I was told my power animal was a rat when someone saw how good I was at shoplifting, walking out openly with a bagful of stuff, finding cosy places to sleep everywhere I went. But I was never very comfortable being a rat. It's not very sexy. I wanted a better power animal.
And one came to me in a dream. I dreamed that I woke up, got out of bed, and went outside to find a fox staring at me in calm alert presence before dashing off into the bush. A fox! As sneaky and feral as a rat, but also wild and beautiful, with the luminous eyes of a loving dog and the potential for danger or gentleness.
So at our power animal guided meditation this summer I expected to see a fox. I walked through the landscape I was guided to imagine as it slowly became more vivid, looking around for a creature I could relate to. I was holding a staff, walking with it, feeling its power, when I suddenly thought of Moses. I threw the staff to the ground and it became a snake. I reached out my hand and the snake returned to my hand as a staff. I had been carrying my power animal with me the whole time, always having that potential in my hand, to transform into a snake.
Sneaky, quiet, passive and yet potentially dangerous; sleek, sexy and close to the earth. For some it might be terrifying to have a snake slither up your leg, bite you on your ankle or your thigh or your... For others maybe it's quite thrilling, especially when at any moment, that snake can pull back and I am not a cold-blooded reptile, but a warm body with a pair of luminous eyes that reveal everything about my loving intention.
It was a snake in the Garden of Eden that tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and she ate that apple, and the juice runneth over her lips and down her chin.
The Christians claim that the snake was Satan, the deceiver, but Joseph Campbell claims that in every culture except the Judeo-Christian-Industrial-Economy culture, the snake was always the primary deity of the garden and that Jahweh was a peripheral deity, though clearly trying to make it big, favouring one race over all others and spreading across the world with the power of genocide and agriculture. Jahweh is still the primary deity of our culture, the atheists worshipping him as ravenously as the fundamentalists. Jahweh supposedly doesn't exist anymore, but he's the same god of genocide and agriculture, now a secular god called The Economy.
The snake is still the deity of the garden, perhaps, its belly always close to the earth, a deity who is close to the goddess, the mother of all life, who gives the apple to man, Adamah, who is also of the earth, despite his lofty ideas and the strange demonic voices whispering in his head.
I grew up in a Christian Capitalist culture, a member of the chosen people, the pure whites, to whom the planet belonged, as far as the eye could see. We already had satellite imagery, so we could see the whole planet, and so it all belonged to us, one master race under god, with liberty and justice for sale.
But I ate the apple and after that crude oil milkshakes tasted nauseating and I would argue in the street with evangelical Christians and try to undermine their numb-minded sincerity. I would argue with evangelical Capitalists in uniforms at train stations, or security guards who kicked me out of my shelter into the rain in the middle of the night, trying to sow seeds of doubt into the idiot sincerity with which they were "just doing their job". We never know what seeds eventually sprout and grow, but we do know that antagonism provokes defensiveness.
I know I can shed my skin when I need to. I can leave behind my own numb-minded sincerity and the idiotic culture I've allowed to leak into my psyche. I can be a rat hiding alone in my little hovel and I can be a snake and eat that rat whole, simply upon deciding to do so.
And here I stand, appearing reasonable and civilised, but knowing that this staff in my hand can at any time be thrown down and I can become a snake. I can shed my skin, I can change my name, the way I dress, the way I talk, I can become a new person, reborn into a new life.
I can leave behind a life of loneliness, antagonism, moral superiority and freedom, I can refine my words on the ears of the sophisticated until they are sharp and effective. I can subvert the straight and tense by slithering up their muscular leg and biting them on their ankle, or their thigh, or their...
I can integrate, I can shed my skin, I can give up my values and maintain my integrity.
I can drink chlorine and my thirst will be quenched.
But I yearn for more, I settle for no compromise. Nothing will satisfy me but total power or total annihilation.
I am who I say I am. Nothing will come between me and the world but my inevitable death and the reliability of that death reassures me that I cannot take this too far.
I want to drink your semen every morning like a shot of espresso from your ecstatic ejaculation. I want a new lover every new day. I want to reveal myself so they all know who I am.
Yes, I shop at the stupormarket now and yes, I keep my myki topped up, but I am not another hetero slave, I'm a fucking faggot shaman, you fools.
[ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss]
2015-06-22
2015-06-14
Not damaged
I construct elaborate fantasies around sensitive men who have not consented to being cast in my lonely love stories.
I often destroy genuine connections with the unnecessary awkwardness of my impetuous imagination.
Sometimes when I agree to meet someone at a later date I place them in my masturbatory sexual fantasies and mysteriously, when the time comes, they are evasive and don't want to meet me anymore. Apparently my ability to repel those I am attracted to with desperate intensity is telepathic and reaches across time and space.
I work so hard to be attractive and then spectacularly undermine my own efforts by being a fucking pervert.
I want nothing more than that which I know is impossible. I want paradox manifest as flesh and I want that flesh warm and sweetly smelling like man.
I want everything I don't really want and I'm willing to sabotage it to save myself.
I'll sabotage everything I can experience, everything that is gifted to me lovingly, because there's nothing more unattractive than the neediness of another human being.
My mother knew I was a faggot when I was a toddler, finding me fast asleep in the wendy house at kindergarten where the girls had tucked me into bed. Due to some facile religious idea she half-heartedly tried to discourage me from having sex with men, maybe knowing she would fail.
Less half-heartedly she told me about the man she fell in love with as a teenager and married, pregnant, at 18. He was abusive and dismissive and didn't live up to the gentle archetype of her loving father. She would tell me, "A man should never hit a woman. A man should never touch a woman unless she wants him to." and all the weight of my mother's strength, and all my love and respect and admiration for her fell upon that phrase. How could the strongest person in my world beg an abusive man not to leave her?
I was told that some men hurt children, doing nasty things that traumatise them for life. So when I was eight years old and I was coerced by an older boy into touching each other's dicks, and when I played sexual role-play games with my older brother, I was convinced I had been "molested", and for ten full years I believed I was intrinsically damaged, that this damage defined me, and that I could not tell anyone. I became good at secrets, I became good at shame.
The decade in which I kept this secret was the decade in which I realised that I am queer, alienating me from the primary institution of our culture, while my entire life revolved around the most homophobic environment I have experienced, high school.
Now I am proud to be a faggot and I'm living in Brunswick and what've I got to do but get laid and find love and build trust, right?
Do I even know what the object of all this unquenchable yearning is, beneath the images pornography have burned into my brain, beneath the infantile relationships modelled on Californian cultural propaganda, beneath the cultural norms and social institutions that I am totally incapable of participating in, that are built under the assumption that I don't exist?
I don't want to model my relationships on sitcoms and cartoons and when it comes down to it and I'm naked with another man I really don't feel like emulating that pornography that gets me off so easily when I'm alone.
These models are vapid and homogenous, they serve no purpose in my life. I feel like a precarious line of text writing my way further and further out onto a blank sheet of paper, nothing to guide me and no one around.
My mother committed suicide within a month of my 21st birthday and so being an adult for me is to be without idols, without illusions and without role-models.
I know what's real when I experience it, I can feel it in my body, I know the difference.
But who's here to match me in my desire, who's here to confront me with my misapprehensions, who will be present with me in the shamelessness of my shame?
Will I be present when someone decides to love me? Will I defy that love because I know I don't deserve it, or I deserve better, or cos they just want me for my companionship and my human warmth?
I can handle your pain cos your pain empowers me to help you; nothing brings me greater happiness than to see you flourishing.
Nothing generates more heat in my body than the proximity of your body. This is physical. I can't help it.
I am falling out of the sky right now and I just hope I land somewhere I am safe to rest a moment, cos this world we've made can be so hostile and dangerous, so gentle and accommodating.
I often destroy genuine connections with the unnecessary awkwardness of my impetuous imagination.
Sometimes when I agree to meet someone at a later date I place them in my masturbatory sexual fantasies and mysteriously, when the time comes, they are evasive and don't want to meet me anymore. Apparently my ability to repel those I am attracted to with desperate intensity is telepathic and reaches across time and space.
I work so hard to be attractive and then spectacularly undermine my own efforts by being a fucking pervert.
I want nothing more than that which I know is impossible. I want paradox manifest as flesh and I want that flesh warm and sweetly smelling like man.
I want everything I don't really want and I'm willing to sabotage it to save myself.
I'll sabotage everything I can experience, everything that is gifted to me lovingly, because there's nothing more unattractive than the neediness of another human being.
My mother knew I was a faggot when I was a toddler, finding me fast asleep in the wendy house at kindergarten where the girls had tucked me into bed. Due to some facile religious idea she half-heartedly tried to discourage me from having sex with men, maybe knowing she would fail.
Less half-heartedly she told me about the man she fell in love with as a teenager and married, pregnant, at 18. He was abusive and dismissive and didn't live up to the gentle archetype of her loving father. She would tell me, "A man should never hit a woman. A man should never touch a woman unless she wants him to." and all the weight of my mother's strength, and all my love and respect and admiration for her fell upon that phrase. How could the strongest person in my world beg an abusive man not to leave her?
I was told that some men hurt children, doing nasty things that traumatise them for life. So when I was eight years old and I was coerced by an older boy into touching each other's dicks, and when I played sexual role-play games with my older brother, I was convinced I had been "molested", and for ten full years I believed I was intrinsically damaged, that this damage defined me, and that I could not tell anyone. I became good at secrets, I became good at shame.
The decade in which I kept this secret was the decade in which I realised that I am queer, alienating me from the primary institution of our culture, while my entire life revolved around the most homophobic environment I have experienced, high school.
Now I am proud to be a faggot and I'm living in Brunswick and what've I got to do but get laid and find love and build trust, right?
Do I even know what the object of all this unquenchable yearning is, beneath the images pornography have burned into my brain, beneath the infantile relationships modelled on Californian cultural propaganda, beneath the cultural norms and social institutions that I am totally incapable of participating in, that are built under the assumption that I don't exist?
I don't want to model my relationships on sitcoms and cartoons and when it comes down to it and I'm naked with another man I really don't feel like emulating that pornography that gets me off so easily when I'm alone.
These models are vapid and homogenous, they serve no purpose in my life. I feel like a precarious line of text writing my way further and further out onto a blank sheet of paper, nothing to guide me and no one around.
My mother committed suicide within a month of my 21st birthday and so being an adult for me is to be without idols, without illusions and without role-models.
I know what's real when I experience it, I can feel it in my body, I know the difference.
But who's here to match me in my desire, who's here to confront me with my misapprehensions, who will be present with me in the shamelessness of my shame?
Will I be present when someone decides to love me? Will I defy that love because I know I don't deserve it, or I deserve better, or cos they just want me for my companionship and my human warmth?
I can handle your pain cos your pain empowers me to help you; nothing brings me greater happiness than to see you flourishing.
Nothing generates more heat in my body than the proximity of your body. This is physical. I can't help it.
I am falling out of the sky right now and I just hope I land somewhere I am safe to rest a moment, cos this world we've made can be so hostile and dangerous, so gentle and accommodating.
2015-06-02
The loving power of attraction
I am a pervert impeded only by my respect for those I am attracted to. I want to consume them like a delicious meal whose intense scent makes my tummy rumble, but it has to be voluntary. It's really not fun unless the intimacy is a mutual desire to know each other, to protect and nourish each other. There's nothing wrong with a bit of exuberant sweaty sexiness when everyone understands and is comfortable with its meaninglessness, but I'm reaching for something deeper.
Why am I sexually attracted to straight men? Some masochistic desire to deny myself? Some dangerous idea of a challenge? Or maybe I know that when a straight man allows me to gently graze my fingers down the tender sides of his torso, or lightly touch my nose to the open pores of his neck in naked embrace, then the purpose of our encounter really is to communicate, to open ourselves, to touch another human being across the tortuous divide of our individual incarnations. It is not enough for me to find someone whose peculiar fantasies match my own so that we can get each other off pleasantly for an hour or three. I'm looking for something else, but I'm still letting my sexual desire guide me.
Perhaps our attractions, momentary though they often are, are deeper and more profound than we usually acknowledge. Maybe our beings are interconnected in ways that we cannot fully know or comprehend. Maybe beauty is a form of communication, and when someone is beautiful to us they are demanding our respectful attention.
I have the utmost respect for the messages my body sends me, surely the only reliable source of information about how to exist in this world. When someone's beauty draws me towards him - I don't know why I am mostly attracted to men in this way - I feel an empowering surge of energy, love and focus. I give this man a focused attention I would not bother with if my attraction had not drawn me towards him. I try to breathe into the intensity of this feeling, to not scare him away in his civilised vulnerability, and whether I like it or not I respect him enough to not leap on him and consume him like an overripe mango or a stolen block of chocolate. I look into his eyes and wait to see if he's brave enough to match my gaze. I move towards him to see how proximity feels. I want to touch him, I want to talk to him, I want to smell him, but what I want is not important. What's important is that which moves between us.
During the summer, when I was strong, confident and full of lusty joy, a young man smiled at me at a festival and I was instantly in love. I saw him leaping around like a big dumb kid, two metres tall, 19 years old, surely as horny as me. One day I finally approached him, I gave him a head massage, he relented further into a back massage before we finally spoke. That night, with my heart pounding and my genitals filling with warm blood, we snuggled together and talked. He had a lot to share with me and for some reason I was the exact right person to tell. For hours we talked and I listened joyously in the warmth emanating from his clothed flesh. He allowed me to press up against his unspoken but unambiguous boundaries and I was happy to give every particle of love that my attraction provoked. When the conversation was finished he said goodbye and rushed off into the night. Though I was still so horny I had to masturbate to relieve the tension, I felt totally satisfied that our connection had been completed, that the mutual moment that my sexual attraction had drawn me into was fulfilled.
Apparently we had a mutual need that his beauty made apparent to me, I confronted that beauty, uncertain of what would be required of me, but comfortable in our mutual ability to see and hear one another's needs and feelings.
So what if I develop a trusting friendship with a straight man with whom I am sexually attracted, whose painful and delicious beauty compels me to give him the attention I would otherwise not bother with? Is my love real or am I just trying to get him naked? Will he trust me that my love is stronger and more real than my perversion? That my respect and desire are totally indistinguishable? Can we fully embrace each other and what is emphatically real between us? Or must we fear the confusion of moving beyond the cultural roles that are supposed to define our relationships, as if every needy, joyous and sacred moment we share can be correlated to a series of distinct categories?
I cannot relate to any of these categories, so if my behaviour disturbs you you have to tell me. To me, every moment of genuine connection is something new, a step beyond a culture that separates with words from the world of experience. It is entirely unknowable, rather it is tangible, we can smell it, and feel it in our belly.
If we feel safe, if we feel so inclined, we can draw closer together. We can find a place where the state will not charge us with obscenity and we can enter fully into the surrender of trust and intimacy, whether sexual or emotional or linguistic. In this moment, my perverse sexual fantasies are profoundly irrelevant, and yet it was my insatiable sexual attraction that drew me towards you initially.
Why do I call myself Faggot or Queer in this lifetime? "Faggot" comes from the fagus tree, branches of which were used to burn witches or heretics at the height of European theocracy. At this time "heretic" was indistinguishable from "homosexual" and so it is that faggots like me are the heretics of a culture that seeks to homogenise our diversity. Even gays are supposed to get married and get mortgages now.
Having failed to destroy homosexuality the theocratic culture we all continue to perpetuate is seeking to draw all faggotness into its narrow bubble of normal. They tell me my faggotness is supposed to separate me from the luminous beauty of your relative straightness. I refuse. I am not gay, the opposite of straight, I'm a faggot, which has no opposite. Perhaps I'm lucky to not live in a time when the stake is my opposite and burns me at the state as a heretic. Perhaps for this reason we need not be so brave to reach across the divide and touch each other.
Why do I call myself Queer? Because my role in my tribe is to queer the straight, bend the rigid and blur the boundaries; to confuse the rational, to embody the ambiguity and to kiss you if you want me to. I won't tell anyone.
Why am I sexually attracted to straight men? Some masochistic desire to deny myself? Some dangerous idea of a challenge? Or maybe I know that when a straight man allows me to gently graze my fingers down the tender sides of his torso, or lightly touch my nose to the open pores of his neck in naked embrace, then the purpose of our encounter really is to communicate, to open ourselves, to touch another human being across the tortuous divide of our individual incarnations. It is not enough for me to find someone whose peculiar fantasies match my own so that we can get each other off pleasantly for an hour or three. I'm looking for something else, but I'm still letting my sexual desire guide me.
Perhaps our attractions, momentary though they often are, are deeper and more profound than we usually acknowledge. Maybe our beings are interconnected in ways that we cannot fully know or comprehend. Maybe beauty is a form of communication, and when someone is beautiful to us they are demanding our respectful attention.
I have the utmost respect for the messages my body sends me, surely the only reliable source of information about how to exist in this world. When someone's beauty draws me towards him - I don't know why I am mostly attracted to men in this way - I feel an empowering surge of energy, love and focus. I give this man a focused attention I would not bother with if my attraction had not drawn me towards him. I try to breathe into the intensity of this feeling, to not scare him away in his civilised vulnerability, and whether I like it or not I respect him enough to not leap on him and consume him like an overripe mango or a stolen block of chocolate. I look into his eyes and wait to see if he's brave enough to match my gaze. I move towards him to see how proximity feels. I want to touch him, I want to talk to him, I want to smell him, but what I want is not important. What's important is that which moves between us.
During the summer, when I was strong, confident and full of lusty joy, a young man smiled at me at a festival and I was instantly in love. I saw him leaping around like a big dumb kid, two metres tall, 19 years old, surely as horny as me. One day I finally approached him, I gave him a head massage, he relented further into a back massage before we finally spoke. That night, with my heart pounding and my genitals filling with warm blood, we snuggled together and talked. He had a lot to share with me and for some reason I was the exact right person to tell. For hours we talked and I listened joyously in the warmth emanating from his clothed flesh. He allowed me to press up against his unspoken but unambiguous boundaries and I was happy to give every particle of love that my attraction provoked. When the conversation was finished he said goodbye and rushed off into the night. Though I was still so horny I had to masturbate to relieve the tension, I felt totally satisfied that our connection had been completed, that the mutual moment that my sexual attraction had drawn me into was fulfilled.
Apparently we had a mutual need that his beauty made apparent to me, I confronted that beauty, uncertain of what would be required of me, but comfortable in our mutual ability to see and hear one another's needs and feelings.
So what if I develop a trusting friendship with a straight man with whom I am sexually attracted, whose painful and delicious beauty compels me to give him the attention I would otherwise not bother with? Is my love real or am I just trying to get him naked? Will he trust me that my love is stronger and more real than my perversion? That my respect and desire are totally indistinguishable? Can we fully embrace each other and what is emphatically real between us? Or must we fear the confusion of moving beyond the cultural roles that are supposed to define our relationships, as if every needy, joyous and sacred moment we share can be correlated to a series of distinct categories?
I cannot relate to any of these categories, so if my behaviour disturbs you you have to tell me. To me, every moment of genuine connection is something new, a step beyond a culture that separates with words from the world of experience. It is entirely unknowable, rather it is tangible, we can smell it, and feel it in our belly.
If we feel safe, if we feel so inclined, we can draw closer together. We can find a place where the state will not charge us with obscenity and we can enter fully into the surrender of trust and intimacy, whether sexual or emotional or linguistic. In this moment, my perverse sexual fantasies are profoundly irrelevant, and yet it was my insatiable sexual attraction that drew me towards you initially.
Why do I call myself Faggot or Queer in this lifetime? "Faggot" comes from the fagus tree, branches of which were used to burn witches or heretics at the height of European theocracy. At this time "heretic" was indistinguishable from "homosexual" and so it is that faggots like me are the heretics of a culture that seeks to homogenise our diversity. Even gays are supposed to get married and get mortgages now.
Having failed to destroy homosexuality the theocratic culture we all continue to perpetuate is seeking to draw all faggotness into its narrow bubble of normal. They tell me my faggotness is supposed to separate me from the luminous beauty of your relative straightness. I refuse. I am not gay, the opposite of straight, I'm a faggot, which has no opposite. Perhaps I'm lucky to not live in a time when the stake is my opposite and burns me at the state as a heretic. Perhaps for this reason we need not be so brave to reach across the divide and touch each other.
Why do I call myself Queer? Because my role in my tribe is to queer the straight, bend the rigid and blur the boundaries; to confuse the rational, to embody the ambiguity and to kiss you if you want me to. I won't tell anyone.
2015-05-28
Hot breath and the dangerous ocean
Your body draws me towards you, especially your eyes, emanating depth and mystery. I am standing upon the beach looking out at the dark and dangerous ocean, taunting me and compelling me to strip off and dive in. I move towards you simply to hear your voice clearly amidst all this ambient noise, and I can smell your breath, warm and familiar. I can taste it in my mouth like we're already kissing, but I don't want to impose my hasty intensity on you just yet. I lean closer because the noise is surrounding us like waves crashing upon our rocks, but somehow this proximity and focus keeps us both dry and it's like I don't even hear that noise.
Nothing has more clarity to me right now than your beauty calling to me softly. Is that the heat emanating from your body that fills me with warmth right now? Or is it all that extra blood my heart is pumping to my extremities? Every waft of rich breath I taste from your speech makes my cock swell just a little. There is a voice in my head compelling me to kiss you right now in front of all these people, but no, now's the time to listen and see you and discover what common ground we have to stand on.
When we experience what proximity provokes, what is mutually possible in this moment, maybe we can experience each other directly. But first we have to look each other in the eyes, we have to feel intensely into the reality of the moment, we have to try to speak without hiding behind chatter and culture. We have to engage with how safe we feel to reveal ourselves, to be vulnerable and pathetic and beautiful and unique. I want to get naked with you in a profound sense that is not visible to anyone else in the room, but I can't be sure that's what we both want.
Maybe first we have to find ourselves a little island we can share and feel safe, if only for one momentary delightful conversation. Or maybe in this shared moment we can get naked together in the most basic sense and so start from there, start from the simple tangible undeniably present flesh of our mortal forms, where we can wordlessly touch each other in the terrestrial sensory ocean of incarnation.
In the danger of this swelling, sucking and crushing beach we must navigate between the earth and the divine, stability and chaos, between heaven and hell, the sacred and the profane, flesh and inevitable death. We can grasp at each other's overwhelming but tenuous bodies before we're inevitably torn apart again in the rip, before we're washed up on the shore or dragged out into the depths.
Nothing has more clarity to me right now than your beauty calling to me softly. Is that the heat emanating from your body that fills me with warmth right now? Or is it all that extra blood my heart is pumping to my extremities? Every waft of rich breath I taste from your speech makes my cock swell just a little. There is a voice in my head compelling me to kiss you right now in front of all these people, but no, now's the time to listen and see you and discover what common ground we have to stand on.
When we experience what proximity provokes, what is mutually possible in this moment, maybe we can experience each other directly. But first we have to look each other in the eyes, we have to feel intensely into the reality of the moment, we have to try to speak without hiding behind chatter and culture. We have to engage with how safe we feel to reveal ourselves, to be vulnerable and pathetic and beautiful and unique. I want to get naked with you in a profound sense that is not visible to anyone else in the room, but I can't be sure that's what we both want.
Maybe first we have to find ourselves a little island we can share and feel safe, if only for one momentary delightful conversation. Or maybe in this shared moment we can get naked together in the most basic sense and so start from there, start from the simple tangible undeniably present flesh of our mortal forms, where we can wordlessly touch each other in the terrestrial sensory ocean of incarnation.
In the danger of this swelling, sucking and crushing beach we must navigate between the earth and the divine, stability and chaos, between heaven and hell, the sacred and the profane, flesh and inevitable death. We can grasp at each other's overwhelming but tenuous bodies before we're inevitably torn apart again in the rip, before we're washed up on the shore or dragged out into the depths.
2015-05-26
I am real
There's beauty fucking everywhere, am I not supposed to desire it? The beauty tears my heart out and drags me towards it. This beauty is people. I want these people. You. These people are you. I want to touch and smell you.
What? Are you going to call me a fucking rapist? A pervert? No. I'm a fucking faggot. That's who I am. And I want to get naked with you.
Forget the pornographic images in your damaged brain. Forget it. Here I am. I'm real. I have desire. I am a man. I have testicles and testosterone. I have a fucking cock and so does every man.
Every man has a cock, like me. But not like mine, your cock is different. I want to see your cock and meet your cock and taste your cock.
But that's okay if you're not ready. Let's start with the eyes. I know I'm full of pain and desire and ecstasy. I feel my animal body every second of the waking day. But I think too. My brain's no fucking animal. My brain is civilised. Educated. I was lucky enough to grow up with the most wishy-washy inoffensive Christianity ever devised, but I got my religion.
I got my disgusting body and gays like to each other's penises in each other's bums and watch out for the paedophiles. I got don't get into cars with strangers who pretend to be your parents friend. I got sometimes you go through a phase. I hid the shameful secret that I was a sexual being for a full decade 'til I was 18 and it was too intense to contain.
I was told it's not safe here. Put up your fucking barrier. Hide behind your fucking cell phone. Desire from afar like you're in a glass fucking box and go home where you're safe and look at photos on Facebook of real people and project them onto pornographic images of real people and dream of real people while there are real people right through the wall of your bedroom and that person sitting next to you, he's real too.
And I am real. I might be intelligent and painfully self-aware and self-obsessed but I'm pathetic and irrational too. I am emotional and needy and sexy and fucking magnificent.
I have read poetry to a straight man in the rainforest in the clouds and then sucked his cock 'til he ejaculated in my mouth while it rained on my manuscript.
I am alive. I am real. This hair on my chest is real. I've earned it. I have greys in my beard since my six-week emotional breakdown in Golden Gate Park, sleeping amongst the eucalypts, eating shoplifted superfoods on picnic tables by the fake waterfall that needs a pump.
I am real and my fucking horniness is just love made filthy by my filthy fucking culture. Our culture. Claim it. It fucking stinks like shit but here we are, pretending to be above it all.
Pretending to not be human, not be animals, not be mammalian monsters with cocks and cunts and none of this is crude it's just our language, it's the Anglo roots of our language. It's not vagina, Latin, it's cunt, Anglo. This is who we are.
How fucking weird that I can do this, I can say this, but then here I still am, there you still are, we're both still wearing clothes, neither of us are crying, neither of us are comforting the other, neither of us are recovering from the perversity of the world we've created.
Here we are. White Australia. We did it. Colonisation complete. A fucking total success, like it never happened. Like it's always been this way.
What else did we colonise? Our children? Are they civilised? Are they white? Will we let the black ones through if they wear clothes? If they wear clothes. Will you let me say anything I want, if I wear clothes? Will you let me get drunk and vomit in the toilet, if I control myself? Will you let me love you, if I don't touch you, talk to you or look at you?
I'm not in love with one person. I walk down the street and there are people everywhere. They scream, "Come. I'm beautiful. Touch me. Love me. Talk to me. Respect me. I'm here. I'm real. I will not reject you." And what do I do? I keep walking. I'm terrified. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm not safe here to feel things. I'm only safe to buy things, to do things, achieve things, get places.
Connecting with random people on the street, just cos they're beautiful? No. That's not how it works. You know that's not how it works, that's why you keep walking. It has to be accidental. You have to be introduced. You have to have mutual friends. You have to find yourselves suddenly and spontaneously alone. You have to act like you don't care and you can't fake it. It has to be real.
My entire body is on fire all the time. I'm sorry for my crude language, my love is anything but crude. I say I want to violate you and it's true, but I respect you and I'm not doing anything without consent; without joyous consent.
I'm not doing anything unless I know for sure it's going to positively transform your life. Cos my love and my passion are the same thing. My desire to respect you and to smell your dripping cock are mutual companions.
I'm not crude, I'm not a pervert. I'm not a sexual fucking predator. I am me. I am here. I am real. I'm a fucking faggot and I intend to manifest that as fully into my life as possible and into this pathetic religion we call culture.
I don't know what it's going to look like. I'm studying the shamans, the pagans, the heretics, the ecstatics, the mystics, the lunatics, the poets and the fucking borderline autistic schizophrenics.
But I'm a faggot. I have a body, a heart and a life. I am here. I am real.
!
What? Are you going to call me a fucking rapist? A pervert? No. I'm a fucking faggot. That's who I am. And I want to get naked with you.
Forget the pornographic images in your damaged brain. Forget it. Here I am. I'm real. I have desire. I am a man. I have testicles and testosterone. I have a fucking cock and so does every man.
Every man has a cock, like me. But not like mine, your cock is different. I want to see your cock and meet your cock and taste your cock.
But that's okay if you're not ready. Let's start with the eyes. I know I'm full of pain and desire and ecstasy. I feel my animal body every second of the waking day. But I think too. My brain's no fucking animal. My brain is civilised. Educated. I was lucky enough to grow up with the most wishy-washy inoffensive Christianity ever devised, but I got my religion.
I got my disgusting body and gays like to each other's penises in each other's bums and watch out for the paedophiles. I got don't get into cars with strangers who pretend to be your parents friend. I got sometimes you go through a phase. I hid the shameful secret that I was a sexual being for a full decade 'til I was 18 and it was too intense to contain.
I was told it's not safe here. Put up your fucking barrier. Hide behind your fucking cell phone. Desire from afar like you're in a glass fucking box and go home where you're safe and look at photos on Facebook of real people and project them onto pornographic images of real people and dream of real people while there are real people right through the wall of your bedroom and that person sitting next to you, he's real too.
And I am real. I might be intelligent and painfully self-aware and self-obsessed but I'm pathetic and irrational too. I am emotional and needy and sexy and fucking magnificent.
I have read poetry to a straight man in the rainforest in the clouds and then sucked his cock 'til he ejaculated in my mouth while it rained on my manuscript.
I am alive. I am real. This hair on my chest is real. I've earned it. I have greys in my beard since my six-week emotional breakdown in Golden Gate Park, sleeping amongst the eucalypts, eating shoplifted superfoods on picnic tables by the fake waterfall that needs a pump.
I am real and my fucking horniness is just love made filthy by my filthy fucking culture. Our culture. Claim it. It fucking stinks like shit but here we are, pretending to be above it all.
Pretending to not be human, not be animals, not be mammalian monsters with cocks and cunts and none of this is crude it's just our language, it's the Anglo roots of our language. It's not vagina, Latin, it's cunt, Anglo. This is who we are.
How fucking weird that I can do this, I can say this, but then here I still am, there you still are, we're both still wearing clothes, neither of us are crying, neither of us are comforting the other, neither of us are recovering from the perversity of the world we've created.
Here we are. White Australia. We did it. Colonisation complete. A fucking total success, like it never happened. Like it's always been this way.
What else did we colonise? Our children? Are they civilised? Are they white? Will we let the black ones through if they wear clothes? If they wear clothes. Will you let me say anything I want, if I wear clothes? Will you let me get drunk and vomit in the toilet, if I control myself? Will you let me love you, if I don't touch you, talk to you or look at you?
I'm not in love with one person. I walk down the street and there are people everywhere. They scream, "Come. I'm beautiful. Touch me. Love me. Talk to me. Respect me. I'm here. I'm real. I will not reject you." And what do I do? I keep walking. I'm terrified. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm not safe here to feel things. I'm only safe to buy things, to do things, achieve things, get places.
Connecting with random people on the street, just cos they're beautiful? No. That's not how it works. You know that's not how it works, that's why you keep walking. It has to be accidental. You have to be introduced. You have to have mutual friends. You have to find yourselves suddenly and spontaneously alone. You have to act like you don't care and you can't fake it. It has to be real.
My entire body is on fire all the time. I'm sorry for my crude language, my love is anything but crude. I say I want to violate you and it's true, but I respect you and I'm not doing anything without consent; without joyous consent.
I'm not doing anything unless I know for sure it's going to positively transform your life. Cos my love and my passion are the same thing. My desire to respect you and to smell your dripping cock are mutual companions.
I'm not crude, I'm not a pervert. I'm not a sexual fucking predator. I am me. I am here. I am real. I'm a fucking faggot and I intend to manifest that as fully into my life as possible and into this pathetic religion we call culture.
I don't know what it's going to look like. I'm studying the shamans, the pagans, the heretics, the ecstatics, the mystics, the lunatics, the poets and the fucking borderline autistic schizophrenics.
But I'm a faggot. I have a body, a heart and a life. I am here. I am real.
!
2015-05-12
bursting intensity
There is a bursting intensity emanating from my soul.
What is my soul? That which knows all.
What is my body? That which is desirous of all.
My body lurches and throbs and pulsates.
It exalts in misery and joy.
And my mind? It is anxiety; doubt.
In a room full of strangers,
in which we have shared proudly with honesty and openness,
I want to engage
but I am ignorant of how to chatter
and forget which face I'm supposed to be wearing.
I want to grasp you in my hands,
forcefully, gently, tenderly.
I want to look you in the eye.
Our arms wrap around, our chests move together, our eyes close
and the room does not exist.
Together we leave space-time and enter instead the aura of each other's bodies.
For an eternal moment we rest in the peace of togetherness.
This familiar feeling.
I know this smell.
Perhaps this is how it felt before we were incarcerated in our individual bodies.
Perhaps this remembrance of peace can only be fully experienced together.
Even two so-called strangers in a room full of people
can transcend time and space, anxiety and alienation,
for one imperfect moment that we can't entirely commit to,
but that we defiantly attempt and share.
Like every morning, we wake up in our own body
with the infinite potential of what to do,
who to be, how to move through space and time.
Alone in my body all day
I try to find ways to communicate,
to reach across the veil of my tortured intellect,
to reach humbly across my throbbing passion,
to step out of the divine moment, to look at it,
to calmly observe with my damaged, lonely and fierce mind,
to laboriously translate the keenest subtleties of my observations into something I can share,
to step into a pre-planned space, an organised moment,
overwhelmingly populated by stunning, terrifying, delicious, intoxicatingly intense, brittle, gentle and pretentious fellow humans,
and to re-enter that long-ago moment,
that I was too self-conscious and civilised to experience
but which I now recreate, as best I can,
inside out,
in which, this time, I am not alone, I am not isolated,
because every thought, every emotion, every vibration
is a word coming from my mouth
and these beautiful humans who I am too scared to talk to and touch
are listening to me, are hearing and understanding and appreciating.
Regardless of their clicks or lack-of-clicks I can feel them hearing me and knowing me and loving me
and I can beg them,
with all the desperation and desire that I'm too scared to express,
to violate me, to consume me, to desire me, to grasp for me.
I'm full of love and I know my stupid useless boundaries.
I respect your boundaries all too well,
but I want to violate them.
I demand you confront me with your desperate intensity.
Maybe right outside the door there is concrete and carbon monoxide and paranoia and uniformed minions of institutionalised violence.
But we have found something,
flimsy and linguistic though it is,
and here we are,
another night,
having manifest another moment,
having emanated an atmosphere of safety and inclusion
amidst the unbearable pulverising insanity.
And here we are.
My god,
here we are
together.
We make sounds with our mouths and this somehow means something.
It’s not just cultural cues,
it is something else.
The world out there is made up of something,
something creating little prisons of meaning.
"You are under arrest," they tell us, and we are hypnotised.
We are hypnotised by the slogans of soft drinks, life insurance, socialists and multinational charity organisations.
We call it advertising and shrug it away.
In the past they called it black magic, the curses of petty tyrants, jealous witches and greedy merchants;
spells of weaving, spells of binding, spells of concealment and diversion.
So what the hell are we doing, gathering in rooms,
carefully composing and projecting delicate combinations of words?
Casting new and better spells to embed ourselves deeper into the illusion?
Surrounding ourselves in an unlikely new cushioned dogma to protect us from the world we refuse to understand?
Or are we spell-breakers?
Are we perhaps not creating a secular new age religion of inclusion and globalisation?
Are we instead destroying illusion,
undermining the pious and politically correct,
ridiculing each other's petty projections and then hugging each other's warm healthy bodies?
Are we destroying the linguistic and ideological infrastructure that caused our parents and our grandparents to give up in despair?
Is this real?
Am we really destroying the barriers that have divided us for centuries, since our villages were invaded and colonised?
Can I stand up here and speak to you and destroy the generations of violence that allowed us to invade and colonise this land?
Have we always been this powerful?
So we refuse the hypnotism, and then what?
We're still in this room, the weeds are only just pushing up through the concrete, only a few national economies have collapsed.
I found my rural paradise and I lived there in peace for years.
I understood; and I spat in the face of patriarchy. I healed myself of paranoia and got bored of anger.
I stopped reading the news though I still cared deeply about the fate of our silly little species.
I lost faith not just in domesticity, authority and entertainment,
I lost faith in hope, I lost faith in startling global upheaval, I lost faith in the all levels of human organisation.
My mother died and of course I grieved the life of the human whose frail body formed the foundation of love my entire terrestrial existence is based on,
but then I found myself
fully present in my body.
I felt into my body and found it to be strong and beautiful.
I felt into this warm self-regulating masterpiece of sensitivity and strength.
I turned 30 and I found greys in my beard and I discovered I was hornier and more confident than ever.
I go to the best possible places, where the humans are loving and free, and I look around for one whose eyes engage my own, whose beauty calls out to me across the room, I approach him, I wrap my arms around him and together we transcend time and space for a wonderful imperfect moment.
Listen to audio recording of my performance of this poem at Voices in the Attic, Ferdyduke, Melbourne, 2015-05-12.
2015-04-30
sexual predator
When I was sitting next to a strong young man this afternoon it was not just his thighs expose below his shorts, but the heat and indifference of his presence that made my penis drip, as if it was salivating.
What does a man do with such a passionate experience of life? Smoke weed and eat until those feelings are veiled in a bloated detachment, a borderline infirmity?
That's what these drugs are for, otherwise us men would be fighting and fucking each other constantly, am I right?
Or am I peculiar? Merely a horny faggot or perceptive in the depth and intensity of my masculinity?
I saw the best minds of my generation numbed by electronic media, unable to escape their culture or their parents' nagging faces on the other side of the planet; who for one full year experienced life in all its undiluted intensity of confusion and clarity, only to fly thousands of kilometres in mere hours to the same adolescent bedroom where they began.
I want to drag them away one by one, as they fearlessly approach me. I want to take them, through the natural path of their curiosity and their tendency towards ecstasy, into a world where their beauty is their currency and their strength and love and need for self-expression is their vocation and where I abandon them to fend for themselves in a world they are strong enough to navigate.
I want to selfishly consume their semen and in the process provoke them with the unavoidable intensity of a love that expects nothing. I want to take their mind on journeys through media fundamentally different in intention, an antidote to alienation and distraction.
I want them to lead me out of intellectual caverns into bright open wilderness where we rediscover the experience of the human body and the terrestrial environment.
I demand communication in full honesty, with its complexity, its rejection and its earned calm peace.
I don't know when it's safe to be brave in rooms shrouded in etiquette, chatter and electricity.
For the last year I have insulated myself in my private paradise, with food, with literature, with philosophy, with denial of life, denial of the intensity of life, denial of the imperative nature of this moment, that this moment demands to be confronted, that we know what to do in this moment.
I do not want to be entertained anymore. I do not want to be distracted. I do not want comfort or convenience. I do not want to have my own space in which I can develop as an individual.
I want to be violated. I want my body to be violated. I want my space to be violated. I want my persona, my ideology, my habits, to be violated.
I want to possess the confidence to violate the beautiful men who beg me silently to violate them, if only so they can push me away, reject me, make me realise I am safe in rejection because rejection is real and when I am rejected I know I must leave and find a place where I am valued.
I am not an individual and I never have been. It is clear to me now that my life is meaningless except in relation to my tribe.
I feel strong and confident. There are still barriers to be broken, but I am ready. I have nothing further to wait for. We know what to do, because here we are doing it. We need each other, we cannot do it alone.
I experience this world only through the conduit of my body, because this is the extent to which I am manifest in this world. My body is like a glove of total immersion in a world of total darkness. In this darkness, as this form moving through space, I encounter warm bodies and realise that I too am a warm body. Nothing is more compelling than this moment we discover each other in the darkness.
The moment overwhelms me with intensity and the scope of its possibility and I choose whether to eat myself out of this moment, or breathe into it.
I'm no monk. I'm not citizen living in a constructed universe.
My universe is chaotic and divine. The divinity of the universe I inhabit is blurred and messy and beyond my powers of comprehension.
From here I know anything is possible, but right now only the next thing is possible.
Only what is necessary and appropriate.
My undeniable hypocrisy and the closing limits of my ignorance draw me back into the real world from this linguistic world in which I can hope for perfect clarity.
What does a man do with such a passionate experience of life? Smoke weed and eat until those feelings are veiled in a bloated detachment, a borderline infirmity?
That's what these drugs are for, otherwise us men would be fighting and fucking each other constantly, am I right?
Or am I peculiar? Merely a horny faggot or perceptive in the depth and intensity of my masculinity?
I saw the best minds of my generation numbed by electronic media, unable to escape their culture or their parents' nagging faces on the other side of the planet; who for one full year experienced life in all its undiluted intensity of confusion and clarity, only to fly thousands of kilometres in mere hours to the same adolescent bedroom where they began.
I want to drag them away one by one, as they fearlessly approach me. I want to take them, through the natural path of their curiosity and their tendency towards ecstasy, into a world where their beauty is their currency and their strength and love and need for self-expression is their vocation and where I abandon them to fend for themselves in a world they are strong enough to navigate.
I want to selfishly consume their semen and in the process provoke them with the unavoidable intensity of a love that expects nothing. I want to take their mind on journeys through media fundamentally different in intention, an antidote to alienation and distraction.
I want them to lead me out of intellectual caverns into bright open wilderness where we rediscover the experience of the human body and the terrestrial environment.
I demand communication in full honesty, with its complexity, its rejection and its earned calm peace.
I don't know when it's safe to be brave in rooms shrouded in etiquette, chatter and electricity.
For the last year I have insulated myself in my private paradise, with food, with literature, with philosophy, with denial of life, denial of the intensity of life, denial of the imperative nature of this moment, that this moment demands to be confronted, that we know what to do in this moment.
I do not want to be entertained anymore. I do not want to be distracted. I do not want comfort or convenience. I do not want to have my own space in which I can develop as an individual.
I want to be violated. I want my body to be violated. I want my space to be violated. I want my persona, my ideology, my habits, to be violated.
I want to possess the confidence to violate the beautiful men who beg me silently to violate them, if only so they can push me away, reject me, make me realise I am safe in rejection because rejection is real and when I am rejected I know I must leave and find a place where I am valued.
I am not an individual and I never have been. It is clear to me now that my life is meaningless except in relation to my tribe.
I feel strong and confident. There are still barriers to be broken, but I am ready. I have nothing further to wait for. We know what to do, because here we are doing it. We need each other, we cannot do it alone.
I experience this world only through the conduit of my body, because this is the extent to which I am manifest in this world. My body is like a glove of total immersion in a world of total darkness. In this darkness, as this form moving through space, I encounter warm bodies and realise that I too am a warm body. Nothing is more compelling than this moment we discover each other in the darkness.
The moment overwhelms me with intensity and the scope of its possibility and I choose whether to eat myself out of this moment, or breathe into it.
I'm no monk. I'm not citizen living in a constructed universe.
My universe is chaotic and divine. The divinity of the universe I inhabit is blurred and messy and beyond my powers of comprehension.
From here I know anything is possible, but right now only the next thing is possible.
Only what is necessary and appropriate.
My undeniable hypocrisy and the closing limits of my ignorance draw me back into the real world from this linguistic world in which I can hope for perfect clarity.
Listen to an audio recording of my performance of this piece at Voices in the Attic, Ferdydurke, Melbourne, 2015-04-28.
2015-04-13
the moment when the vast open night sky tempts me back into life
When I
wake up
I don’t
know who I will be.
I do my
best
to
breathe calmly.
When I
breathe and listen carefully
I
notice
I do
not fear anything.
and then
I hear
life call
out to me.
It is
faint at first,
I
dismiss it.
I step
outside
to the
aliveness
of sunshine
on my skin,
or the
delicacy
of a
misty rain,
or the
harsh chill
of a
cold wind.
In that
moment
I know
I can
go inside
and I
will feel nothing.
Now,
I feel
the fear.
I
listen, quietly, patiently.
I fear
I will
say no to life.
I fear
the corrupt self
who
lures me inside the house
with
disparaging slogans
gleaned
from my inadequacy.
I close
my eyes
and
open them.
The
universe surrounds me
in every
direction.
The
vast sky and earth
do not
overwhelm me
because
I know my limits,
I
accept the possible.
I step
forward,
the
space yields
to accommodate
me.
I can
move,
I can
act,
the
limitations are conceivable.
I
encounter another human being.
I
choose,
in this
moment,
how we
will communicate.
I am
entirely naked,
I am
vulnerable,
I am
totally within my strength.
I have
no boundaries.
I allow
you to move towards me
in love
in
desire
with
respect.
I do
not fear your truth,
I am
not ashamed of my own.
I feel
your beauty
throughout
my body.
I want
to merge with you
emotionally,
sexually, intellectually, culturally,
momentarily.
I want
to know what that feels like.
I want
to re-emerge
alone
and
know what that feels like.
I am
merely an entity
temporarily
incarnate
in this
body,
in this
place,
in this
moment.
I
cannot act
other
than my nature.
I lay
myself
in the
bed I have prepared.
I dream
pasts, presents, futures.
I wake,
hear
again,
ignorant
of the
unmanifest certainty
of the
universe
I have
dreamed into.
2014-12-25
Merry Christmas, Satan Claws
I
reject Christmas as a Capitalist celebration. I can't bear
the thought of sitting around a pine tree, or worse, a plastic pine
tree, for hours, stuffing my face with candy and watching present
after present, each lavishly wrapped and entirely superfluous, passed
around like a great ritual.
I
need not reject Christmas as a Christian celebration because this is
an idiotic abstraction. Growing up it was an implicit joke that
Christmas had anything to do with the birth of Jesus. We
were urged to remember at Sunday School specifically because none of
our rituals related in any way to this theme.
Every
year throughout my adolescence we would quietly confess to each other
that it didn't “feel like Christmas” so much anymore, as the slow
realisation of the unlikely nature of it all dawned on us. How
cheated we felt. How disappointed. I never
found out that Santa Claus didn't exist. The solemn
hopeful deceit of it simply became obvious. The sacrifices
my parents made, the magic that permeated reality and the devastating
realisation of my own naivete were like the crushing weight of
adulthood. It's all a sham, and happiness is to believe in
lies. I was inherently incapable of believing the lies but
my hope and faith would carry me far; hope in the loving unity of our
family, faith in our culture, to contain and protect us. It
was only later that my parents separated, deconstructing my family,
and our whole culture was pulled out from under me with the same slow
shameful disappointment as the Santa Claus lie. This early
humiliation can only survive in my sensitive body like a trauma. The
ultimate specialness of Christmas that has leaked out of me like a
dripping landfill for years is now completely gone and in its place
is the grief of loss – loss of my childhood, loss of my mother,
loss of my culture, of a world that made sense.
I
was invited to spend Christmas with my three siblings and their five
children, in whom the ritual survives into the next generation. Out
of love and loyalty I said yes, and then the thought of piles of
Christmas presents under the tree and hours of significance given to
what amounts to garbage bags full of rubbish for the landfill, made
it perfectly clear that I couldn't put myself through it. To sit in
a cluttered sanitised house with these people I love so desperately
and see their fake smiles for the video camera as they open each
present, to see the disappointment at the disillusioned hope that
this item could possibly make them happy, would break my heart.
Fuck
you, Santa Claus. Repent. Stop releasing the
propaganda, all that ingratiating Christmas music and sentimental
family TV specials. Release the Elves, slavery is illegal
under international law. The obvious fiction of your
existence has failed to alleviate me of the possibility of
magic. Your plan to turn all children into Atheists and
Consumers will fail. The magic of the unseen worlds will
prevail and your rituals will be undermined with the ridicule of
great art. I reject you, Satan Claws, and I will enjoy the
summer solstice with my family, those who are truly able to be
present with me, without the buffers of alcohol, presents and
sugar. The weather outside is not frightful, it is warm
and bright, the cool water beckons, exuberant summer fun beckons. I
am not dreaming of a white Christmas, I'm dreaming of a naked
Christmas, where the the white of my bare bum is slowly tanned by the
sun in preparation for months of summer.
I
dream of a new year, in which the curse of Christmas is far away and
a refreshing and challenging new life awaits. When the
uncomfortable blip of Christmas passes, New Year will be an
exhilarating rage, a shedding of skin, a release of madness, an
immersion in the world, a baptism of mud, an ecstasy of sex and
psychedelics. The non-existent Satanic fantasy of Santa
Claus is discarded and decays while we celebrate the Earth, each
other and the complex intensity of incarnation as a human being.
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