Word-laced scepter skelter, and fine figs for dinner. Listen, 
there is a lot of joy in the little things, in the ho-hum-dum-dum-
damn bugs picking licks, finding spots, scram-damn-dum-dummy
bugs all crevice-bound, bloodthirsty, blood fiends of dark.
The allure ends here, it’s the punch-line and the general
underwhelming reveal, because Yes, it doesn’t last forever,
and yes, I do end here in flames. Let me be the piotious, pretty
pamplemousse pink-gummed gallbladder of your choosing, let
me rest here, stick-bound, bound to a stick, primed and pretty,
scepter of red and oozing ooze. I’m the Cannibal Holocaust
stick-fucked faerie gnashing on wood, wood stick peeking up
from my esophagus like God. Look. God compounded make man
after man of loss. It’s like that one time when I didn’t choose
to set my own hair on fire, flames finger-licking, scouring
for the last square centimeter of dead skin, skull-climbing, using
strand as ladder, inching towards home base. Then I was off
puking mucus, a bile-ridden carpet, sulfur scent spinning
me off into delirium, dum-dum-dummy bugs rising up
to the surface to lick the ash. Now stick-bound, endowed
with the great gift of great prophecy, all-knowing, all cure-having,
all bliss-containing, cheerful nuclear wife ready to show the others
how it’s done. Enjoy. Ready for the fanfare, for the fans touching
feet then hands to forehead, venerative cucks slowly on their way
to earning their very own molten wives. Listen, it’s either stick-
bound or aesthetic for life, but I’m thirteen and you’re fifteen
and she’s sixteen and there isn’t much substance in the whole thing
if we can’t be our true, vapid selves.



I’m starting to believe that the new wave of romance is just
prolonged rejection, tape-looped ‘till the end of days, being powerless
to the projected omnipotence of limp dick. It’s sputter-me-up
splutter lemon drop coughs into his cheap TJ Maxx suit (bad joke
recoil), it’s being ketamine’d at the hotel bar (quick slip), it’s
Kraus-ing a guy until you get a restraining order, shivering at
the curve of his d’s, his p’s, his o’s, your name written there
in lovely, distracted man-scrawl (swoon). It’s knowing that
it’s all going to end. It’s counting losses like coins. It’s being
more woman the richer you are. It’s accumulatory loss-accumulation,
it’s acclimating to the acrid acid of burning flesh. I met most
of the men online.  I burned a piece of me in their wake. At
their wake, I burned beside casket. Before you wake, I’ll burn
the evidence. Me. I believe Notley when she rewrites mythos
with She-God’s “lightbulbs and liquefaction.” It’s a matter
of believing, then, in either self-imposed or statutory masochism.
State-mandated pyres blazed the  lands, bright with liquefaction,
searing the eyes of watch-bound teenagers, clung and thick-lipped,
clipped news articles of the most recent fire—just a few years ago,
yet now as something illegal, something committed on one’s own
accord. Says the news, anyways. Ketamine’d at the hotel bar says
otherwise, I’d argue. It’s being poised and primed and pampered,
sitting pretty, pyre-bound, bound to binds by ballooned hands,
camera in focus and white men disseminating the evidence. Me.



There are different depictions. You pick your favorite. There’s
the sexed-up voluptuous female crouched over dead husband,
welcoming, evoking the flames. Then there’s Sati as colonial
justification, widow white-wearing and dark-skinned, tears
like gas, egging on the fire. What’s the difference between
martyrdom and martyrdom? The flame-laced, rope-tied woman
was bound in every corner, bound to be in every corner. Across
every ocean. All the time. Everywhere. There’s something
about the spectacle of loss. Give me woman crying, breaking
down, head on ground, heaving, she must be heaving (adjust
her posture to look more heave-like), heaving, yes, heaving.
Give me woman on a stick, give me indigenous woman blood-laced,
luster-struck boobs embalmed in grime, then put it on a stick.
I want a fun, fresh, funky Drew Barrymore-type cut into pieces.
I want a sexy, sultry, contemporary Black Dahlia. It’s all about
the smile. If it’s not there, carve it on. I want a day where I don’t
dream of setting myself on fire. Then I question if it’s something
genetic. Am I inherently barbaric, is lusting over inferno
something integral to who I am? I like the idea of everything
going away slowly. Of you watching. Eyes aflame. This is a general
“you.” This is for the fanfare in the back, for that guy at the bar
that didn’t text back, for the boy that I dated who actually died.
Give me self-flagellating toppling bodies stick-fucked, fisted
balls, balled fists and iffy-type sideways women heaving and
heaved up to the stick with heathens watching chewing
bubblegum not mourning not crying and not even heaving.



And in my final act, I stand stick-fisted, stuck on a stick
engulfed in gestures of homage—a rose here, a splash of gas
intermittently, word-laced scepter skelter hour upon us. Ready
for round two. More gas, more infrequent now, more infrequent
are the fans, the fanfare dwindled, fans now morose and sweaty
and bored in my company, retreating. I forgot my lines. It is hard
to conjure up air here. Breathing has never felt so much like heaving.
I feel blisters pop and bristle like juiced-up spikes of electricity,
and I feel nothing. I know what will be said tomorrow, that I was
humpty-dumpty strong, or perhaps was squirming on the stick
too shamelessly, was Notley- worshipping, was waiting for She-God
to end the shebang. It didn’t end. I burned and I died. But not before
I slut-shamed the bubblegum girls, pity-pissed the stragglers
who walked by without a glance, flipped-off the magistrates
who  organized the event, shat-sat the uniformed Brits pretending
to close their eyes, lip-kissed the baby boys, praying for infanticide,
tummy- tucked the pregnant women, their screams furthering
the fire, undercut the gamblers, playing to win on my demise,
and wind-whipped the ashes, forming contrails out of self.