Talk to me dirty as the sun tears itself grotesquely through the sky. I am lost in language all over again. Can you slide your fingers in my mouth? French is a beautiful language and should not waste its time with me. I am inclined to believe that everything, like our relationship, is initiated from a state of anxiety—a general malaise that seems to float through life, a premonition of death that sprawls through all bodies.

…

Then it would be our last night together, you are tender and bore affection into the shell of my body. Beard burn on my neck—one’s welcome is always ephemeral so when I untangle my legs from yours I do it delicately, find my clothes in the corner glowing as they cover the salt lamp. The best is when your body takes over to tell you go.

…

Is the shift West something inevitable? This winter has made all signs point to Los Angeles. I want to be aimless like that place.

At 3PM in an orange-lit cafe on 22nd street I eclipse and come clean to Cece by deleting Hinge—the first step towards spiritual redemption—proving that I am not a masochist.

A typical-looking white man with a beard and a backwards light blue baseball cap slouches in a booth, fingers working furiously on the keyboard of his laptop. Cece and I try to decipher his posture as some constellation of his attitude towards us. She asks what we’d do if he came up to us wanting confrontation. I told her the only reasonable response would be to apologize then leave. Because leaving is like poetry. And I quite like poetry. And since putting Catholicism behind me, shame has become abject rather than endearing so I can make no justification to remain.

…

It is April 12. My body has been—to this point—the only stable abstraction. The mirror is never forgiving, rather loving as it does not waste its time with my feelings.

…

Is it okay to admire someone only for the way they look? I suppose that is why we have Hollywood. And I suppose writers—and I—use words like ‘suppose’ to impose an impression upon the reader that we know what must be said concerning the truth of things.

So I suppose it is okay to look at someone and say to oneself I’d like to sit on their face. …

To be a closeted middle schooler again while the guy I chose to have a crush on sits next to me asking questions. What does he know about me that I don’t? I don’t know him, but I don’t think he could love me. My hands are darts which aim to tear out all my hair then stuff it in my mouth, and I’d then want to scream.

He wore a navy sweater. It fit well.

…

It is midnight, plans made yesterday, too late to cancel. Day-old eyeliner and baggy jeans, walking outside into the May wind, I am simultaneously amorous and numb. If I was not so emotionally bankrupt I might feel excitement and not this depraved obligation.

…

The only thing better than living in NYC is knowing escape from it is imminent. Driving past these repeated images of highways breaking into greenery and factories pumping out clouds of plume, I am thinking about how this year has chewed me up, held all my parts above the ocean. When let go I plummet but never break through the water’s skin, instead I’m in the back seat of a van my parents rented to fit me and all my life belongings in.

…

They’re putting in a new data center 15 minutes from my old high school.

Dad and I are driving past the land that was recently decimated. Soon the humming will be all around us. The birds will stop singing because we won’t need things like bird-song anymore. In 10 years birds, along with other obsolete things, will fall from trees—if there are any left.

…

Just read an article that proclaimed stop existing to be consumed! Though if Marx has taught me anything about alienation and the body, it is to ask: if one gains pleasure from the commodification of their sex, then is this not reclamation of labor? Of self? Gonna take off my clothes and get some pics with the flash on tonight.

…

The willow blossoms, but it doesn’t do me any good. I want to call you, but instead I step outside. The wind reaches for my face but cannot bear to touch. Might be nice to cry now, but only guilt flutters through me—it is a sparrow in my heart, it wants a fuck and a cigarette.