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(p.s. drag me!!!!!)
My Devotions
Sometimes
I worry
about allotment and such, about how much
is available. I wouldn’t like to run out. I think that
is a fair anxiety. Today I felt the day drag
like something drugged. Today I drugged
through the wind, found myself envisioning drugs
to ingest and puncture myself with, like a kind of shot
or antibacterial or party-indulgent. I used to count
my devotions like warts. I had six, to be exact. I would remain
tethered to it, until late, tethered to the discussion of devotions.
I divvied up the rations unequally, with an emphasis on the unequal.
I assigned the most beans to a pile called YOU, found myself
in a perpetual mode of distribution, redistribution, and so on.
Most days, I don’t dwell on the issue of hoarding, on the amount
of furniture magazines those women on TLC keep stacked
in their toilets. I’m indifferent to the notion of a surplus.
I’ve always had just enough. I do not want to go to a raver
and thrust light like a rebel. It doesn’t interest me to go to a roof
and kick people like a deviant. You didn’t actually want to lace yourself
with everything evil and watch it all crumble. Never. Once, in the summer,
you told me that you were getting arrested, that you had heard siren sounds
through your window like an armageddon, had stashed your stash
under a sunken mattress, only before calling me to cry. I anticipated
the amount of letters that I would send, the cursive that I’d use
to make State Prison look lovely. I knew, at some point,
that those letters would surpass the twelve beans in your pile,
destroy the notion of the beans altogether, the practice of rationing
in and of itself. I didn’t want you locked in a cell, but I still planned all of it,
anyways. You, accumulating commissary money, prosaic letters sent in bulk,
an underwear or two of mine stuck between leaflets. At that point, I knew
that I had already exhausted the allotment, spent what could be spent.
It was drained long before the idea of the letters, the beans. Underwear.
There were never any caveats to my reverence. There was a reason
why I never stipulated certain conditions, was never bothered
by the needle, by the sheer amount of needles, by the way your hands
had ballooned to an unproportionate size. I safeguarded myself
against the phantom siren calls with devotion: It’s more legitimate
if it’s not real. There were always going to be more letters,
actual letters, sent within the conditions of our unreality,
mailed off in the alternate universe of fantasizing about you
going away, leaving, leaving me. You didn’t actually get arrested,
the red and blue at your window a mere product of withdrawal haze.
You called back, laughing. Somewhere, though, those letters were sent,
and you bought yourself a book with the commissary money.
You remembered that I had mentioned Flannery O’Connor. Sometimes,
I look back and call it teenage escapade. A depraved longing
for rejection, as Kraus says. Projected fantasy, masturbatory fixation
turned real. Kraus asks if knowledge has to be eroticized
to find its point. I answer: your Eros was the point; the beginning
and the end. There was never anything smart about what was going on.
I was powerless to your omnipotence, though, to the organism
of our distance, to the phantom siren calls, phantom prison,
phantom nod. Today, I tried to emulate you in my walk.
I phantom nodded. I nodded off in phantom form, pretended
to discombobulate in vignette. It didn’t feel all that different
from my normal state. Perhaps we were both in a psychosis
during the thick of it: You, opioid-ridden and broke, sending me photos
of your ballooned hands, Me, held at the neck, wind-whipped,
seeing visions of you everywhere like contrails in the sky.
If the threat of the siren call had been rendered real
that summer day, the O’Connor hardcover actualized,
the prison reified, cementing you inside, you’d still be there,
and maybe, there would’ve been letters, and maybe,
you would’ve spread yourself thin on a cold cot, considered
the morality of the Misfit. Instead, you went on furlough
to escape your absence, an absence from an absence,
too many layers of gone to even begin seeing the contrails
once more. You went on leave to avoid the dust mites
burrowed in-between half-yells. You there? The first time
that I visited your house was in your honor, to collect
your phone. You had so many phones. Three, to be exact.
The stash was still stashed under the sunken mattress, but mattress
had sunk deeper. The evidence of your affliction was less jarring
than your dog, your dog who knew how to sift through it all,
your dog, who knew the ins and outs of the piles in your room,
everything illicit and romantic, unused and unsaid compounded,
the intricacies of who you were laid bare. With everything there,
dog and mattress and drugs and all, all of which contained
a corporal tinge, I felt a tremor in my core. I was made aware
of how you must have hovered in that room. I saw that the chair
at your desk was used for sitting. I took a Greyhound back to the city
and found it settling within me: the vigor of being in mourning.
I was a colonialist with an acute obsession; I had entered your turf
without permission, perused the aisles of everything you were
without permit. And still, wanted more. I wanted to hoard it all, hoped
your family would let me keep the phone, the phones, the drugs, even
(if not to puncture oneself with, then to cherish, like dolls),
the phantom entities, the mattress, I ached. I wanted to restock
my pile. I was running dry. Those twelve beans had unnoticeably budded,
had blossomed, had bean-stalked out of view, had become something
to squint at, to makeshift into a continuum, to believe in as a reality.
You grew to be tall and grand and as one looks up at something like that,
it disappears from the eye. That is a fact. So is: I had met you online.
You were much older. There was surety in your nebulae, in knowing
that there was form but form lacking stature, form lacking breath
and cells and stamina. You only got big because I let you. I did
the divvy-ing. I did the devotion. I realized, on that Greyhound back,
that I must have left them behind somewhere, the rest of my beans.
The ones that didn’t beanstalk. The ones that possibly would’ve,
in the future. I dropped them on the way to Jersey, or on the way back,
maybe. I left them under the mattress. In your narrow hallway.
On the windowsill at your bedside. Dropped them in the stash.
Added them to the drugs, indistinguishable in the mass. They flew
toward you that day, the day that you died, and drugged through the wind,
drugged the wind, lacing air with legume, painting wispy marks of grief
in their wake. But heaven knows what beans are made of. Whatever you are
is seismic and has become a case-study for whatever future things I decide
to get involved with. I worry that I intellectualize you too much,
but I’m not sure what else to do. You’re more than dust.
about allotment and such, about how much
is available. I wouldn’t like to run out. I think that
is a fair anxiety. Today I felt the day drag
like something drugged. Today I drugged
through the wind, found myself envisioning drugs
to ingest and puncture myself with, like a kind of shot
or antibacterial or party-indulgent. I used to count
my devotions like warts. I had six, to be exact. I would remain
tethered to it, until late, tethered to the discussion of devotions.
I divvied up the rations unequally, with an emphasis on the unequal.
I assigned the most beans to a pile called YOU, found myself
in a perpetual mode of distribution, redistribution, and so on.
Most days, I don’t dwell on the issue of hoarding, on the amount
of furniture magazines those women on TLC keep stacked
in their toilets. I’m indifferent to the notion of a surplus.
I’ve always had just enough. I do not want to go to a raver
and thrust light like a rebel. It doesn’t interest me to go to a roof
and kick people like a deviant. You didn’t actually want to lace yourself
with everything evil and watch it all crumble. Never. Once, in the summer,
you told me that you were getting arrested, that you had heard siren sounds
through your window like an armageddon, had stashed your stash
under a sunken mattress, only before calling me to cry. I anticipated
the amount of letters that I would send, the cursive that I’d use
to make State Prison look lovely. I knew, at some point,
that those letters would surpass the twelve beans in your pile,
destroy the notion of the beans altogether, the practice of rationing
in and of itself. I didn’t want you locked in a cell, but I still planned all of it,
anyways. You, accumulating commissary money, prosaic letters sent in bulk,
an underwear or two of mine stuck between leaflets. At that point, I knew
that I had already exhausted the allotment, spent what could be spent.
It was drained long before the idea of the letters, the beans. Underwear.
There were never any caveats to my reverence. There was a reason
why I never stipulated certain conditions, was never bothered
by the needle, by the sheer amount of needles, by the way your hands
had ballooned to an unproportionate size. I safeguarded myself
against the phantom siren calls with devotion: It’s more legitimate
if it’s not real. There were always going to be more letters,
actual letters, sent within the conditions of our unreality,
mailed off in the alternate universe of fantasizing about you
going away, leaving, leaving me. You didn’t actually get arrested,
the red and blue at your window a mere product of withdrawal haze.
You called back, laughing. Somewhere, though, those letters were sent,
and you bought yourself a book with the commissary money.
You remembered that I had mentioned Flannery O’Connor. Sometimes,
I look back and call it teenage escapade. A depraved longing
for rejection, as Kraus says. Projected fantasy, masturbatory fixation
turned real. Kraus asks if knowledge has to be eroticized
to find its point. I answer: your Eros was the point; the beginning
and the end. There was never anything smart about what was going on.
I was powerless to your omnipotence, though, to the organism
of our distance, to the phantom siren calls, phantom prison,
phantom nod. Today, I tried to emulate you in my walk.
I phantom nodded. I nodded off in phantom form, pretended
to discombobulate in vignette. It didn’t feel all that different
from my normal state. Perhaps we were both in a psychosis
during the thick of it: You, opioid-ridden and broke, sending me photos
of your ballooned hands, Me, held at the neck, wind-whipped,
seeing visions of you everywhere like contrails in the sky.
If the threat of the siren call had been rendered real
that summer day, the O’Connor hardcover actualized,
the prison reified, cementing you inside, you’d still be there,
and maybe, there would’ve been letters, and maybe,
you would’ve spread yourself thin on a cold cot, considered
the morality of the Misfit. Instead, you went on furlough
to escape your absence, an absence from an absence,
too many layers of gone to even begin seeing the contrails
once more. You went on leave to avoid the dust mites
burrowed in-between half-yells. You there? The first time
that I visited your house was in your honor, to collect
your phone. You had so many phones. Three, to be exact.
The stash was still stashed under the sunken mattress, but mattress
had sunk deeper. The evidence of your affliction was less jarring
than your dog, your dog who knew how to sift through it all,
your dog, who knew the ins and outs of the piles in your room,
everything illicit and romantic, unused and unsaid compounded,
the intricacies of who you were laid bare. With everything there,
dog and mattress and drugs and all, all of which contained
a corporal tinge, I felt a tremor in my core. I was made aware
of how you must have hovered in that room. I saw that the chair
at your desk was used for sitting. I took a Greyhound back to the city
and found it settling within me: the vigor of being in mourning.
I was a colonialist with an acute obsession; I had entered your turf
without permission, perused the aisles of everything you were
without permit. And still, wanted more. I wanted to hoard it all, hoped
your family would let me keep the phone, the phones, the drugs, even
(if not to puncture oneself with, then to cherish, like dolls),
the phantom entities, the mattress, I ached. I wanted to restock
my pile. I was running dry. Those twelve beans had unnoticeably budded,
had blossomed, had bean-stalked out of view, had become something
to squint at, to makeshift into a continuum, to believe in as a reality.
You grew to be tall and grand and as one looks up at something like that,
it disappears from the eye. That is a fact. So is: I had met you online.
You were much older. There was surety in your nebulae, in knowing
that there was form but form lacking stature, form lacking breath
and cells and stamina. You only got big because I let you. I did
the divvy-ing. I did the devotion. I realized, on that Greyhound back,
that I must have left them behind somewhere, the rest of my beans.
The ones that didn’t beanstalk. The ones that possibly would’ve,
in the future. I dropped them on the way to Jersey, or on the way back,
maybe. I left them under the mattress. In your narrow hallway.
On the windowsill at your bedside. Dropped them in the stash.
Added them to the drugs, indistinguishable in the mass. They flew
toward you that day, the day that you died, and drugged through the wind,
drugged the wind, lacing air with legume, painting wispy marks of grief
in their wake. But heaven knows what beans are made of. Whatever you are
is seismic and has become a case-study for whatever future things I decide
to get involved with. I worry that I intellectualize you too much,
but I’m not sure what else to do. You’re more than dust.