Show me, unknown. Show me more and stay there, where you are and as. Don’t come out where things are given and given over given up and given in to explanation, don’t come out here for something so goddamn dumbfuck gloomy as having. We have conditions, have money, have jobs, have problems, have sex, have dinner, have names, and that’s just it, that’s the problem. There can be no name for you, no single word to match and cover, no proper explanation and none needed, only image and sentence, sense and sentiment, reflected and tooth-bitten, nail-clawed and scrawled. Show me that and nothing else and I swear we’ll make conditions, take sex, skip dinner, change names, burn money, quit jobs, hatch problems and cause scenes and fusses and who knows maybe a riot or two and light fires where no light has shown and sit down together to watch it burn, feeling the heat somewhere back behind our minds where we can do more than say.

Take me, take me all you want, all you possibly can, however you imagine, so long as you know you’ll never have and shouldn’t, can’t, because having is kitsch and having is small and will make me smaller and you too and I want the idea of closeness to linger and lurk and bite us through incidental, airborne pathogen presumption like it just stumbled upon us and we it, the affinity of impossible similitude mixed with our obvious ignorances and deviations, shown and told and completely unexplained, the mad idea and messy, tremendously, beautifully flawed ideal, bloodstream-bound and choking. Come close, cut inside with your knife’s edge and I’ll own you with no idea of where it’s going and knowing it’s not going to give and you won’t till I take, I won’t till you do, till we both swell up to bursting forth for a good old fashioned tolchock in the rot.

Read me, read me and stay there, close and closer, coming. Keep coming, coming close and closer, making fast, low passes, darting away and arcing and circling back in a fury only to alight ever so softly on the uppermost branches of the tree I wish grew outside my window. Do all that, wildly, but don’t come out where I can imagine you doing anything more perfect than imagining me, touching with fingers, hearing with ears, drinking with sight. Reverse contact, invert it, turn it inside out, call it what you like but let’s touch silently from distances mine and yours and wonder. That’s all. Not out here, there, wherever it is where knowing thinks it happens, even if it’s just starting to, where explanations start and the read moves from what moves to some semblance of is as if is won’t change and change us with it, from performance of person and self to performance itself. We both know where that story goes, I think, and christ it’s fucking boring. Map it, a to b, here to there, this to that, start to end, and it always means nothing. Plot it on a chart and it’s perpendicular to nowhere, headed right for it.

But you, you don’t perform performances, do you. You perform you. And here I am out of rhythm… tell me something to knock me back on, tell me…

Tell me, love, tell me whether it’s love or hysteria, tell me you’ve read Kundera and you remember how he said everything is illuminated in the aura of nostalgia and Foer stole it, the fucker. Tell me you remember he said—Kundera, not Foer, the fucker—metaphors are dangerous, “a single metaphor can give birth to love,” he said, but in Czech and all I know is English. I remember love, love, so do you, I think, I guess, I’ll presume because what the hell, and I’ll remember on sight to tell you I’ve learned it’s hysteria, love, not love or but love of, love, and that love itself is a metaphor, all polished up and cleaned and disinfected and trapped in gelcaps for easy ingestion and what we need to be is not that but ourselves without explanation and with plenty to tell and throw back at vague senses, at first electrified uncertain, then shocking on contact, appalling electrocution, using infinite combinations of finite words with metaphor-twisted meaning to shake even an early morning sleep-deprived and chem-fogged mind wide awake. That’s all.

Show me more with words you tell and don’t, and keep it all to yourself. Be a little wooden Pandora’s magic mystery box not unlike the one on my shelf with the MADE IN U.S.S.R. label on the bottom and sticky residue from where someone once taped it shut—ornate, authentic, delicate, of dubious origins and incidental meaning, chained, though, not taped, rattling sometimes when the world shakes you, radiant through the cracks sometimes when you shake back, and other times still and dark, cold to the touch but nevertheless electric, only allowing what you want out, out, taking what you want in, in, apart and contained and bursting.

Distance, now that’s something, and real. It means. Love or hysteria. I say of. And that’s another story, I think. Show me and I’ll tell you.