Black Wave

You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.

Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill.

It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life's passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.

They were living exciting, crazy, queer lives full of poetry and camaraderie and heart-seizing crushes. I mean, not that night, but generally. That night they were bored.

To be a butch girl in high school, to be better at masculinity than all the men around you, and then to be punished for it!

You can’t get lost if you have nowhere to be.

The messed-up queers Michelle ran with tempted fate daily, were creating a new way to live, new templates for everything – life, death, beauty, aging, art.

Oh my God, Michelle thought, I think we’re making love. It was a term everyone barfed at. No one wanted to make love, people wanted to fuck, to take each other’s skin apart with knives and pin it back together with needles.

She kissed her like she’d been stranded on an island, notching each stranded day onto a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. She filled Michelle like weather, worked her mouth like a cherry stem being tongued into a knot.

On the first day of the end of the world, Michelle got out of bed, walked into the kitchen, and smacked some roaches

The heartbreak of having written and published a first book is that the world then expected you to write a second.

Older Fags and Younger Fags, Like Legally Young. Daddies. Zeus and Ganymede. Ganymede was a child, Ziggy schooled her. Yeah, You Were There, Michelle retorted, On Mount Olympus. You Were Working the Door. You Carded Ganymede.

Michelle had great admiration for criminals and crime, though only from a distance.

Did anyone think this canon of druggie men were out of control? Only in the most admirable of ways! Out of control like a shaman or a space explorer, like a magician sawing himself in half. Out of control like a poet.

Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another.

Michelle could feel the pull of the other world upon her, and for a moment Reinaldo was gone and Michelle was alert to the reality of her lumpy futon, her smushed pillow that stank like scalp, the sun searing through the venetian blinds that couldn't ever be opened, not anymore, not with the dog and the man rotting in the heat right there. Michelle didn't want any of it, she wanted the summery New England warmth, the way the air was thick with water, and the dark harbor, the way it lay calm and flat against itself, not giving off clouds of poison, not scummed over with oil so clotted you could float on it, not bumpy with the trash of history.

The entire planet was dreaming of the lovers they would have had if only they had lived. In the dreams everyone was their highest self, everyone was present and their hearts were wide-open. It was a gift and a plea, from the planet perhaps, or from the universe, from the essence of life - no one knew enough about such things to be certain.

In order to have your complaints listened to in this world you couldn't have that much to really complain about.

Michelle wasn’t butch enough to mess around with men. It would be simply heterosexual, and slutty. For Ziggy and Stitch it was something else, proof of their toughness. They could tumble around with this guy and emerge from the van as queer as ever, more queer, even, and the man might now in fact be a bit queer from his time spent cracked out in Ziggy’s butch bosom.

They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they’d be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn’t imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores.

The Leatherman was a lesbian phenomenon and life ran more smoothly because of it.

It smelled of oily flowers, like the worn pillowcases of long-ago lovers.

I’m A Queer Poet Too! She stressed queer not because she walked around identifying as a queer poet but so that the youth understood she would fuck her.

Michelle was shocked at how many beauty products were marketed at balm for swollen eyes. She imagined thousands of female consumers sobbing hysterically all night and acting like there was no problem by day, smearing cream into their haggard faces at the bathroom mirror. She was part of a demographic.

Don’t you ever fucking write about me! Andy hollered, and was gone.

Writing was the antijob, the fuck you to all jobs, her claim on her autonomy, what kept her feral and free.

Michelle felt that if people didn’t like the way they looked in her book then they should have behaved differently.