Two rows of teeth in lockjaw. What is that taste? On the back of your tongue. That metal, like sucking on pennies. Zip descends molar by molar. Each hook to its hollow. A loop-type of eye is used when two ends butt up against each other without overlapping. You like the tease of this proximity. The soft-hardness. Also, you don’t. In your dreams your teeth fall out in your hands.

Luce Irigaray writes that ‘more than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance… [T]he predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations... the moment dominates, the look dominates, the body loses its materiality’ . You think about Buñuel and Dali making fun of Lorca, their earthy comrade, by naming the film Un Chien Andalou. Clouds move across the moon and the gaze turns to the barber’s razor… the holy eye, slit clean lengthwise, unbloodied, yet liquid as though leaking ichor. Your eye, pristine, beholds the next screen cycle of the flat body that acts; impotent and irredeemable through art. (‘Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?’ ) Regardless of your presence, Undone replays.

You cannot see the person’s face – the owner of the jeans – so they won’t look back. Like Mapplethorpe’s Man in Polyester Suit. You will never overlap. Tight close-up on crotch demands your attention (pay it, spend it, give it); the peephole that remains taut as it opens, barely gapes, may be continents away. Slow, clean, tremulous fingernails. Something tender: ‘the correlation of the body and the gesture’ in endless rehearsal. But it isn’t nothing. What did you have to lose to see? The grazes of indignity. Prized moment, bronze saddle of light. None of this shit will last. How many people have you watched shuck themselves of their jeans? You see them stripping queued in a mirage and you feel the hot smack of desert and what you miss. Materiality quavers impermanently.

Le sujet supposé savoir is the subject who is supposed to know. Do you know me when I undress? Knowing is not a static category: it is petulant, contrary, inextricable to power. A savoir (to know) is only possible as an ideal: ‘As soon as one tries to get close to it, it becomes… ungraspable’. Fools and fanatics know. Knowledge tastes like your mother – saltwater taffy – the body to which the writer returns to play.

The vulnerability of the video is contained in your propinquity; your adjacent breath to the unbreathing, the fact of fascination. ‘The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me. The text chooses me, by a whole disposition of invisible screens, selective baffles: vocabulary, references, readability, etc.; and, lost in the midst of a text (not behind it, like a deus ex machina) there is always the other, the author’ ; but you are not thinking about Charlie. You’re thinking of the box of her poems, the Mets snapback she gave you the day you left New York.

When zippered trousers caught on, they were meant to stop the ‘possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray’ . Disarray as a verb means to bring disorder to. (ORIGIN: c.1386, from dis- ‘lack’ of + array). Embarrassment predicates audience. Giovanni Bellini painted The Drunkenness of Noah in 1515. (‘And he drank of the wine and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent’ ). Two of Noah’s sons, Shem and Japheth, try to cover their father’s nakedness when they find him. They walk into the room backwards to drape him without their eyes alighting on his shame. His third son, Ham, laughs, and Noah curses him and his descendants to be forever slaves. So, who is punished and for what?

Anxiety is fear without an object, or an object yet. Anxiety produces prime capitalist subjects; insatiable, isolated, suggestible. Like catching a fish and throwing it back ‘humanely’. Do you feel your scalp start to prickle? The wound left by the hook still weeping. (‘I am interested in language because it wounds and seduces me’ ). Are you making yourself a spectacle? Do they know? (They cannot know). Mulder’s in the background saying I want to believe, the shorthand in a Tinder profile – collate your memes to mimic a personality. Believing is not knowing. If you cut yourself open, you know you would find something irreparably broken; something crooked; a piece of the hook. The zipper sticks, you pull too hard, the fabric is chewed.

People in traumatised communities struggle loving one another because intimacy is boobytrapped. You have been a bad queer. Cough up some more teeth. ‘Queers can be so very mean to queers… precisely because we want so badly to love and be loved by one another. Our trauma teaches us to experience this as at once irresistible and explosive’ Last year you fell in love in Harlem. Even though you know ‘there are no good surprises’, and everything they can do to you, you can do first to yourself, and worse ; even though you know it was a loop-type of eye amidst the red and green wires, you still reached for it.

For a year you did not write, or wrote badly, and no one cared. No one noticed. Proust complains like the ultimate commitment-phobe: ‘It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one’s own like a bomb which one holds in one’s hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime’. Proust is an antirelational queer punk radical. You picture all of the invisible cardiac debris, granular drifting, like microplankton trying to nourish the dying reefs.

Summer steams behind you, a caterwaul, the Hudson River’s in your hair. The bathroom is filthy with cockleshells and silver bells. The rats ride drunk on brunch scraps and Dunkin’ Donuts from downstairs. The zip keeps going. You have never seen their eyes. You never knew them. You want them. Or the feedback loop. Or not them, rather the moment outside time: ‘déréalité / disreality: Sentiment of absence and withdrawal of reality experienced by the amorous subject, confronting the world’ , which seems is wearing thin in more and more places, soon you can dig to China.

There was that glimpse of open-throated time with her. You think of the sterile, pretty coldness of Warhol’s Blow Job. When will she come to you; smell the hot September wattle? When will the sea wash your cup in a far-flung Empire’s upside-down sun? No answer through the Kaddish. She doesn’t like the ocean, doesn’t swim.

Do you remember? You text.
Our bodies and one breath filled us both like your fist inside me my tongue in you.

Christmas and the streets are tinselled. The smell of piss and chestnuts. The bleached beach of Coney Island licks itself of Styrofoam with an old man’s spittle. You’re left on read. (‘So far in a few blocks / To be so low / And if I call you from First Avenue / Where you're the only motherfucker in the city / Who can handle me’ ). You want to touch again her great golden crown but her buzzer’s broken and she doesn’t pick up her phone.

The moment; the eye; the screen; the surface. Smooth where you are sticky. Why do you sweat so much? Airconditioned flavour. To unwind she gets baked and goes to Target in the Bronx. She wanders, stroking the merchandise. You don’t go because you need something, Target tells you what you need. Zip descends molar by molar. You are disarrayed. Repeat. You are so far away. Is that blood? ‘Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe’ – Said Jesus, but you cannot. Undone replays, regardless of your presence.