I killed a man when I was fifteen. It bothered me for a while, but then I got over it.

People get over things. Only the very malignant types get stuck. When you do something wrong, it’s never okay, not for anybody. But some people crumble, and others get fixated, and some others walk away like breakfast and coffee.

Now I’m not saying I’m a villain. Because nobody believes in that fairy tale stuff anymore. But without a few tales tucked under the belt, nobody would know how to build stories.

My story begins under the belt as all good things do. I was born in a nunnery in New York City to a fine and noble lady who used to be a whore. And in that nunnery, they really knew how to make a good belt; I know this for a fact because I was subject to quite a few. I mean, what they had us do was fix belts every single day out of old leather and clips, delivered on Monday mornings in giant garbage bags by the Salvation Army. There was no point to the task really. I think the head nun, Mother Beatrice, simply felt that rosary beads were a bit passe and so she decided to give us something practical to do while we prayed.

I was a pretty decent catechism student, though I can’t say I ever tried that hard. I memorized my passages as I was told and always showed up more or less on time to all my lessons. I learned early on not to talk too much because talking wins you enemies, and the last thing you want in the House of God is an enemy.

I had a best friend named Elizabeth who had a severe hearing disorder. It wasn’t that she couldn’t hear, it was that she didn’t hear correctly, and so she always found herself in all kinds of wrong situations because she didn’t get the facts down straight. And everybody felt bad for her because we all understood she really tried.

One time Elizabeth found herself in the back of a truck with a naked Salvation Army man because she thought she had heard him tell her to remove his belt and bring it to the nuns. The way I see it, she might have heard correctly that time.

Silly me, that morning, when I found that Lizzy wasn’t in our room or in the dining hall, I decided it would be nice of me to pick up her chore for her, as her best friend and all, and grab the garbage bags from the truck myself, which had been parked outside for so long it got strange. Of course, I needed some help, so I brought Mother Louisa along.

Needless to say, when we lifted the truck door, and saw in the dim April light, the gray and red panties of a frightened Elizabeth dangling over the swinging headlamp, we felt a little bit shocked.

All the nuns got horribly busy that day. Mother Beatrice stormed into Lizzy and my room and threatened to kick us both out. She brayed for an hour that it was all very unacceptable, and then she and Mother Louisa bolted us in, to have a serious meeting outside with all the other nuns.

That was the first time Elizabeth and I kissed, and it was my very first kiss ever.

…to be continued…

—-

become as sharp as a single point, piercing through the economy with such exuberant specialization, as to make pin after pin until every invisible hand is applauding. dear adam, what world did you be-smith when you allocated all the fruit to the woman?

the bells chime, the school day starts, and the current of bodies push from room to room all packages of skills and capital, in neat rows, eyes lower to the books, heads bow and lips chant. a child stands up and immediately crumbles to salt. red-faced and dishonorable.

the bells chime, the school time is over, stand in neat black lines, shadows of shadows, to receive your shadow book. today we are released upon the world. once a haunting of europe, now shiny in robes, expensive with proud crying faces.

a bell will chime in my woman’s body and i am to resign this labor line to make room for another. but my ears ring as i exit the mosh pit, this metal industry i prefer, and spin/smash into conundrums of illusory choice: one life over another, thinking over feeling, analysis over experience, the specific over the general, the general over the vanquished. i do.

i will not be a loser in this game, i murmur to myself, as i put on my bra in the sweaty locker room.

—-

like a thick, knotted noodle
   I tore my clothes to rip my roots
and found it too greasy to break
   into open mouths, laughing
tongues that push through brains
   and stray chemicals flittering like snowflakes
all winter, full of unique and slush

square gentlemen with metal cases for wallets
   clink around the place, shiny-eyed
and greedy me, all high on my chopsticks
   pick the sushi off the rice
to lay in black black sauce

—

there is  in living quickly
    a quick rotting of memories
wasted fragments lose their links
   and solidity erodes, erodes

—-

wisdom is the pearl of someone else’s suffering. the wise are cowards. the fools are rich with life. those who live richly tell wise tales at the end to young travellers who can also choose wisdom or folly. but those who live wisely from the beginning are not so fooled in the end, about wisdom.

—

How two healthy, wealthy kids could squirm in that smelly bed, I don’t know. All’s I know is the girl had a vaginal infection you can tell from across the street, and the boy didn’t seem to mind none.

There was a whole house full of strange children like those, and they all made a lot of noise. Some days, I’d wake up at four in the morning because I’d hear some racket in the back yard. I’d open my window and a whole tribe of them’d be popping out my garbage can. But why, I don’t know. My granddaughter is five yeras old and she’s curious; wants to find out about that wrinkly lady in the big skirt is doing with all those dusty bags! But me? I don’t ask no more.

One time, in the middle of the night, three ambulance cars came by and dragged ten white bodies clean out of the garage. That was the first time I took a peak at the inside of that house: it was a bitter jungle in there! Nothing but.

Half-an-hour later, a fancy Manhattan car pulled up the driveway and a skinny lady all in furs came rushing at that house, yelling so the whole block could hear:

“Where’s Perry? Where’s my Perry?”

A little Asiatic girl with blue hair poked her head out from the second floor window:

“Oh shit! Are you Mrs. Medici? Wait, wait, wait a second.”

With a quick hop, the girl disappeared and soon after, the front door flung open. A small, sticky hand grabbed at Mrs. Medici’s leopard print.

“Um…P-man is in the hospital,” it said.

“Yes, I know, my husband told me. But that old bastard won’t tell me which hospital!”

“Woodhull Hospital. On Flushing Avenue. It’s that way,” she pointed to the left, and then pointed to the right. “I mean that way.”

” Oh, sweetie, won’t you just come with me please?” Mrs. Medici sang sweetly, “I really don’t know Brooklyn. Thank you, dear.”

“Um…I can’t. I don’t believe in hospitals.”

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Medici stared blankly at the little girl. Her sunglasses dropped down her face, and she peered down threateningly.

“I’m sorry,” the girl squeaked.

“TAKE ME THERE NOW!”

But the girl shook her head and looked up resolutely, proudly. Mrs. Medici began to tremble violently and shift from heel to heel.

“My son is in the emergency room, and you’re going to take me there, you little geisha!”

“No. I can’t. I’m sorry. I won’t. I really really really don’t believe in hospitals,” sputtered the girl.

Just then, a greasy-haired man in a ripped leather jacket poked his pretty nose out the door.

“Is there a problem here?”

“YES!” Mrs. Medici exclaimed, “My son, Perry Caesar, is in the hospital!”

“Very well, but everybody is sleeping right now. You’re making a racket, ma’am.”

“It’s three in the afternoon! I want to see my son!”

The woman looked hysterical. Every hair on her fur coat seemed to stand up straight. She peered curiously into the leather man’s eyes. No response, not even the slightest sign of self-subservience. She began to cry.

“Oh, you want to go to the hospital now, is that what you want?” the man began to croon. A smooth smile spread across his face, and he glared at her for a moment. “Of course, baby, I’ll take you there! I’ll take you, Mrs. P-Man; I know Brooklyn like the back of my ears.”

Mrs. Medici smiled a coy little smile, “It’s Lucile for you, young man. And it’s the back of your hands.”

“Oh?” smirked the man, greasy from temple to temple, “What about my hands?”

Nico was a noise musician, a runaway. He’d been all over the country with his dirty dog and his skinny black jeans, jumping rails and hopping trains, not stopping for anyone. He ate shit and sold it too, a survivor and a hater. I loved Nico like a pigeon loves the street. I held him up with my high-heeled wage, bought him cigarettes and coffee, and when that failed to keep him up, bought him Adderall and coke. We made red the nights, screaming lullabies, tossing instruments, and loving voraciously. I gave him a recording studio in my bedroom, and a house full of friends and weeds. Because what I adored most about Nico was his big dreams that he’d talk me into, till I was with him.

Nico lost his mind.

We lived in a little half-sized house in the basement of that communal perfection. I, in a pile of philosophy books and sex toys; he, with his crates of records and analog recording equipment. We’d sit together for days at a time in that tiny, smelly room, like the 13.5 floor of John Malkovich, permanently bent over each other, making tons of art, whatever.

“That’s so John Cage,” he’d tell me, about the doodle I’d be scratching on my denim skirt. “No, it’s totally Marquis de Sade,” I’d retort. I didn’t listen to much John Cage. He didn’t read much of anything that was written before Allen Ginsberg.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah?”

And then we’d start making some collage: spray juice and house paint onto scrap wood stolen from the dumpsters of Chinese factories. Screw on magazine cut-outs with murderous drill guns. Nico loved collages of girl-bodies, no head, usually just tits and odd parts. I used to get mad at him about that. Said it wasn’t feminist. And then we’d argue, and get pissed at each other, and pretend we cared so much, about the politics of the matter, the aesthetics of the thing. We’d never finish, and sooner or later it’d become another casualty in my room, rotting creatively. And we’d be stuck having to keep looking at it all the time, waiting for inspiration.

The day Nico died, I was listening to John Cage, his String Quartet in Four Parts. I was up to the fourth part, “Quodlibet,” when my old girl Carla from back in those days texted me to let me know:

Nico passed last night. Jumped off the roof. Sorry for your loss. Please come by house for police report.

I looked down at the cracked screen of my Nokia. Fuck; he what? And I couldn’t see or hear anymore. The rubbed out numbers on my keypad were like the rubbed out signs in the subway tunnels, the time Nico and I got lost searching for mole people, afraid they’d invade if we didn’t pre-empt our introductions.

——

Nico and I met kissing, in between the subway and the tunnel walls. I was drunk and he was drunk, and I guess we were both curious and impatient with the train and what not, so we ran into each other, mouth-first, as a train roared by, nearly killing us.

I was dressed up as a tiger for Halloween, with a tail and ears, and a ripped spandex outfit that was supposed to resemble stripes, but looked more like Edward Scissorhand’s teething toy. My best friend Karmen had allegedly spent the whole day making my costume. She had decided ages ago that she was going to be Princess Jasmine that year (she was a different Disney princess every year) and so had asked me in mid-September if I would be a cartoon character along with her, and accompany her to this party that our mutual friend was throwing. I was having a cinema-triggered fling with Catwoman and Halle Barry at that time, and told her that’s what I wanted to be. She said that since she was taking a class on sewing and costume-making at the School of Visual Arts, she would be delighted to make my costume for me and have it count as one of her school projects. So I said cool, why not.

On Halloween night, about an hour before the party, I went over to Karmen’s loft on the Lower East Side, and there she was, still snipping away on the floor, in her lovely Jasmine dress.

“What’s that?” I asked her about all the fur on the floor.

“Um…that’s part of your costume.”

“Oh. What part?”

“That’s like the stuffing.”

“Stuffing?”

It turned out Karmen had decided that since she was Jasmine, it would make more sense for me to be Raja, her pet tiger, which was close enough to Catwoman, since tigers are like big cats.

To add insult to scrap, she had also purchased several tubes of orange body paint for me to put on -

“Underneath the costume! Like lotion,” she nodded and reassured, “And then you can have all the colors of a real tiger!”

Except that the colors were somewhat reversed. And only the stripes had fur. I was hesitant.

“Put the costume on!”

I pawed anxiously at my scarce costume, wondering if all the essential parts would be covered. Jasmine smiled and skipped happily into the bathroom. And so it was that half an hour later, I ended up at a crowded Halloween bimbo-fest, full of happy whores and hellish nurses, in my own slutty nightmare of spandex and polyester fur.

We fit right in, and there were boys who didn’t seem to object. They crowded around Karmen as custom dictates, cooking in an angry soup of their own testosterone, warding each other off with their monkey scents. And as their anxious jokes began to spill over the pot, they realized that I was the only other female there to catch each drop, like a good pet tiger, licking them dry and keeping their egos in tact. So some of them became very grateful for me.

Luke, my ex-boyfriend, among the surveyors, eyed my costume suspiciously, then patted me on my semi-naked ass.

“Nice tail.”

“Thanks.”

By the time Karmen was incoherently drunk, which was fortunately not too long a time into the party, I had become thoroughly embarrassed and was quite stably entrenched in my second-class status of excruciating boredom.

…to be continued…

I rest my feet at Tiananmen []
where radiant Chinese girls in
    Levi’s, Calvin Klein’s, Converse’s, Nike’s, American Apparel’s
smile broadfaced into the sun
   to be clicked and captured by friends with red red cameras

giggles of good!
and sunburnt country women in Mao sleeves and flowery shirts, days worn
air their old leathery toes, sit beseeching on cement:

——-
popsicles                                                  1 yuan
cold water                                                1 yuan
wrinkled woman push cart corn       1 yuan
——-

lai! lai! lai! (come come come)
the chinese are sensitive to color:  

neutrogena skin whitening cream:      400 yuan
—–

in grand malls with glassy displays
the brown-skinned migrants clean the escalators
here, as in any city, wiping the ascension with water and soap
“are you countryside?” they demand of my american tan, curling their beijing tongues
“no, i am not of of this country’s side”  –> incredulous. <–

(Are you my people?)

They pull me around, the men
    from HeBei – they smile
and take detours, and suggest locations
   I never intended, charging exorbitantly
as soon as they know there is white in me
   (more than previously discussed)
back and forth, i must have wasted
   a hundred or more yuan a day, in detours! but
all the best journeys require a long way to go a very short distance

the pedal cab breezes make me smile
    the danger of in-between cars
      and against traffic speedy u-turns
never stopping a second! oh! i am happy! this is happiness! this.

Are you my people?
i ask into the sun,
the girls with their new capri’s and diet teas
and all the middle-aged who still dress like revolutionaries -not
fashionably insensitive but Chinese
all asking:
Are you my people?
i wonder under the tunnel crossings
the uniformed women who scan my bags before subway doors
Are you my people?
i question the waitress, the hotel lobby man
all the Great Wall of money between us
already muffling my speech in oceans
of pre-conceived notions.
Are you my people?
i whispered at the Forbidden
City, in the cold homes of ancient concubines, the majestic
courtyards where masses lined up to welcome
the King, always central.

Bei Jing in the Middle Country
like the number nine

        |||

|||        |||

perfect dragons play in stone clouds
    dragged by thousands of unnamed peasants
along icy roads of ingenuity only affordable
    to the insanely powerful of old old times

I turn on my audio guide
   and walk from palace to palace
with the couple from Seattle and the girl from Scotland
   still more comfortable, somehow, with the English, than this language I was born with
why?
we go to the roast duck zone, but i can’t afford the whole duck
i buy the bagged duck in the grocery store next door
staring at my chopsticks, as my spotty Chinese characters blink and blank
through tears of early pinyin, back up to a lonely planet outdated.

————-

JULY 28th  ROCK AND ROLL BEIJING

spirit!
I want freedom to FEEL feel
FEEL
and understand
what is utterly
alive    in this
world, natural
and untrained.

express
  buses weave nowhere
frowns upon frowns of fake
   inauthentic NON-human!
stories that march and endure
   their banal miseries
like it’s appetizing

I want honesty!
    like I want my flesh to sing
forget arbitrated
    dreams and fistfulls of  — existence
knock liberation into my crazy!
(the selfish is the real) 
the cruel and civilized savages
   stomp hierarchy and order 
   into ignorance, to create this sweaty confidence of millions
I drink my blood
   and get infected by my being
I have only pure joy to offer me no promises 
   I dream of him, him adminishing me for choosing banality
we build lives upon sheer trickery!
   and crumble
at all the falsehoods possible

do not 
doubt my steps
i jump with
my chest pouring
from my nose and fingertips
I live in this bondage to scream in love!

take me, world, that on my crotch
stink the poetry
to imbibe in banquets of mutual suspicion

take my crotch
and give it meaning, yours

i forever maintain my purity
of motion.

Everyone so happy, (pretending
    freedom so well) that sometimes
forgetfulness would cover over our garbage – how we  ate each other up,
    enduring decay, communally. Covered our inadequate patterns
in the foul breath, the death gasps, of each other’s sweat glands,

ever dripping with big ideas.

The hijacked subjectivity. The spectacle. Awareness and manipulation of gaze. Enjoying gaze. Employing gaze. Shape-shifting and addiction.

Some people, like me, are born to perform. We can’t help it. It’s all that we do: day in and day out, even when we are by ourselves. It’s like we’ve surrendered our souls to some all-encompassing reality show, except we’re not sure if anybody else is watching. Every frame of our lives: acting, acting, acting. For what? The contract was signed in blood. We were made to be looked at.

And there are more and more of us every day who are being fixed this way. Something about the internet and celebrity culture, and advertising, and MTV bloodsucking the American dream: we can talk sociology all day. There should be a law against looking, or something, because really, it’s such a trap.

I star in my own little personal drama, an epic poem in which every moment is connected to every other in a tapestry of personal symbols, an anti-heroic romance that flirts dangerously with metaphor and circumstance, each a jealous lover, but I want them both. I love it all. And I’m not afraid to fool one or play the other, bend the rules and cheat tricks, then pretend I didn’t do it, play nurse or play dead. God, it’s narcissistic, and so many other disgusting, clinical words.

The problem is: I leave a mess all around me. Destruction, chaos, everywhere. I’m clumsy. I wish I trampled more lightly, carefully, patiently. But gravity is beyond me, and I was born with it pulling at my bones; awkwardly I have been trudging on, in spite of warnings. Omens. I am too thick for this delicate life with its delicate people. I am like poison.

How to ease the toxins of entropy? The patterns that have made themselves so obvious, artless, the repeated lessons I repeatedly fail to learn? I hold my breath and try to squeeze myself thin. I hold in my garbage until it makes me sick. I live in my garbage, in refuse. I never meant to harm anyone.

But I exist. Thus harm.

The human virus, scourging the Earth. Let’s go back to primitivism. (Oh, I prefer words. I strongly prefer ideas to material things.)

We must transcend the problematic, suffering ego and give to others freely. We must live in community. We must destroy private property and Capitalism.

There, we said it. Done. Now that this hippie theory has been paid proper homage, I wanna take a deep dive into our mental dumpsters, find the memories and relationships that we can’t live with, and savor the rancid corruption of our egotistical logic. The nasty fucked up whispers we get scared of when we look into the mirror on a bad mushroom trip. We have to salvage it. It’s our duty as scavengers and decomposers. All those expired little secrets must be freed with honesty.

But that’s the spectacle in me speaking again, setting up the scene for a dramatic confession: Father, I have sinned. Father, I have sinned and gotten away with it. Father, I have sinned and gotten away with it, and died a million times. Are you ready, Father, to be manipulated?

————–

The Fox Demon terrorizes Chinese history. Each dynasty falls to scandal, and empires crumble in arterial blockage. Kings get caught up in their concubines, and war logistics are thrown to the wayside. Seductive women are terrorists; they trigger the Kingdom’s undoing. Eve took one bite of some sacred fruit, and because of her dumb, disobedient hunger, we are all shot clean out of Eden, burning forever.

My grandma and I used to watch imperial soap operas every night on Shanghai’s CTV. I was four years old. One evening of my childhood, Da Ji, the Fox Demon, tried to hang herself to rid the Zhou Empire of her own evil and to save the King, with whom she has supposedly fallen in love. It was an act. He rescued her, lifted her slender and helpless body up from her silk suspension, and basking in his own heroism, the King felt more love for Da Ji at that moment than he’s ever felt for anyone. And so the fox charms her prey, holds him captive and strangles him by the rope of his own eyes, stronger than any silk. I learned second-hand from the CTV Fox Demon that death is beautiful on a woman, and sacrifice is stunningly feminine. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too, unless you fake it.

Shakespearian heroines. Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona: the more beautiful you are, the less you deserve to exist, and your lessened existence only heightens your beauty. Even a shrew must play along.

I gaze down on men from a well-lit stage. Five feet one, with eight inch platforms to become five feet nine. You can’t have my number – baby, they don’t allow me to do that here – but I will take your business card with your generous tip.

———-

Chris was a fucked up manga artist. I met him online when I was fourteen: OKCupid, some profile compatibility bullshit, modern day oracle boners and e-masturbation express. He messaged me first. He had a naked picture of his ripped torso on his bio, and a really long ponytail that hung down to his ass. I had a photoshopped pic of me with makeup and my hair blowing in the wind, with the Shanghai port and skyline behind me. I wrote up a sassy profile too, completely false. (I was really just in it for the personality tests, I swear, but once I got onto the site, well, what the fuck, I might as well see what happens.) We had Thai food for lunch.

I took the subway to Brooklyn from my uptown apartment, wearing a nice button-down blouse my mom made me, a gray sweater-skirt, and black boots. On the F-train, I felt like Columbus; I felt like Cortez, ready to conquer every living testicle. I wore a push-up bra because I barely had any tits, I was so green and so curious. I told Chris I was seventeen because that sounded old to me; he told me he was thirty-five, and I couldn’t even fathom a number that groggy, but I didn’t care. He showed me his apartment and his manga collection. I wasn’t really into cartoons anymore, but I liked the careful little drawings with the whispery sight lines that he carefully erased and delicately inked over. I liked the thirty-second animation commercial that he drew for Burger King, with the wide-eyed manga protagonist in a sexy sailor/Catholic schoolgirl outfit kicking ass for burgers. Chris told me about his freelancing, and it seemed like kind of a lousy living to me: trucking your portfolio to all sorts of interviews for a lucky gig, but whatever. He was a real artist, and he lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone. And that, he told me, was how he knew he was successful.

Chris showed me tons of photos and stories of ex-girlfriends who looked like supermodels. He was pretty modelesque himself; thin and well-defined, he was into raw foods and the caveman diet.

He was into BDSM. He had strange action figures by his bed with their skins ripped off and clipped to wooden stakes, with eyeballs peeled from their sockets, and red veins on their ghostly faces like taxonomy diagrams. I freaked out when I saw those toys, and I hid in the bathroom for a few minutes, contemplating escape routes. I thought he might have been a serial killer. It excited me to no end. And then during dinner and all the following weeks, I secretively thought up scenarios in which I would out-kill him.

(Part of my ongoing fiction novela, see Sister Stripster)

      Luce Irigaray is a linguist and psychoanalyst whose work centers upon the study of schizophrenic “ideolect,” verbal expression that does not follow the rules of formal language. By studying the linguistic structures of the words of schizophrenics, words which seem devoid of logic, Irigaray seeks to find essential human patterns in language. She honors delirium, as Surrealists honor madness, as the key to understanding atavistic human psychology predating the structures of civilization. Irigaray builds upon the theories of Lacan, who wrote that the symbolic order of language is fundamentally masculine and patriarchal, particularly in our languages of law, economics, mythology, and history. She also builds upon the ideas of Freud, who wrote that the phallus/penis is the “signifier of signification” and the keystone to all linguistic structures. Like the film critic Laura Mulvey, who wrote that the film medium is appropriated by a visual and symbolic language that is essentially defined by a “male gaze,” objectifying female characters to serve a male heroic narrative, Irigaray also challenges women to create a new language, a new gaze, that is essentially independent from male verbal and visual expression. She believes that this l’écriture féminine, would find its truest expression in modes of delirium, which she writes has the potential for providing the basis of a woman’s language.

      However, by defining her ideas in opposition to the works of male intellectuals, using their defined terms and their symbolic language, Irigaray falls into the same trap of masculine linguistics. Her dilemma is the fundamental dilemma of Second Wave feminism, which seeks to transcend more than the social inequalities that women experience, but also transcend the deep-seated Patriarchal ideological structures that govern women’s understandings of themselves and society: Second Wave feminists desire more than equality for women through being socially or politically equal to men; they want an equally valued female way of being, essentially different from men, but they can only articulate this separateness through opposition to an existing male language and framework, thus complicating their dependency. The trouble with Irigaray’s argument is that if our language is fundamentally Patriarchal in structure, there is no way to transcend its limitations through philosophy, which requires language to communicate logic; by using Lacanian and Freudian arguments, Irigaray is allowing herself to be governed by the same logic she seeks to subvert. 

         I believe that the construction of an essentially female language, l’écriture féminine, lies not in philosophy but in music. I believe that noise vocalism, devoid of lyrics, transcending words, inspired and informed by musical delirium, communicating only with the texture, tonality, and rhythm of pure vocal sound, is the key to touching an atavistic tongue before Babylon. This is what I aim to do with many of my vocals with Twilight Language. I sing in six languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Kakchiquel, and Tzutuhil (the latter two of which are Mayan indigenous languages); but I also want to make motions in sign language and sing pure noise, like a human beatbox/synthesizer, but without any intention of imitating a drum kit. I want to sing pure emotion and create my écriture féminine.

      Furthermore, I strongly believe that by singing/writing/painting about the experience of the whore, I am freeing a repressed female voice that needs to emerge and be honored in order for Third Wave feminism to progress. Both the Madonna and the Whore are male understandings of female as object, servicing men’s domestic and sexual needs. Women’s social status as objects of dependent sex (monogamously married) or independent sex (promiscuous, economically self-sustaining), is one defined by a Patriarchal order of female valuation. (Please read my zine, The AnnaKissed ManiFiesta, for elaboration of this argument.) Sex workers are keenly aware of the dilemma of being trapped by the “male gaze,” the male language of social understanding and desirability. In order to survive, sex workers cater to male notions of what is or isn’t attractive, and play to their fantasies to seduce and gain income; they consciously and subjectively objectify themselves by appropriating a male language and gaze, a language and gaze that, paradoxically, already appropriates their sexuality and objectifies them. This double reversal of perception and power dynamics, which confuses subject-object relations, is the complex reality of self-understanding and conscious agency in sex work. I believe it is of utmost importance to the feminist movement that a sex worker expresses her or his experiences in authentic terms, devoid of Patriarchal social assumptions, and I believe that such expression is a crucial part of creating l’écriture féminine.

        I am also fascinated by Irigaray’s take on mysticism, divine goddess worship, and witchcraft. These female-centric belief systems have always existed outside of Christianity and legitimized male-dominated religions. They have always suffered repression and persecution as “evil” and “strange” belief systems, though they are no more or less rational or superstitious as Bible stories. In fact, witchcraft and “pagan” Earth goddess creeds have offered a wealth of knowledge on nature and natural medicines that has always been marginalized and persecuted to destruction by those of the male-dominated theological, legal, and medical professions throughout history, which are threatened by female bodily self-understanding and understanding of the Earth. The Earth, like women, must be tamed and used for mankind’s purposes, not appreciated for its own worth. The female body is appropriated by male science and the female mind is drugged by male pharmaceuticals, just as the female sexuality is appropriated by Patriarchal marriage and whorehouses, and the Earth is “civilized,” exploited to the brink of destruction, or “sustainably developed” to serve mankind’s needs and whims. The realm of the unknown is called “religion” by male prophets and Kings, but the language of Universal spirituality as experienced by many women prophets, is called “witchcraft” and “mysticism,” and deemed strange and inherently evil. I see mysticism, witchcraft, ecospirituality, and goddess-worship as the l’écriture féminine of what men call religion, and I experience and analyze them for the purpose of discovering a twilight language of the female tongue.

        George Bataille also writes about religion and its relationship to eroticism. I became interested in Bataille only recently, when Todd Pendu, the filmmaker who is creating the avant garde/Surrealist porno I will be acting in, “The Evocation of a Demon Lover,” recommended that I read Bataille’s The Eye to prepare myself for the aesthetic of our film project. I am fascinated by Bataille’s obsession with horror and obscenity in eroticism. Bataille wrote that horror is fundamental to art, as it creates “disequilibrium” to our “general economy of utilitarian materialism,” and it allows us to commune with something sacred. He defines sacredness as “a privileged moment of communal unity, a convulsive form of what is ordinarily stifled,” (Visions of Excess) and links it to eroticism, which is a “fundamental violation of the pure (sacred) self” and a “transgression of interdiction.” Through eroticism, human sexuality obtains its climax through the shattering of taboos, and this transgression in turn creates the foundational constructs of religion. The erotic impulse is the first thing to be appropriated and bound by religion, as can be seen in the story of Eve’s Original Sin in the Garden of Eden, thus eroticism is actually the foundation of sacredness rather than its antithesis. Anguish and horror are the contestations of the disruption of social structure and sacredness, yet these very transgressions define the boundaries of that which is shattered through the act of eroticism. In our post-Sexual-Revolution society, where people are increasingly desensitized by sex and eroticism, which have been casually co-opted by advertising and a consumerism of excess (“homogeneous expenditure without return”), the realm of transgression is pushed further and further into BDSM. I enjoy playing with these erotic taboos as an exploration of sacredness as delineated by anguish and horror, and as a means to commune with a transcendental psychology, a fundamental humanness, that has yet to be completely defined, dissected, medicalized, and advertised to the point of non-eroticism or bland sanctity. Paradoxically, the experience of sacredness is only reached by breaking sanctity, and I experiment with eroticism and BDSM to touch new levels of sacredness/communion.

         In “The Evocation of a Demon Lover,” the protagonist Laylah recites a mantra or spell that unleashes a fantastical beast. This beast, or demon (evil by religious linguistics), is the embodiment of the transgression of interdiction, whose manifestation and penetration unleashes Laylah into the realm of the sacred. Its very existence is a struggle for the psyche of Laylah, the mind that is slowly and torturously unbound from formal erotic signifiers into a language all its own, an authentic linguistic of eroticism that I hope to make l’écriture féminine of sex.

breathe slowly and enjoy the creeping night /
boy huff puff the shadows with bushy eyes \ sweep out the ashes
till the sickness of venetian blades rising /
burns through delusions \ like a good blunt
smiles and twitches and refuses to grow old //

this industry of immortals, this city of vampires \
deep in our stiletto shoes, we are all a million years old /
lifetimes ago, we must have signed something without reading it  –
pitchforks tuned to disaster
and all tails pointed to a sleepless bliss //

—

10AM

morning class:

every negative thought is an intrusion!
he keeps himself gated up,

mind-twisted, like a peacock

yoga mind
(he progresses)
straining for half the world
like coffee, except coffee is unhealthy
he eats ezekiel and wakes up at 4:09
stretches harder and harder to reassure himself, leg             up so high

so pure
chops critics with his mind

him maverick

——-

5PM

i am nervous, skidding across the surface, aware of my short skirt
i caught an old woman / subway laser tag

wish, wash / gazes across
like being filtered through a synth phaser:
moods changing / attack and frequency rising

tremolo!
everyone so variably perceptive

——

8PM

and then somebody got caught under the L-train
clogged up all the hip arteries to the underworld
blood spills onto buses
unhappy transfers: people i’d never talk to /
asking me where is the J? M? Z?
Metropolitan? Avenue?

on cell phones: “did you hear about the person who died?”
shocked girl. so shocked.

too many people at a bus stop
eyes peer out from tinted windows, dreadfully
stomachs prepare for the crowded air

bag lady hands folded on bus
never asked for this
why people fussing on my route
whi’ people always fussin’

J? M? Z?

artsy artist says i’\m gonna be independent
finds an artsy bicycle

punk with no ears no more
i don’/t know anything about a fucking train delay

home voice:
Crushed Neighbors Make Friendship from Subway Accident

——

11PM

notebook smelling of cigarettes
charred flesh inside me where
pages turn fluff
gray hairs on a strangers’ head
music, never mine

tired cafes
where English sprays out
amid mouthfuls of beer
and chewed up diagnostics
lays afoot all dreams

hi-hats roll over
cracked voices

—–

12AM

runaway children
where are all the families you deny?
pierce your face with me
so we can retrace our roots
with better fantasies

deny our food
prefer to dive into ghettos
treasures from fetishized things tossed aside
but this Spanish ain’t ours: why hide?
walls hugging our romantic corruption
are so fragile

I dare not ask
where you come from, really
we all have our fronts
and our backs
who am I to deny you
your victimhood?
I’m content
we have our smokin’ mirrors to blur out the obvious lack of art here

I, Mott Street Amazon:
fishnets and steel toed boots crossing streets lined with
kitchen equipment
porcelain sets / I trample on
all shy girls with plastic slippers
that smell like 99 cent shower curtains
sour Chanel baked with Canal exhaust
skinny legs and hoop earrings that dangle over fish
I beat down on all cute cartoon animals!
will have no bubble tea or slightly sweet pastries,
refuse pale skin and round surgical eyes
watch me squint
and enjoy my disgust for you
like a fortune cookie you cracked excitedly but stare at confusedly

Take tips from men who
beg to lick my unbound feet: call it Chinese nipple torture
call it whatever
I’ll be the bitter part of Made In China
still falling into the same exotic trap
but armed at least
with spike chains and surgical implements:

my dreadlocks past Grand street create
battlegrounds with each step
Cantonese wisecracks
break mothers’ backs

those men with boxes, in and out of vans
for restaurants that open and close
- and that’s a day:
home to where wives wok and children do homework

make sense of everything
old woman counting her lucky stars

—-

II.

I, Revolution retired
sleeves still rolled up to my elbow
ready to throw stones
at bourgeoisie in hats
not I -

I sent my children to the farmlands
sacrificed my jewelry for Mao
waited over bedsides
where soldiers died in quilts of flowers and tear-soaked letters
my husband in a casket of calligraphy

That was respect.
Now these sour streets I can’t believe
dust over bad language
and bad rice cooked in too much oil.
Raised sons but left with daughters
to a Fujianese dirt camp
not I -

I saw right through the Japanese
and the English
I watched my husband collapse
in a bed of whispers,
I watched my children enter buses
packed senseless,
and slowly, I too fell out of place.

counting the sidewalk cracks
arrogant child with too much makeup

—–

III.

Black stilettos meet Revolutionary sleeves
Neither in their proper landscapes
And so failed to touch

Lucky to be here, says
Mother rolling her sewing machine
fingertips humming of rice fields and industrial kitchens, warrior second
stitching together this town.

Oh, that’s the aesthetic: white dreads
    for Mother Earth, comfort in mushrooms
for discovery of celestial patterns and blown-up brains,
    colors creeping through the cracked walls of the commune
ignore the infestations we live in

He told me,
    as he was tripping:
“We must suck at the great mother’s breast, the great magnet,”
 like leeches, he preaches:
      ”Everyone is confused except for me. I’m
       not confused,” he tells me
that he needs four hours to collect his mind
in the mornings over illegal EBT cigarettes,
     yet in his hippity-hop journey, he tells me:
“I gave a gift to you. Did you get it?” 

I strain to receive,
    lying awake at night,
listening to the throbbing of fifty-three dreams,
    all the molecules pumping through so many veins.
How many veins?

I am a foreigner here.
Alan Kaufman explains white poverty,
    punks and garbage bag ladies
he steals money from,
    calls them racist metaphors, condemns them dead
while they are holding his hand.
How he rages
     against policemen in peaceful towns,
   takes the outcast voice
 (they all do)
       the poverty, the weirdness
    piercings that penetrate the social fabrics
         we were born with, woven into our
skin with our DNA, we dye them away -
     Alan Kaufman knows.

But I am an immigrant, a hipster poser,
     a stranger in a surreal land,
privileged enough to know my Norton verse and
     traveled enough to know what is worse
than America is a lot of other countries,
     governments maybe -
           but is Anarchy safe?

Across the wall, the sleeping man is my subconscious eye,
      all night, I perform for him (he doesn’t know)
how I endow my voice, my moans
      with meaning for him alone.
While “my boyfriend” drools on pillows, three at once – I am incapable of loyalty, 
       he lies there beside me after a day of
          what? nothing. He writes and listens to music
loudly. He is talented. I don’t want to constrain him.

YELLING:
I don’t know! When! I got stuck! In this stupid! Hippie cliche!
Looking around me! Is this a Joke! I don’t recognize! My race.

I am not Kaufman
    I am not angry
    I am not political enough
        except when my mouth is dry and I need
borrowed tears to cry, which
        is rare, because I have my own 

I will not preach you
     my vegan goodness. For
we are all trapped like flies here
     in amber, sweet ego, not
a tool or a lens, not special
     but congealing.
As we believe we are flying, even though
      all the world is already frozen.

I am not one of them. I can not be.
I act damn Capitalist.
I collect books I never finish reading.
I scheme celebrity status, confess
    that even the sale of my body
    can be sold – I have been told, before I
grow old I want to burn through the cold
world with the lamest poetry I can sell

But I am frozen,
    amber never drips
above the horizon of the weavings in ancient patterns,
    Universal deceptions that
sail away into forgotten dreams, Bohemian
    and the dingy basements of abused brains, mine
        sleepless and failed
impatient to make my abstractions real