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“Name your torture,”
one of them said
with a wink.
I wanted an orchard
but I swallowed the vodka
he handed me
willingly.“The Gorge”
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normally
I just open the door
and walk right in
but this time I decide
I should be invited.
founded on repetition as the old adage
of classical conditioning,
some things work best in saturation,
a vacuum
and unrevealed to the participants.
this is an examination of ethics.
no, an examination of motive.
same thing, the query being:
is it stronger when stated?
as the querant believes,
it is stronger with want
regardless of
palpable confirmation.
want is hope in modern language
and the most consensual
exchange of felt.either way, it is
best to have some controls.
I arrive, same fashion,
dramatically.
you have been out in
the snow with your friends
and enjoying the view
of the constellations above
when you hear the twig snap.
you will see their yellow eyes to
your right as you react
and you will be alone
suddenly like that compelled
to walk right in
before you see me cloaked,
walk right out.
you say I am the coldest, darkest
thing you’ve ever met but
my two dogs are
licking your frozen cheek
as you lie beneath my feet,
a sturdy boot on top
of your face, me baring down
without much weight but
pressure of depth.
but you seem colder than that.
you are face down
becoming the tracks.
I am taller than you expected,
yes?2.
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to seek me meant
pleasure in ineffability,
a loss for words perhaps
out of fear of my retaliation
and to remain hidden
from some parts of the depth
of me and from the world with
me. I prefer the furtive
curl against another.
the unutterable and silent
worship
drives this depth
and the others and
you and me
like rifts adrift
like that, the moment
I turn my head.
I like to live,
eat, sleep alone
and move the country
this way; solo,
home
a solitary war
between
picking up impulse
and
deep, deep reflection
upon impulse
control.
I’m so sensitive
though
that if I settle into
think and spread
the cards like a fan,
I’d feel it out
in five seconds
eyes closed.
show me,
she said.
show me one year
show me two years
show me three years.
flip it and
it’s the King of Cups,
again.
plus I’d pick the right
song to match.
get the numbers to flash 3:13,
my lucky bet.“duplicity”
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“And you will know the difference between the two?”
“The difference between a truth and a lie?” he asked to clarify.“No,” she said. “The difference between how I got here and the weirdest thing about me.”
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of course i would never kill
a child, I continued with her,
but the question was
how do we make something like
the death penalty less of
a moral argument?
and the only way to take morality
out of law is to write clauses that
outline exactly what will happen
and under what circumstances and
then without reneging, go and
enforce it every single time.
these are authoritarian things.but I didn’t agree with any of it
so I felt like battling me
was moot but I enjoyed the spectacle
and had, for no reason, invited
a male friend to join me in
class that day.
I too was interested in
motive but we cannot prove
intent truly without
absolute confession
and even then, we may
doubt what we hear.she was pandering to my
emotion, calling this episode
a real child even though my friend
took my side and mentioned how
dramatized television is
and that those cases are slim.
BUTshe said you said kill everyone.
I never said kill everyone, I said
if the law is x=x then it’s x.
I could see her reaching for
the feminine in me
which
as far as I could see
was straddled and leaning back.
confident enough to be the first one
to volunteer for the exercise,
which I remind her, is not
examining the morality of the law
itself but to remove debate around it
so that it may be better enforced,
without outcry and fairly.
when I finished nine hands
went up. we were a class of eighteen.
unsure of why
I volunteered for the exercise
first, and given the freedom to begin
with any declaration, why I chose to
examine how mass assassinations
could really kick things off to accept
blindly that some people are
executed.
the argument was not over
until all counter points had been examined,
the professor said.
she was tall and smiling when
I spoke and I felt thankful for her
defense of me any time she reiterated,
I was correct in re-summarizing the
exercise for each of the
nine hands that went up,
consuming the bell with a
theoretical society that arbited
punishment blindly as the statue
alluded to also,
the society we have tried to
have now is composed of
criterion like that.
I was eighteen and glowing
and enjoying the attention
with zero conviction about
the death penalty.
and when it came back to
her, and she presented it again
after many others had spoke,
I am sure I said,
to be perfectly frank,
we would HAVE to
kill the child in order
to make the law work.
and then I just kind of laughed
because the exercise itself asked you to
first pick a side and fight for it;
not to defend the death penalty
but to remove morality from law
having the freedom to remove all
structures of law around murder,
I could have created a punishless state
in which murderers walked free
or a Hammurabi and it is with the
same amount of callousness, that I
have begun to plant
nightshade around your house.
probability being like
you probably like to touch
things like me
and thinking it
to be Queen Anne’s Lace
giving it to your girl
for Valentine’s Day.“Valentine’s Day ”
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my interest was
social experimentation.
it’s why I went to college.
I wanted to be educated on the ways
to manipulate small crowds
and because of my naivete,
I did not realize at first
that my interest in slightly
sociopathic
behavior was a reflection
and that I find,
truthfully, serial killers
to be undeniably weak
in their compulsion.they are artless megalomaniacs.
you could just as easily garden
with the same amount of torrid wonder.
learn to grow nightshade and then
plant it all over town
in places where people smell
flowers and pick weeds for each
other.
but these are men and
they have to be known.
I’ve always had to cross my
legs.
Mrs. Shepherd said you
cannot bet on things that talk,
Sarah, when I interjected to
share my observation that
the same formulas can be applied to people
when presenting with the same patterns over time.
they would be seen as a fixed event
because they have not wavered in
reliability yet.
another time I stated calmly to
my ethics class that the best way to enforce
a law to ensure it gets a message across
is to just begin enforcing it.
if you believe in the death penalty
the best way to slice it
is to make a black and white clause;
no matter what the circumstances,
calculated homicide will put you
in the electric chair and then they
wouldn’t quibble so much with
semantics.the first girl to shoot her hand up
was the most riled by my
callous eyebrow lift and when
she presented to me a law and order episode
where the murderer was a child,
I said without pausing
well then kill the child.“events #1”
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then I see your friend three times.
this is where formulas come in
handy and I am grateful:
formula for probability of
A and B.
I am thankful for my AP statistics course in
the 12th grade.
to begin to find the probability
of two events (events being actions or interactions,
not literally events but )
co-occuring you begin to
first choose the right formula,
then map it.
I loved this class. I aced this
class having been removed from all other
advanced math classes. there was nothing
confusing about finding probable
cause. my learning disability
denotes I can’t twist shapes into
other shapes or tell you which way is
north but i can find cause.
when she brought out the dice
to teach us statistics, it kind
of coalesced: luck is when
things occur against all
odds.“chiron”
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“and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.”–Adrienne Rich
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I value freedom most.
I wander
in both eyes and body
always collecting
but devoted to the last,
even fixated on the last,
even clutching the last
but also loose with most
acquaintances stressing
compromise, meaning
yielding to my rule
and enjoying breaks,
enjoying reaching,
enjoying screaming.
favoring opportunity over floor,
I become an opportunist.
favoring power over doormat,
I become a tyrant.
I value the sky and
currents more than houses.
the ephemeral in
our lives while also walking
three inches higher than I am,
on tiptoe,
touching things,
making threats in the air
when angered and
you say I am
for-mi-da-ble
and slow like that.
a bit virulent
is how you say it and
before we seek the advantageousness
of everything, it’s Friday
and we are
processing hard truths.
the way silence hits
and my hand opening,
the spontaneity
of losing things.
tell me,
where do you keep your pocketknife?life is rushing and swamps
with its shades of
blue; azure
(you name things)
sky, or cobalt fluid
or nightmare
like a wall of nail polish
you’re reading every
dressed up inch of you.
your rehearsed malignance.
your wry contribution
with your cocked smile
to hide your jealous
sulk.
the moon moves
from womb to waste
to task those unsewn wounds
and you embrace things now
with reticence
but you’re open to the epitaph
scrawled across the rock hard
eyelid
temperance
my Venus in Leo
is running.
you made him carve something else
across your eyes
that night on Jupiter:
I remember everything.but you didn’t want to be
so right and you didn’t really
ask for things:
you just opened a door
and walked right in.
you made it clear
as you rummaged through
the closet smelling him,
you are always only someone’s
secret. you are
unconditional when furtive
but otherwise,
rigid and passing
like a northern mist.tthat means when kept.
when kept,
you’re just a blur,
vanishing,
just a sprint.“venus in 12th house”
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“there ain’t no answer. there’ ain’t going to be any answer. there never has been an answer. that’s the answer.
“–gertrude stein
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What is more concerning, he was thinking, was the space between us and our religion which governs us.. He was setting the votives carefully along the stairs and praying quietly. A sense of mania surrounding him but it was muted, almost invisible. Like an electric fence. Daydreaming again.
Tonight he was being decisive: which candles to set, where to place them, who to invite. This filled him with a sense of purpose. It was winter, six pm and the sky was black. Already six inches on the ground, the weather predicted a foot more by midnight. No one is coming. The burgundy filled him by four and he was into the beer quickly after that. I have given up already. Depression is an insidious murderer.
“We just don’t feel safe driving,” his phone blinked.
Her face danced on the pane in front of him but he didn’t reach for that. He stood stoic; numbed by the alcohol, frozen by the climate, taken by the idea of it all. No one else was home on his block when he heard the knock.
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