I am perfectly ok until the next time I fall in love  Good intent and honesty do not redeem incompetence and stupidity; sorry, better luck next life  I don’t understand why you are all about death, and why I am all about beauty, and why we are so willing to change ourselves to accept the other  Your mouth is just another lethal head wound—bleed for me, baby  Go ahead, I won’t let you hurt me  Look, I can’t make you feel anything and nobody hurts you more and worse than yourself... right?  I never again want to choose between art and love  I never want to choose between closeness with another and closeness with the creative force within  They go together, they accompany one another and each is an important gift, each is here to be felt, experienced, savoured… the challenge is distinguishing one from the other, and choosing which one to hold in my hand and which one to hold in my heart at any given moment  We look for someone to love because we’re unhappy or unfulfilled;  we only find them when we are joyous and the emptiness has passed, when we no longer need them; they are relegated to the status of luxury items—“living” becomes all-important only after survival has been assured  I am sorry that I have become a reminder of your fear of your own capacity for intimacy  It’s not fear, self-loathing or suicide; it’s sheer, impersonal necessity… we have to destroy ourselves because the world is hopelessly inept and just not up to the task  You have said that the mistakes we make are our greatest gifts but why must we make mistakes on purpose?  I DON’T want to court disaster and self-abuse in order to grow stronger  I want to learn about how I have unconsciously been hurting myself all along… to clean up that mess and move on to the next one  Be patient, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it; just remember, next time it’s your turn to bring the weenies and my turn to bring the whine

Your hatred for women goes as deeply into you as my own hatred of myself goes into me… you could say we are a perfect match  Last time I saw you, you were frozen, waiting for a reply… breath was hissing through clenched teeth like a prison gate; electric slider switched, you squinted and twitched, last time I saw you  God says it’s safe to experiment  Satan says my way or nothing  “I am a jealous God”… with, apparently, a very flattering biographer “I am legion”, and I deserve a place to live as much as the next guy tell me about desperation, about loss   We are like so many finite quantities of salt and pepper; we’re just here to enhance God’s dining experience  After a certain point, I stopped having a relationship of preciousness with myself, and I just began living without regard for appearances  Appearances are a form of armour for the ego  Nazir was a beautiful man and the last thing I ever said to him was “put your fucking brain-bucket on you stupid bastard; you still owe me twenty bucks”… be as crazy as you want, but don’t forget your bucket, baby  A crazy person surrounded by other crazy people will not get better  There’s nothing wrong with any of us that 365¼ days in Kandahar wouldn’t cure… one way or another  You challenge me to love what I can’t  We are entwined, a dance, an embrace, a battle  You are not good or evil, you are important  I am never as free to be alone as when I am with you; it gives me space to focus myself as if no one were around  Men marry, build families, then spend most of their time in the garage  God help me to forget your beauty and how much I want to put you in my mouth and taste you and drink you  Here, inside our skulls, inside our ribcages, between our ears, it’s a lot like any other war zone; late news always breaks early  I have learned what I wanted to learn, that sex opens doorways into my own consciousness, that sex has its place, just not the place I thought  Easily amused, water falls in sheets over what I’m realizing; elusive; curtained Phillip Marlowe sits in someone else’s red leather chair with a tumbler of gin; my thoughts are picky private detectives in cheap suits; if they take the job, they’ll find me for fifty dollars a day plus expenses  Who am I? Am I this saintly, centered, balanced, compassionate individual or am I a self-condemning terror?  Am I a whore, a slut, an object? Or am I a sensitive, beautiful woman capable of great depth of emotion?  Oh my, you know, torturing a self-absorbed philosopher to death is like showing home movies to Helen Keller  I will NOT apologize to you, no matter how much I hate myself  Calm down and give me the gun why don’t you?  Thank you for the challenge of being strong when being weak will get me noticed more; thank you for joy mixed in with all this pain  I’ll never really sleep again   I lite a trembling cigarette  My face quivers orange in the mirror while it dies  I try hard to remember all the things I’d like to forget  Forget about it, just forget about it  Life: the ultimate suicide mission  Death: the ultimate rest and re-fit  It feels like… home  You don’t ask any questions of the fiery mind at the heart of the desert, you just steal each other’s lives in the belly of your ego’s rubble  The sand has taken my feet and the sky has taken the rest of me but the man before me is dead, and I know the divine   I look at your intensity and I know it will be replaced by ignorant frivolity  I look at your humour and I know it will be replaced with anger  All I want is to ask the nice, decent, friendly people to leave me alone for a while as I explore my own darkness; it is much safer to accept the darkness than to repress it  A wise and righteous man once showed me the difference between the triangles in the star; you either get everything you need, and forget your wants like nightmares, or you just get everything you ever wanted and nothing you need… forever  I thought, for a long time, that I wanted to find another person to enter into me deeper than I could go alone  But I can’t ignore the fact that painting is the only thing that will make me come hard  I once met a man who came when he killed; I shot him, but light comes, too… in many colours… you have seen a rainbow before, haven’t you?  We go so deeply and we think that pulling out is even an option   You want Kali to fuck you  I don’t know whether I want to tenderly, compassionately nurture you or whether I want to compete with you for your own soul  I don’t know whether I am Kali or the Virgin  You panic too much; if you’d ever seen me in the morning, you’d know Jesus was only a rank amateur at resurrection, baby  I’ll think about that  Are you ok to drive?  Yeah, let’s go  The police came today with boats, ropes, and hooks  They’re dragging my dreams for the bodies  It seems pride and hope have gone missing, and were last seen in my company  I’m relaxed, it’s okay  They tasted like licorice, like childhood  I want you  This is the ultimate seduction, the ultimate trap  I don’t see how I could possibly NOT betray you when everyone else’s weaknesses have let you down  Will you see my sensitivity as a weakness?  Or will you see it for what it is?  Receptivity?  The ability to respond?  Stop your voyeuristic whining; I haven’t forgotten in my heart that the origin of all history is always now  Either the life I lead is my real life and the art is symbolic, or it’s the other way around…  Fantasy vs reality… I want to feel how I am someone else’s fantasy, when I am happy and content and friendly and sexy, that he would want to possess me—even the users who struggle with it still want one thing—to possess the feminine principle in me and then throw it away like garbage when they see that it is empty   Men who abuse women and women who want to be used want to believe that the Divine Feminine is a lie  The moment of impulse  of epiphany is such a thing  a delicate light-stepping anvil that I chase, hammer flailing   I play a brutal game of tag with my desires in a dark room  But time is too short for this dusky percussion romance; I turn my maul’s arc to the painted blitz windows, walls, doors instead  Then my moon will rob the dancing target of its evasions  I will still chase, but I refuse to play this game blind  I am driven to destroy all I know and all I have built   Thank you for being here to teach me about my own darkness    I don’t care to impress you, white, upwardly-mobile society   I don’t care to flirt with you, to tease you or God forbid to bring you back with me and have you in my bed, have you possess me for one night, raping my sensibilities as you have raped everything else  There’s a hard razor cool in the fetid heat of the forest tonight  It threads itself through the coils of the jungle’s veins and arteries  Somewhere past the tree line, water sprints down the mountainside   Like me, it gets no rest; my sweat is my clock, marking time in drops to the dust beneath my face pummeled by the sun’s fists  My victims are lucky  I take the risk of continuing when I don’t know the reason or the outcome  I step out even when I don’t know where my foot will fall  I am absolutely terrified of being alive and you can’t help me  But I still want to do it  Damage my body, it’s nothing  It heals or I adapt  I hear a woman screaming; if I ignore it, the damage is permanent, and I will never heal  Maybe it will always be this terrifying   maybe we will just get used to it  I used to think risk-taking meant entering burning buildings, climbing mountains in Nepal, driving fast cars, doing hard drugs… but now I know that the greatest risk is in choosing not to buy shares in irony; choosing to take life slower than all the rats in all the cages; choosing not to be a victim  Love all children unconditionally, even if they hold weapons, even if you must kill them  Love them because they are your own possibilities;  Every day you are born, and a child again  Wear your scars with pride; they are the wounds life gave you  Rejoice in your survival and make life of those who didn’t survive  They deserve nothing less  Flood me with purpose  Fill me with my own freedom  I connect with my own spirit  I long to know genuine happiness and genuine strength  I long to know myself   It is only when we refuse to find the truth anywhere but within ourselves that we begin to discover it reflected in everyone and everything around us  Fill yourself with yourself—trust me, nothing else will do; you need no god to forgive your “sins”; you need only to realize and accept them  I learned how to cry, how to be sad   ALL of my sadness   Letting it come up   Living in that place where it feels impossibly huge  God help me  Watch as I pick up the ball I dropped  A moment can be a long process, and I’ll never be the one to see what all this really means  God gently re-educate and teach us once again the difference between our tenancy and your ownership, the difference between responsibilities and trust  Teach us gently because we wear our wounds with righteousness  I am this tiny, frightened human, wanting so badly the magic of being alive—Myself, and Other in this beautiful dance  I place myself here, I do not move  I deserve to ask questions, I deserve to speak  I deserve to be here  Love opens over time  And there is no worry in rushing it, for it will not be rushed  Where did I ever get the idea that God never wanted MY love?  What if God needs us as much as we need our very life?  I can pick up Love and hold it in my hand  I am not afraid  The only fear I will hold on to is of embarrassing MY FATHER.