So this is the new book vibe.
We're getting to know each other right now.
"Why I so wise?
It wasn't so much a doubled consciousness,
but more akin to a doubled gaze.
I didn't leave my body when it would happen,
but it was like I could see myself seeing them see me.
And I must admit, I got a rise out of it.
Their feelings of insecurity.
They were so obviously intimidated
by the work they knew they could never do
and would never be able to make.
This is how beasts are made.
Oum kalthoum sings to the one I saw before I saw,
in the body before the body worries she will tear the veil.
On the floor of a dimly lit gym's basketball court,
I learn Pilates method was born in a prisoner of war camp.
Be long, belong, be long, belong.
Respectability was the first form
of erasure, which is to say obliteration
not objectification.
By the time we are adults, we have become
edited versions of ourselves.
To delete is to deny.
My editor seems to have a typo in her name.
She keeps insisting it is with a w.
An emphasis on the w.
The typo is the correction.
I have stopped wondering how we will meet.
It is easy to leave what is already gone.
I know because I have left so much or else it has left me.
What is a man without patriarchy?
Who decides if the sacrifice was worth it?
The one being sacrificed for, or the one
doing the sacrificing, or is it the one being sacrificed?
If so, how have you participated in your own objectification.
This is an actor portrayal.
Whispers and all the world's a stage.
Even my outfits have become formulaic.
Exposed minus unexposed equals some semblance
of respectability.
Immigration theory is the cousin of game theory or grass
is greener theory.
May we each live to see our own death,
our own imminent irrelevancy.
I've lived to see many of my acquaintances
become commodities.
LLC, doe see doe, doe see day.
The grass is synthetic.
Doe, ray me.
I grew like a Himalayan pine tree.
I no longer watch the news.
I used to be involved in making it, pulling
B-roll from a decade ago to tell the same story today.
My parents reported it to me over the telephone.
They say, today, they saw a man fleeing Aleppo
with a cat that looks like theirs perched on his shoulder.
They say when it is our turn to flee,
they will carry the cat in the same way.
And I think it is easier to live destruction than to watch it.
I live the consequences of that revelation.
This is the part where we dream of a pacifist military."