We are drunk on a code of unchecked desire.

We are the unchecked, coded in desire;

and we have given up love, for it lacked desire;

and we believe desire rightful only when fulfilled.

And to attain pleasure we have abandoned the nature of touch;

we see the flesh only when it is ripe for grip.

All other passions and dispositions, such as virtue and respect,

are to be done away with, for they cannot be easily seized,

nor do they aid in the reach of piercing pleasure.

In fact, they are the enemy of piercing pleasure,

for they widen and scatter longing, and longing,

true longing that is, we have nailed to a cross—

agonising, the blood of the body of longing

gathered by tiny tubes and channeled in flasks

of easy, unchecked desire. What a pliant industrious machine,

you who give us brothers and sisters the cure at arm’s length,

glued to every sex, to every vertebrae.

There are bones of aggression we have inherited from the chimps.

It’s understood in the swelling of our cities’ artery lines;

it’s understood as such;

it’s understood in the fragrant eras of the market,

in the bends of today’s psychopathologies, under the bedsheets of the night;

it’s understood: this low-lying itch, deep-staining both matter and mind.

We are drunk on a code of unchecked desire.

We, the unchecked, are coded in desire,

and while we writhe, in relish of our numbness

(no single thought spent on surgery of the self),

all our tiny cells go bent in a straight line

from our head to our heels—as an arrow

fired by the unyielding stretch of sexual stimulation

whose simulation of bare bliss ends with a whiff of oxytocin.

And what of the woman who let her hair grow dirty

while they played with themselves? Did she fare well?

I was one of those looking; I have grown sleepless ever since.

By what industry of contact were we ever made to comply

to such coil and pleasure? To such bones of rigidity?

Maybe by reason of such piercing pleasure,

we do at times escape our immovable skeleton;

maybe we do indeed bend and stretch at once;

yet this conclusion is no conclusion at all,

as love and longing are at times not simultaneous at all;

but these words indeed do please and hurt at once

or not at all; it’s understood:

we are drunk on a code of unchecked desire.

We, coded in desire, are and shall remain unchecked,

and we do muse whether our kind is truly meant for betterment.

But alas, no time and no blood is left

(no thought spent on surgery of the self);

we cannot simply unwire our sex, our vertebrae.

The strongest sting: we have always achieved through debasing.

And it is from bones that we carved the necessary tools

to build such keeps and cages, to endure such ages.

Bodies and their weak links were meant to simply withstand.

These desolate hearts have taken us farther than.

I walk by the pool made out of my dried desert

and no water, no conductor can send

anything from me to the other.

This fat teat has made our mouths rot, and now

we do not know how to stop chewing.

From “Poems. 2016-2018”