Do I look alive

enough out there?

 

Crushed velvet

signaling my intent

 

to be devoured, undone,

et cetera, whatever else

 

shows veritable effort

I want useless splendor,

 

to be as carried off

w/ rapture

 

as the woman who kissed

a Klimt hanging in a gallery,

 

later said It was a gesture of love...

I did not think it out carefully

 

I want the class wars to start

but everyone's so tired

 

All these neologisms

​for disruption & innovation

 

& still, not a soul I know

confuses precarity w/ play

 

Eros, I've looked

for you all over

 

Our totalitarian state

​glitched out my libido

  

& I give over whole afternoons

to huffing lavender,

 

hitting up ghoulish senators,

browser history littered

 

w/ herbal elixirs &

​all the things I should know

 

how to do by now. All around

me, women grip the buoys

 

of their autonomy to stay

afloat until personhood washes up

 

on the shores of no nation

I stockpile intimacies almost

 

too ephemeral to clock:

strangers act so kind

 

whenever I wear

this ridiculous pom-pom hat

 

& old friends use my name's diminutive

& some lovers leave

 

a glass of lemon water by the bed,

my body carved w/ red filigree

 

Desire doesn't aspire

to anything other than itself--

 

I don't miss so-&-so,

just being seen in that way,

 

just having an unholy place

to rest, set all this down