LXSSYS

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like ‘Maybe we should just be friends’ or ‘How very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.”

- Neil Gaiman

The ad on the back of the magazine was selling body parts. The couple in the photograph looked sublime, Greek gods with perfect limbs and soulful eyes, and I almost cried from envy. I sent in the order form and in 2-3 weeks, my new heart came in the mail, cryogenically frozen. I tore open the packet with my teeth, half-expecting a packet of instructions to fall out or for a cloud of dust to explode, maybe even to find sea-monkeys instead, but there it was, swimming in liquid nitrogen, still as a sunset.

I thought to myself, the most sensible thing to do would be to leave it out to thaw before doing anything else so I watched it, sitting on the kitchen counter, a little brown around the edges, dripping liquid that seemed a mixture of blood and absinthe.

A watched pot never boils, I told myself, and so a watched heart never beats. I busied myself around the house instead, making up stories about whose heart it used to be, who it had loved, who had broken it. Soon enough I couldn’t help myself and I picked it up once it was warm enough, examining the scars, poking my fingers through the sections, wondering if it smelled like springtime or like the sea. I wondered what to do with it. Mine was bruised, but it had a good couple of years still left in it. What to do, what to do, what to do with someone else’s heart?

I decided to eat it. After all, no one ever said it could be a bad thing. If one can try to eat someone’s sadness, why not try to eat their love? Finally having made a decision, I got impatient and threw it into the microwave, set it to defrost. I couldn’t wait to go outside in the cold afternoon light and start grilling it. I wondered who I could call over. It was a big heart, big enough for sharing.

A little lime, a little salt and pepper, and it was perfect with a side salad and a glass of red wine. I wondered absently if it had been stolen, given willingly or if the owner had died, thinking it too broken to continue using. The first bite tasted of uncertainty and fear, towards the middle it was almost-orgasmic. But towards the end… towards the end it became bitter, and I grew tired. I pushed the silver plate away from me, wanting no more and resolving to bury the leftovers in the backyard.

I realized the heart was yours, and I had only sensed myself in the bitterness.

the flesh covers the bone 
and they put a mind 
in there and 
sometimes a soul, 
and the women break 
vases against the walls 
and the men drink too 
much 
and nobody finds the 
one 
but keep 
looking 
crawling in and out 
of beds. 
flesh covers 
the bone and the 
flesh searches 
for more than 
flesh. 

there’s no chance 
at all: 
we are all trapped 
by a singular 
fate. 

nobody ever finds 
the one. 

the city dumps fill 
the junkyards fill 
the madhouses fill 
the hospitals fill 
the graveyards fill 

nothing else 
fills.

By Charles Bukowski

A quiet hospital is infinite, The polished, ice-white floors, the darkened halls That lead to almost anywhere, to death Or ghostly, lighted Coke machines. I call To him one night, at home, asleep. His breath, I dreamed, had filled my lungs--his lips, my lips Had touched. I felt as though I'd touched a shrine. Not disrespectfully, but in some lapse Of concentration. In a mirror shines The distant moon.

IV, by Raphael Campo

there was this girl i once loved.

like a solid clash between air

and ion. then rain fell, and it was

clear to me that that was it.

and i will never love that girl again.

or maybe always. i cannot

discern the variance between

a lifetime and a second. today

i spent my time with the girl

i love. eating her mother’s cooking

and dancing on her sala.

a thousand tomorrows completes

every last sorrow between us,

every joy, every lasting glance.

i look at her and find the dark and

the warm, these little days too

short to conquer. so now I drink

on through the holiday night. on

a thinking spree, shooting down

the unnecessary with shots of whiskey:

oh, the girls. oh, the many, many

beautiful girls. and then i go back to

loving her right. ah, love. love is like

lighting. only permanent when you

catch it at that last, incredibly lucky

second.

By Raphael San Diego

sometimes, just sometimes in the middle of the night my soul aches from realizing all the lives I have lost.

slapdash-lines:

and this is how archipelagos
are formed—the angry wakening
of volcanoes, rapid movement,
cooling water and mass;

look, we have drifted apart,
hardened by the sun, we set
our bedrocks where we please,
and too late, we notice that
we have nothing left between
us, but water—far and stretching,
yawning and rippling. when
we look at each other’s eyes,
remember that once, we
were under the ocean, soft
and igneous and together,
promises of always, in
our fingertips.

now all we have left are different
wildlife, on the surface the same,
but in structure all too different.

That Day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and
stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed, to find out what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow
But you didn’t notice because

That day, the day the saucers came, by some some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because

On the saucer day, which was zombie day, it was
Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us
A ship built of dead-men’s nails, a serpent, a wolf,
All bigger than the mind could hold,
and the cameraman could
Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out
But you did not see them coming because

On the saucer-zombie-battling-gods
day the floodgates broke
And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites
Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities
And charm and cleverness and true
brave hearts and pots of gold
While giants feefofummed across
the land and killer bees,
But you had no idea of any of this because

That day, the saucer day, the zombie day
The Ragnarok and fairies day,
the day the great winds came
And snows and the cities turned to crystal, the day
All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the
Computers turned, the screens telling
us we would obey, the day
Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,
And all the bells of London were sounded, the day
Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,
The fluttering capes and arrival of
the Time Machine day,
You didn’t notice any of this because
you were sitting in your room, not doing anything
not even reading, not really, just
looking at your telephone,
wondering if I was going to call.

- Neil Gaiman

1.

In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.

2.

Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She is in love with Peter. I am in love with her.

3.

Stand on the floor where it’s marked X. I am standing by your side where it’s marked Y. We are a shoulder’s length apart. I’m so close you can almost smell the perfume. If I step ten paces away from you, there could be a garden between us, or a table and some chairs. If I step another 20 paces there could be a house between us. If I continue to walk away from you in this way, tramping through walls and hovering above water, in 80,150,320 steps I will bump into you. I can never get away from you, and will you remember me? Distance brings us closer. There is no distance.

4.

In 1961 I was in Berlin. It was a dusty Sunday in August. In the radio news was out that Ulbricht had convinced Khrushchev to build a wall around West Berlin. I remember it precisely: By midnight East German troops had sealed off the zonal boundary with barbed wire. The streets along which the barrier ran had been torn up. I lived in that street. It was the day after my birthday. I remember the dust covering the sky. I remember being scared. Father had not returned from the other side. The Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse had orders to shoot anyone who would attempt to defect. Father had not returned.

5.

Happiness is simple.
Sadness forks into many roads.

6.

Before the time of Christ, Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the universe because he needed a stationary reference point against which to measure all other motions: a rock falling, a star reeling through the sky, his heart beating against his chest like a club. He needed to believe in certainty, in absolute space. Without it, the world would not be known absolutely. Without it, the world cannot be known.

Twenty centuries later Hendrik Lorentz needed to believe that every single molecule in the universe must move through a stationary material called the aether, as every human being in his various turnings must move through God. Scientists looked everywhere for proof of this aether. And everywhere they found nothing.

7.

I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and I’m handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I don’t like going to airports and hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a memory of something that never happened.

I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.

8.

Memory is brutal because precise.

9.

She said: give me more space. I said: don’t you love me anymore? She said: give me more space. I said: why? Did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong? Is there someone else? When did you stop loving me? In what precise moment? In what room? What city?

I held her tight as one who’s about to lose his own life holds on. Then she said: give me more space. I said: no.

10.

I have only one purpose: to live intensely.

11.

I wish I never met you
and I wish you never left.

You taste like a river in June.

12.

I’m going to say something important. Look at my face. Ignore my eyes. Just listen to me. But listen only to the timbre of my voice, not to what I am saying. They are different. They are two different rooms. The first is an exhibition of despair, the second only an explanation.

The first is all you have to listen to. So listen carefully because I cannot repeat myself:

“Everything/ one suspects to be true/ is true.”

13.

In 1879 a boy is born in Germany. At age five he’d throw a chair at his violin teacher and chase him out. In time he would develop the capacity to withdraw instantaneously from a crowd into loneliness. At twenty-six he would publish his theory of relativity in Annalen der Physik. He looks crazy, but he is certain: there is no aether, no absolute space.

14.

Sometimes they thought it was the words.
What they wanted to say could not be said.

They fixed the TV, vacuumed the rug,
dusted the furniture, looked out the window.

Sometimes she would purposefully lose hold of
a plate and it would smash to the floor.

Then they would have something to say,
only to begin to say it then stop.

15.

Look at this box. It is empty except for a diary, a book, and this picture in my hand. Now look at this picture. It weighs nothing and occupies almost zero space. I can slip it in anywhere and it will fit: inside the diary, under the box, through a crack on the wall. If I tear it several times, it will occupy a different volume, many and various. It mutates, you see. If I burn it, it will smoke into the air. It will take up a whole expanse.

16.

How many more times
are you going to let the world
hurt you?

17.

My father is an incorrigible storyteller. He would tell the same stories in different ways. I wouldn’t know which ones to believe. So I believed all of them. “There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu.

Father would point at the TV. He would repeat lines, rehearse the beginnings and ends, explicate with his hands the elaborate twists and turns of every road.

He said: “I am dying.”

I said: “But aren’t all of us dying.”

18.

And I thought the world
was about this leaving,
not about anybody’s leaving
but about this leaving.
The next day it was the same.

19.

A beautiful woman walks into a room. The room is dark. There are no windows. There is one light bulb but any time now it will go off. I pretend not to notice and look away, my heart beating against my chest like a club. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. What other forms of happiness are there than this?

20.

In 1989 the Berlin wall falls down.

21.

I believe in love only when it rains.

22.

To appreciate the value of land, one need only look into a painting: so much beauty. Buying land means buying the layers of beauty directly above it. It means buying the sky above it. And the birds above it, the clouds, the gods.

In truth you are buying a corner of the universe. You are saying: this is my room. You are saying: I live here. Here I exist.

23.

Your sadness is immaterial. You did
not come into the world to be happy.

~

You came to suffer/survive.

24.

How many words have you spoken in your life?
How many did you mean?
How many did you understand?

25.

Somebody picks up a phone. He dials a number. His voice travels a thousand miles into another country. On the other end somebody picks up and hears the voice. Who is this?– This is me. The phone is hung up. The voice travels back a thousand miles.

Elsewhere somebody picks up a phone and before he could dial forgets the number.

26.

Sometimes wars are waged because there are too many people in too few rooms.

27.

Memory is incomplete–lost.
The world is incomplete–vanishing.

Nothing more happens. You open your eyes and it’s over.

Memory is brutal.
Memory is precise.

28.

In the next room people I do not know are talking with hushed voices. Their secret slips out the window like a cat. It is raining, and I press my ear to the wall. I imagine that one of them is smoking a cigarette. I imagine that one of them is covering his mouth in surprise.

29.

When my aunt died the doctors said the fat clogged her arteries. Every week she visited the hospital, and every week the vein on her wrist had to be ripped out so a catheter could be stuck into her body to suck out her blood. You could see the plasma pass through a filter and then back to the body. If you put your ear to her wrist you would hear her heart.

Before my uncle died the heart attacks were so excruciating he said he’d prefer to just die. They transported him to the hospital, and on the way to the emergency room his heart gave. Mother said my uncle ate too much pork and drank too much beer. She wonders if he’s going to be happy in heaven.

30.

In some house in some province in some country in some novel there is a story of a man a father a child a lover who dies because of too much sadness.

31.

Nobody thought that what was wrong was the love.

32.

She said: give me more space.

- Arkaye Kierulf

You must have felt it working in your bones. It’s begun: The papers
print the same stories over and over, and have you checked

the obituaries? Already, nobody remembers

how their first kiss went. The phone keeps ringing and ringing
when nobody’s home. Between our skins is a necessary friction

that separates us forever. Look: space. Somewhere, a lost key. It’s begun:
What was once the wind or an echo or an accidental sweetness

is now a bird outside your window singing with perfect pitch and timbre
the song that’s on all our tongues, cut. What pulls from the earth to exist

the earth pulls back into itself: this and this and this is mine. You own nothing.
Our bodies breathe to a rhythm, to one direction, to one regression. It’s begun:

The truth stares us down like an owl: There’s no place to go: You own nothing. 

In the dark you hear movement- a squeak, a hiding. The heart opens, closes, opens.

- Arkaye Kierulf