write your love letters to other women
commit your regard to pages or  
atmospheric photographs
paint them in watery white
fuck them, grope them, gaze befuddled
set the scene and play the role
reel in all the little moments
then come home to me (reeking of brine)
throw arms round my knees
don’t apologize, but affirm
without these sundry everyday
body parts of mine
eyes seeing and tongue speaking and fingers writing you into being
you don’t exist
you are nothing but a scrabbling little romantic
poking your dick into pretty things

I stepped on a nail, in a board. It went in a half-inch. Bright red blood, puddling in the basement filth, splattered on the debris. I balanced there, with my shocking stigmata, electric red flowing off my toes, and I thought of you. I thought of you in the middle of the salt flats. I thought of you when I touched the burnt forest corpses on the mountainside. I bathed in the darkness, naked and vulnerable, a knife nearby, and I thought of you. I thought of you not long after I eased the car around the goat dying in the road; it cried out its fear and pain, cutting me deeper than any nail. In the black night of the interstate, in the lonelinesses of strange cities, in turmoil and in doubt, inhaling the sweet drunk blossoms of spring, walking the wet littered pavements of fall, I thought of you. I’ve been a fool, and I know it.

“Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves, and forgives, and suffers everything because it must. It is not our judgement that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults that we discover that make us abandon ourselves or that repel us.
It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it and ask not whither.”
(Sacher-Masoch)

The thing is, most of the time I don’t fear death.  Not in and of itself.  Every time my plane lifts off, I make my peace with it: the frailty of my body, the fragility of my access to life.  If my body is done, it is done.  I am reluctant to be stopped in the middle of something – a journey, a project, a lifetime.  But death has no interest in my little compulsions, and I have no illusions about this. Of course, I am not fearless:  I fear humiliation, domination, torture.  I fear being terrorized, or being put in pain.  I fear being rejected by others, fear being disgusting to them.  But death itself I respect.  I acquiesce to death, before it demands anything more of me.  It will have its way.  I think about all this while walking home from the bus at night.  Perhaps my bravery simply reflects the fact that I haven’t felt a real threat in so very long. But the idea that I might be attacked in the darkness doesn’t make me cringe or cower, or reconsider my route;  it makes my adrenalin flutter, stirs my bloodlust.  I wonder how I can be so mortally terrified of other things, stupid little things. If someone comes to take my life, daring to pose as death’s hand,  I very well may die.  But I will blaze with such glorious rage, such a violent indignation, that I will burn the flesh off their bones.

Swing the wrecking bar
And sweat. Adrenalin shudders,
and ragged breath.
My father  shows me how, and says,
Think about that guy, the one you say
doesn’t see you?
If he can’t see you after this, well.
Fuck him.

“And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose…”

I saw beauty in a fat body for the first time in a Costco sometime between 2000 and 2004. I was standing in line with my mother, and the checker was wearing sweatpants and no makeup and a blond ponytail, and she wasn’t actually beautiful, perhaps, but it was not unpleasant to look at her hips as she moved comfortably to maneuver each item steadily across the code reader. And I’d never found such a sight “not unpleasant” before. Seeing my own loathed fat in every fat body, up till that point I had always recoiled from bodies that reminded me of my own, with which I nevertheless felt some sort of fat kinship.
 
A Costco line moves slowly, big parade floats of food-laden carts arranged in ungainly lines waiting to pass through their designated checkpoint. I had a bit of time to adjust, to experience some wonder. The checker wasn’t huge or elephantine, merely large and rounded. And yet hers was a body which, when put through the automatic sorting process of all bodies into categories of “acceptable” (meaning thin) and “unacceptable” (meaning fat), would have been easily classified as the latter.
 
The moment was a strange one; it estranged me from my own perception. I was simply and suddenly aware of an absence, of an expected response which failed to materialize. I gazed at this stranger’s body and felt no repulsion, no disgust; I was able to see the beauty in it. Scales fell off of my eyes; I could see something in a new way, and it was bizarre and miraculous. I hadn’t been thinking particularly about bodies and beauty at the time, certainly not any more than the usual constant drone of worry cycling with self-righteousness and self-reassurance. This sudden sight came out of the blue.
 
I wondered if the blonde woman was the only object to which this new vision applied, and almost reluctantly removed my gaze from her to cast it about for other bodies. I saw an older Mexican lady, her short three-rolled torso wrapped in a red suit — and my new vision held true. Her body caused me no disgust, no revulsion, no immediate “no!” shouted silently at the unacceptable body. 
 
This alteration of vision has persisted. I don’t see all bodies as beautiful in their entirety; I’m not some fucking PollyAnna of bodily aesthetics. But that automatic, binary sorting process has been quieted. All bodies are not required to be either affirmed or denied. I can see beauty and grotesquerie living side by side in the forms that present themselves to me.
 
But at the same time, the way that this visual capacity descended upon me was so particular, so unexpected, that I cannot expect the same experience to have occurred to everyone. In a brief correspondence earlier this month, anxieties about attraction were summed up as “feelings of inadequacy.” But I don’t feel inadequate at all. I feel entirely adequate. What troubles me are are feelings of unintellgibility. The response to fat bodies are so polarized, so charged with all of these bloodygodawful freighted Kantian legacies. I don’t fear having my advances simply and kindly declined — I fear being flung across the room in a spasm of recoil and disgust, as if I encroached like overconfident vermin in search of warmth.

I fear that I cannot be seen, cannot be read, because for years I simply could not see beauty in a place where it clearly had a foothold — my own body, the bodies of others like me.

There is a combat veteran in my Freud class. He fascinates me. I am deeply affected by damaged men; I suppose this is a fair point to acknowledge. Usually I am drawn to men damaged by love or depression, the high drama of the everyday. I suppose if we incorporate an Oedipal element, we may assume that the figure of my father hovers about here somewhere; perhaps I should not be surprised that my fellow student draws my attention in such a complex way. My father never saw combat, but his time in the Marines was the great psyche-shattering episode in his life. The shame and anger, the fear and hurt of being trained to kill and being profoundly ill-suited to the task has not, I think, ever left him.

The man with whom I am fascinated describes Afghanistan and Iraq, and life in war itself, as simultaneously mundane and in-credible. This is the puzzle implicit in his descriptions and accounts, a trying-to-make-sense to every verbal gesture he makes. These are the things I did. These are the things I had to do and the things I had to see. This is what every day was like. And yet now I am sitting here with you — how can this be?

Cognitive dissonance — the discomfort of holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. My father could not, would not be turned into a killer. He escaped in drugs and ran away in physical space, until “the service” finally let him go. And yet he was ashamed of his escape, ashamed if its terms, felt somehow a failure in his great relief. The combat veteran, in contrast, went where he was told to go, and did what he was told to do. He killed, under the premise (promise?) that this action was righteous, was called for. In war, the story goes, killers are not murderers. I do not know, but I suspect that he cannot quite believe that the state of exception applies to what he has done. He is waiting for punishment, wonders if the punishment is constituted by the torment of memories and uncertainty.

This is one of the untenable choices we offer men — be a killer, or be a coward. Be a brute, or be a failure.
All men are told: “You will do harm.
One way, or the other.
Either you will disappoint us with your lack of resolve,
Or you will disappoint us with your brutality.
There is no exit.”

If I don’t resist, if I’m not afraid, if I let it come
                   it will soon go.
The misery and I will have our brief intercourse,
and then disentangle smoothly,
and continue on our trajectories –
which, if we are honest,
are not parallel most of the time.

You smacked me on the ass,
and then looked nervous — tho the emotion was nearly imperceptible.
The smack, for me, barely registered
It took several beats for me to even consider
                                        “ oh
                                         perhaps that –
                                         huh ”

Because I don’t really care.
Didn’t flatter, didn’t threaten, just sort of…rolled on by.

Really, boys
I don’t have a           goddamned           thing
to prove.

(from Wikipedia, “Typically, the Ingenue is beautiful, gentle, sweet, virginal, and often naïve, in mental or emotional danger, or even physical danger, usually a target of The Cad; whom she may have mistaken for The Hero…The Vamp is often a foil for the ingenue…”)