Should we talk about it?
1.
A woman I used to live with lives inside the internet. We still live in the same city. I go around the streets looking for her, but each time I catch a glimpse, she slips around the pixelated corners. A black scarf, a yellow shoe, a thread of yellowed silver hair mucking up the perfect blue pool of frozen sidewalk gunk.
I get word of her from others — she was seen flipping over backwards on her ex-husband’s blog. She was caught on video: wrecking her vehicle; dancing wildly in stilts on the wreckage of her wheels; drinking in reverse. But is it really her? That’s always the question.
Whenever I see her, I pretend to worry about her to her face. I would like to find her in the internet so we could have a real conversation about it — say the things we could never say in person.
I would say: Are you ok? I would say: Where did it all begin?
Childhood, she would say. My father —
No, I’d say. Tell me the truth.
2.
A person I used to love has uncovered vital information, which had been buried, archived, catalogued within. They have discovered that they are no longer merely a person, but now, more definitively, a man. They take drugs to make it so. I listen to their stories and try to hear properly. I listen for their new body in the proximity that used to be between us. I listen for their new body in their shifting follicles, in the new thickness that reforms the air between us. It is not that the thickness is wrong; it is that it is a temporary residue of change, which we must both contend with. They are the same and not the same. They are newly angry about everything, or whatever they were angry about before surfaces at new angles and in new ways. They are angry that what they were is what they were and that what they are is what they are not — at least not yet. They are, yes, completely who they are — only not yet reflected to themselves in the way they want. They want more. It is not enough change, not quickly enough. Or it is all the change too quickly. Whether the change occurs at the right rate or not, it feels too late. They are angry that transition is eternal, that their version of this fact is more extreme. That the natural law of their bodies is at odds with the barbaric trebles of humanity.
They are angry at me because I am no longer in love.
For me, one reality has no relation to the other. I fell out of love for my own reasons, which have nothing to do with them. Or have to do with them, but are not in relationship to the thickness and the change that is not change but rather an affirmation of a future already settled.
They would say that I cannot separate the change from anything else about them. For them, all the problems are the one problem, and the one is all the others.
I love you, I say.
I reach into the grandfather clock with my brow, and point my middle finger at it, and turn back time but barely. I mean it as a kindness, but they can tell that I’ve fussed with the physical world. In the recent past, I watch their chin hairs growing.
What have you done? they say.
I’ve made us more time, I say. I’ve made you more space.
You’re not in love with us, they say. They say it meanly, as though it is my fault. When they say us, I can’t access the newness.
When they say us, it is four o’clock again.
When they say “him,” they mean their new self. When they say “us,” they aren’t including me; they mean a reality that doesn’t include mine.
It is just as it was before.
We are both saying the same thing, but we cannot agree.
3.
A person who used to love me informs me that they are no longer merely a person, but now, a more extreme form of a man. That is, they identify more extremely as a man. One might say, they have found a pocket for themselves. They have always been a man to the world, and now they have made an accord with a god they associate with, once and for all. They are sure, they say— no matter what others live through or go around in their personal contexts of manhood or its opposites and negations — they can speak for themselves: they are definitely a man. There’s no question about that. They play a role to make it so.
They ask me to play a role extremely definitively — the role of the woman —s o they can really know for sure they’re a man.
I thought you knew for sure, I say. What’s it got to do with me?
If you’re one thing, they say, I’m for sure the other.
Usury is usury, I say.
Use is use, say they.
4.
I get word of the woman because a friend sees her walking upside down in her regular bar. She walks home on her head, and several bored bloggers take a feed. Then others, fucked up on retina-fatigue, feed on the feed. As it always goes, several half-sized zombies pop out of computer screens and into the reality.
I get word of the woman because she writes me a letter to tell me that that she’s died. It’s a paper letter, in my mailbox — strange. I think this means I will never see her again, at least not in the internet. I’ll never really get a chance to have that authentic conversation I was craving. I know she’s not alright, but she’s not my problem. I don’t know where she is and I’ll likely never learn. I don’t ask her if she needs anything. I don’t ask her how she died.
A week later, I see her briefly in the marketplace. She’s bidding on a brown, egg-shaped stone. It looks like painted basalt. I sidle up to see if it’s really her. She grins and taps my shoulder. They used these at the onset of the patriarchy, she says.
Oh? I say. I didn’t know you were into that.
It’s a dinosaur egg, she says. Fossilized.
She starts telling me about the eggs — how the patriarchy undid witches using witchcraft—and for a moment, I think she might have useful information, but in the creases of her face, I can see that she’s not really online.
I move my face in a specific way — I try to let her see that I am disgusted, while also indicating pity, to be sure the public knows I’m kind.
I have to go, I say.
5.
People wonder about god.
I say, I’m in love, which means there aren’t any droplets in the air that aren’t poems, and there aren’t any poems that don’t belong to my body. My lover is confined at the moment. There are no windows in his storage space, let’s put it that way. The images are cosmetic. The problems are aesthetic. He tells me he’s met the woman of his dreams, but she wears too many different types of textile at one time. When he touches her, it’s impossible to understand how she could be one person. She’s probably cheating on him with other versions of herself. He speaks to me of me as though I’m elsewhere. I’m barely even across the country. He’s in his house, looking for the answers, which are outside.
I’m close, he says. I’m about to crack this case open like a fucking egg.
People wonder about god.
I say, god’s in love with god. He’s like my lover in his house, and there aren’t any poems anywhere that don’t belong to my lover. Just ask him. Just open the front door. You’re about to crack this place open like a fucking egg.
6.
A man I’m not in love with, whom I don’t know and have never met, may go back to jail for the second half of a while. In a span of 10 days, he has no nucleus of geography. He’s traveling between the court dates, wrenching his potential heavens in his gut. People who know him whose voices I listen to say nice things about the judge, trying to twist his karmic odds in a direction. They say they know he did it, but what about her? It isn’t fair to her, they say.
I know all about this situation because I’m eavesdropping.
I don’t know him, but I hope they are right. No one deserves jail, not even a criminal.
7.
In the morning, an army of Roberts are reported missing on the continent. There is a question as to whether or not to send a search party. Sometimes the Roberts have been known to come back on their own.
The news squeaks of natural disasters in the west. Mudslides, tornados, hurricanes — all out of order, out of region, out of season, out of sync. The tornados in the mountains and the earthquakes inaccurately placed in New York City. Hurricanes now occur at regular intervals of impossibility, far from the ocean.
A colony deletes its dictator from the matrix and he goes into hiding, where he will do much secret harm. Now that he’s not visible, everyone or some people go to sleep.
A democracy reveals itself. I am not a democracy, it squeaks.
A monarchy fucks itself. I am still a monarchy, it screams, decaying.
Meanwhile, witchy religions are on the rise. In the Dakotas, the republic has been overthrown by a coven led by the OG Oracle. The Dakotas secede. Or more accurately, go home to themselves.
Everywhere you go, everybody’s left side is bruised and bandaged. A monitor in the airport shows flickering images of a spleen.
When I air travel, the airport wants nothing from me, it is practically a church.
When I return, the scene has changed. My body, for one thing, upon arrival in the home, grows in two directions — I am simultaneously older and younger than I was before I left.
Something is amiss. We all feel it in the air. There are any number of problems one could be concerned about, but we all have the same thing on our mind: Are the Roberts leaving us for good, or are we having a neurosis?
We think of how the Roberts actions affect us. We can’t seem to stop.
Meanwhile, the Roberts are all alone, or lost. Between each Robert and another Robert, there is a synapse, a gap. The Roberts, though they travel all together, are far apart. They do not know one another, poor souls, are all apart upon themselves.
Interlude: Why I Will Provide You No Photograph
I don’t want to be consumed. I don’t want to be unseen or misspoken. I won’t have you write a title on my behalf. I don’t want a title to collect me, or to be in your collection. I don’t want to be inaccurately quoted. I don’t want to be wrongly accused. I don’t want to be accused of the wrong thing.
I don’t want to be unknown. I don’t want to be known for what I’ve done or not done. I want to retain my authorship. I don’t want to be perceived as outwardly beautiful or ugly. I want to stay in my body. I want to leave my body whenever it suits me. Because I won’t be a monument to you. Because I don’t want to be a monument to myself.
Because I will never live up to how beautiful/ugly you perceive my photograph. Because you will struggle to relinquish the photograph for the real thing. Because I don’t want to be bound to an image of myself that you created. Because I don’t want to be tied up without my skin —
I don’t want to experience only one type of bondage. I want a plethora of bondages. I want to be undone. Because I want to find you in the aftercare — for us to hold one another. Because if I provide you with it, you will perceive yourself already held, and then you will ignore me.
I will not be the name of the book you are writing.
I have already written a book. Because I am alive.
Because I will never be ready to be buried under your ideas. Because I would regret to be buried in your garden.
Because you are a coward. You won’t take a photo of me for yourself, in your brain. Because you have a key that you have always had and you always think it is the key to the next woman, and it is always not. Because I do not wish you to open me with your key, which has nothing to do with me.
Because I love horses, and we have nothing more to say.
We are too liberated now to speak further of this matter.
We are illiterate in kindness. Because I trust neither you nor myself to fail to objectify my likeness, image, representation.
Because, excuse me, I must take this one, or I must call my agent.