The revolution begins, here, with a utopian longing. Because every longing indicates a void, and the void is constitutive of (all) living things, we return to our roots sleeveless, against ourselves.
When you bisect the space between the void and the real, you do not end with two halves of the same self. You end with a border that circumscribes. You end with a swan’s heart beating inside a Ziploc bag, to which you murmur, and it responds.
“This is the crux of the problem,” says the committee, caressing a crimson trail of guts. “No more oracles, we need actions with material consequences.” The committee is comprised of many men who are in the same chapter of an Ivy League fraternity. They squirt ketchup into each other’s mouths during hazing rituals and bump fists in sincere camaraderie. The committee buries the guts in a dumpster and sets it on fire, forgetting that burial is a symbolic act, and once all have fallen back into their old ways, the viscera coalesces quietly, seethingly, which is to say: the law encodes its own transgressions.
The law consists of many pieces of paper that the committee members print out and recite in their brains. They wear combat gear at all times (in showers, in bed, at the beach) like they are chastity belts. It can be something insignificant that induces a militarized response—a plastic sword or counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, which they mysteriously transmogrify into a real sword, a real twenty-dollar bill.
Time dilates and constricts. Burial, resurrection, burial, burial, until one evening, miles of dumpsters ignite in alleyways, sourced from fires kindled over centuries of bloated swan hearts. Something like beauty ensues. Walmart parking lot in flames as symbolic world order. A woman twerking on the hood of a Hummer under nuclear light. A fence at a corrections facility carves a vacancy in itself. The committee forms a subcommittee for listening to swan hearts beating inside of Ziploc bags, but it’s long past the time for us to remedy what lies beneath the ectoplasm of a wound.
I am most grateful for those days when we are not ensconced in our utopian longings. We slip into summers and depressions that taste like flat cherry Coke. We piss on public monuments and come to our senses about why we love the people whom we love
- There are not many of us left on earth.
- And so we are left choiceless.
- My despair does not equal yours, but they meet each other in a field.
- It’s impossible to say, no? Something indiscernible about the glow of a cheekbone, the flick of a wrist, the bacterial colonies on our tongues growing in correspondence—
We’ve brought all the right books on trips toward the sun. There are types of power that ask us to wield them softly, like a sword balanced within a body, within a body, which I unsheath for you.