wait for you to arrive. I edit constantly in my head but for you I try to edit less. I want to be honest with you for once. Because you have given me access to so much, taught me by pointing to and brushing past parts of myself I never knew were there. For your incidental generosity I will speak true and real words, will write good sentences, and will shower with kindness. I'll tell you where everything is. I'll show you where to go. I'll take you out, baby. I'll give you everything. I'll risk it all for you. You––who barely probably realize how much is in those books and our futile relationships with them. I notice and remember what you don't remark.I press and you are impressed. If I can write just one original line a day I'm happy. For you I will try to be so good. I want to survive with you. Climb onto the roof of a flooded house, through the halls and doors up to the attic and out the curved windows. No straight lines in sight.
Written in response to video of SECT Inc.'s performance at Pageant. Performed by Iliana Penichet-Ramírez, Ella Dawn W-S, Isa Spector, Lavinia Eloise Bruce, and Josie Bettman
Don't come into this house looking like that
Bow your fucking head
Stop touching yourself and worrying while you work
Respond, reply, relay, react, reappear
Stop giving up
Read, reread, rerere read, re re re re reread
Edit boldly
We're in the house, no you and I
We're a body in a house
And there was a party yesterday
We don't mind the mess, in fact we find you beautiful
We unfolded the laundry just before you got here
Carve out daily daylit time to edit
Edit everything
Unfold everything
Needles fall in a house
And in unison we need a mother
This house is not a mother
Unthreaded needles fall to the bottom of the house we live in
Totally fine and green to be late left foot goes down to go up head crooks elbow eyes parabolic in some projected desire make yourself impenetrably porous [to] allow trusting handfuls of breath to arrive and depart through a softening belly dialoguing with each eyelash that falls toward getting up backward eyes like that kind of descent all that there is like that kind of knowing old friend like that one you think of sees the space of this window in 45 infinite hues you see it as time dissolving kneecaps poured into these hands made large enough for you and time and all my ideas never step nor do they simplify just fall and multiply space between eyeballs and hands moving backward through morning windows of nighttime sun
