“I can’t see what’s the point.” Tina said, flicking through the channels.
Peter snatched the remote out of her hand. “The point is you fucked him!”
“Listen,” Steve said, walking in from the kitchen, “I really had nothing to do and neither did she…”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I really can’t believe I’m still here.” Tina rolled her eyes. “I’d like to just once have no regrets about who I sleep with.”
Steve looked puzzled as he plopped onto the couch, next to her. “What other regrets?”
Peter threw the remote at Steve. “You thought you were the first?”
“I have that effect on boys” Tina sighed, getting up.
“She’s that good, Steve?” Peter asked, his face desperate and a little broken.
“Hold on,” Steve said to Peter, holding up a finger, calling out to Tina. “What’s with the boy comment?”
Tina poured herself a glass of wine.
“Three years and not even a kiss..” Peter muttered.
“Three years?” Steve was shock. “You sorry bastard.”
Peter snapped back, “”Three minutes, Steve? Who’s a sorry bastard?”
Steve closed his eyes. “You told him?”
Tina shrugged. “I was really upset about the whole thing Stevie.”
Peter put his face in his hands. “I can still imagine the scene, with your Bugs Bunny boxers around your ankles apologizing.” He looked up at Steve. “I must admit, stress over your dog’s neutering appointment is original.”
Tina chuckled and poured herself another glass.
Steve turned a deep red that neither Peter or Tina thought possible.
Tina tugged at her tank top, suddenly irritated. “When are we going to bury this conversation among other fruitless ventures ?”
“I’d like to know when am I going to get the chance to bury my head underneath your sheets.” Peter shook his head.
Steve regained his composure. “Wait a minute…Did Tina ever know about your feelings for her?”
Peter looked at Steve deadpan. “It’s one of the only reasons why we’re friends.”
“What??” Steve glared at Tina.
Tina glared back. “It’s none of your business.”
“But-”
“It really isn’t.” She cut him off and turned her back, disappearing back into the kitchen.
“It’s times like these my therapist warned me about…” Peter paced the living room, his face still in his hands.
“Oh please.” Tina stepped out of the kitchen and sat on the dining room table.
“Do you mind?” Steve said, regarding his table.
Tina looked down at either side of her. “It’s a bit hard but considering it’s wood, it’s to be expected.”
Steve paused, then looked at Peter, who was still pacing, and Steve didn’t care if he was crying or not. “You love her and she’s like this?”
Peter spun around, his arms waving. “You DON’T love her, you don’t even KNOW her and YOU SLEPT WITH HER??! Who are YOU to judge ANYONE??”
Steve scratched his head. “I really don’t know what to make of all this.”
Peter was pacing again, mumbling.
“It’s simple,” Tina said, crossing her legs. “I was horny and you were around and everything else from there on was a bit of a disappointment. Now,” Tina then pointed to Peter, “He’s upset because he’s been hard up for me for a little while now-”
Peter dropped his hand from his face. “A little while?”
Tina looked at him, “Look. If you think three years is a long time to wait for me then you know nothing about me mister and I suggest you give up all hope as of now.”
Steve had never seen a man shrivel up before but Peter proved that such things do happen. It wasn’t anything anyone could have pointed out on the surface, but Steve knew Peter, albeit briefly, and this was it: Peter looked broken by the way all the weight, all one hundred and ninety pounds, just dropped out of him.
Steve turned and for some reason, even if he really never liked Pete to begin with, always moody and always too loud, Steve became angry with Tina and to hell to how tightly she could wrap her legs around him. “You got some nerve.”
Tina then pointed to Steve and he could almost feel that jab on his chest. “You, minuteman. I have no problem with the fact that you weren’t a raging bull. I enjoyed everything up to that point and was kind of expecting it.”
Steve didn’t know whether to smile or not.
“What I wasn’t expecting,” Tina continued and then the tone of her voice lowered, softened, “..was for you to come up with some lame excuse about it.”
Tina lowered her head. “Not everyone is some sort of piston and the ones that are, are the ones that like to hurt you with it.”
This was a rather sudden turn, not what anyone expected. Peter had looked up. Steve fell very silent and felt very guilty and couldn’t understand why. Then again, there was very little that Steve did understand about someone he barely knew, but had slept with.
But Peter caught on, regrettably, recognizing the tone in Tina’s voice, and it was one that he had not heard often. Instead of leaving it up to her, which had always been, Peter assumed, a bit harder than other things, he gave Steve a reason. “Tina’s first time,” Peter stopped, looked towards Tina for affirmation, or a sign for him not to continue. There was none, which meant, knowing Tina, it was okay, he could talk about this. “She was about seventeen and a little drunk. It was a house party and no, we were all really smashed and there was this guy there, a senior who had quite a rep and well, Tina wanted to find out…”
Peter looked at Tina and Tina nodded her head, but she remained silent, looking far off, past the corner of the living room.
“I walked in on them. She was missing for an hour or so and I got worried. I didn’t really know her then, I was going out with this girl, Suzanne, but it was my house.” Peter paused, glanced at Tina, then looked straight at Steve. “He was raping her. He said he wasn’t, but she couldn’t have let him… I mean it looked like he was practically strangling her, pinning her arms, pinning her. I tried to stop it and he decked me.” Peter laughed halfheartedly, exhausted just by the retelling, “I introduced Tina to one of my closest friends and he raped her…”
Tina straightened her back and whispered, turning both Peter and Steve’s heads. “He tossed me a nickel on his way out.”
Peter looked at Tina and his eyes were wet.
Steve bowed his head and ran his fingers through his hair. “oh..shit…”
They stayed where they were, breathing in that quiet way that people do at funerals, or during moments of silence, the room quieter than it would have been if it had been empty. Then Tina slid off the table and walked to Peter, taking hold of his arm, then turned and stood in front of Steve, her other hand outstretched. “Nice place, but it’s a bit stuffy. Let’s go for some fresh air.”

She says to the doctor that it isn’t so bad that it isn’t so bad as she has heard other people have told her, that it isn’t as bad as he thinks it is, as bad as other people have told him, she should know, she knows when it’s bad and it isn’t this time she swears it on her grave, and the doctor tells her that he doesn’t want to be the one to tell her I told you so, putting flowers on her grave, she says that it isn’t like, that she would tell him if it was she could tell if it was that bad which it isn’t because if it was he’d be able to tell without asking her, and she’d know it if it was that bad, which it wasn’t and he’d know and they wouldn’t have to say anything about it, but it isn’t that bad so she could put her clothes back on, forget about it like he did when it happened, and the doctor says that it isn’t as easy as that and she says, yes it is, forgetting is the easiest thing to do in the world she says to the doctor and her pants are on and she’s out the door like she hadn’t said anything at all, which she swears she had nothing to say about it to begin with. Really, there’s nothing to tell.

The me that you know wrapped around your ribs and I could leave I couldn’t breathe I could shed my skin like those snakes that we were both so afraid of and stare at and wonder how do you get one of those where do you get one and it was in the house always outside of the aquarium always outside of its cage and having found its skin on the corner of the bed one day between your toenails we knew right away that you was out of itself and we were out of our minds. Just a little snake you said. It won’t give up. It wants me dead.
A revelation came to me in the moments when I first woke up. I guess I had been thinking in my dreams of umberto eco although I’ve never had the attention nor the intention to read him but standing over the sink I had been thinking about something he had told me or something that someone who wasn’t him wrote about him and I was all very clear and clear for him I felt something come through in settle and make itself invisible swallowable and learnt. Something about language. Something about language that made it understandable something that set my mind at ease with what I’m doing, with writing and being so clear headed safe and relieved I came and sat here to jot it down before it left me before it became so well learned that it dropped out of articulation. But like everything else it and everything that it brought gone.
All I think about is filling up the page, how to get there. What to write what needs to be said anything to get to the end of it. I don’t want to stick around it’s too hard to stay here to force myself to stay here and pay attention to the moments beside me around me plaguing me at all angles. It isn’t nice here and it isn’t easy. You’d think it would be because breathing is such a simple act of faith. In deep and out there you go. Simple as one plus one but then you realize that one isn’t a number at all, that there’s no such thing as one thing being only itself or time stopping for one thing to be itself and the world shatters into raving maggots crawling shedding fish scales and everything is wet and thick and soft to the touch and my god breathing the easiest thing to do in the world becomes impossible.

an agony to breathe
deliberately
that next breath
but never being enough
to welcome another.
from the unlikeliness
of relieving the pressure
from behind the eyes,
to be scream
(wiring of metal slivers)
sweaty hands
over the neck,
to push my tears
roughly beneath
the skull,
the cranium,
the lacking.
my lip dry and never
twisted round enough
to lessen this tongue.
wanting to hear
teeth cracking the one eye
that could
never find itself
abrasive enough
to tear itself
through the lashes
thrown upon scars
(like bent skewers)
to pierce,
the tension
to make itself
that one “I”.
never forget
looking
for attachment to
the confined self
to say, grinding against skin
within myself,
but quite uncomfortable
to say
“within this skin”
however,
to skin these eyes
this hand is
being swallowed.

The statement of purpose, or rather, in the back of my mind, it comes out as, the purpose of statement: the purpose of laying down the divisions that have brought you here, that you’re about to transgress and embark upon. To make clear a point: this is the point from where I am, hailing outward to all beacons, “This is me speaking, is there anybody out there?” How does one answer that question at this age, meaning my own, or even, “in this day and age?” The future is unpredictable, not just ups and downs and roundabouts: it contains tragedies and unexpected lemon rind squirts in the eye and the smiles of children; it unfolds and untwines, entangles and ensnares, moves along at its own pace. To sum up: always with each footfall, our hand in front of us feeling for a handrail, sometimes there, other times not, we ask, “What’s the point of this? What has led me here? Where’s the meaning of it all? What has been determined by memory or desire or even fate? What now? What further?”
Begin then from the little I know, the little I remember. A mother, a father, in a country where neither spoke the language, the language with which I am plagued, that I find myself in, surrounded and immersed, traveling further along than either one could have imagined having started from such meager beginnings. After elementary school, the mother was sent to the big city, away from the hills, to earn her keep. The father strolled by the zaharoplastion (pastry shop), saw the fifteen-year-old girl through the window and walked in. Four months later, they were married. He was twenty-nine at the time. His family bought them a house in New York. He had a job, she had a child. He had gambling debts and a mouth that stunk with explicatives, along with top shelf liquors. She had no water or electricity, just debt collectors at her door and bruises. He had a string of bad luck (or so he had told me when I would meet up with him two decades later), she had enough. He was told to leave after one night in particular, and I remember the particulars the most: the towel wrapped around her head and him pulling the phone out of the wall in his black socks and jockey briefs, I viewed it from the floor where he had thrown me; she huddled in a corner. He left. My childhood then consisted of hours playing in the garden behind the house, in what I later realized were weeds, immersed in silence. I learned to make my own toys that we couldn’t afford out of aluminum foil, twisting the silvery material into Godzillas and fighter planes.
Early schooling showed promise; I won storytelling contests in elementary school. There the writing started. It led to special placement in a junior high school where I was ostracized for being different, ethnic and silent. I took a specialized test to enter one of the three best high schools in New York City. Accepted to all three, I choose Bronx High School of Science. Sophomore year, November, a friend committed suicide by jumping off the side of the train, three feet in front of me. Winter of senior year, another friend, after having undergone three years of surgery to remove tumors from around his head, flew out the side window because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, twenty feet from the car that his parents had bought him after he had survived the final surgery that summer. That was January 9, 1990. I dropped out of high school on the seventeenth. I had my General Equivalency Diploma and was accepted into John Jay College of Criminal Justice by April. Making Forensic Psychology my major, I had hoped to find some sort of explanation for what the people in my life (my father, my friend, even my God) had done. I still hadn’t a focus, a purpose. My purpose, at the time, which I was quite committed to, was throwing this laughable life away. I still wrote, endlessly at times, but “what of it?” One professor, a creative writing course I took on the fly, looked at my work, turned me around, forced my eyes onto my own words, and asked the right questions. For two years, I have been finally listening, reading, being reintroduced to words, both in and out of required texts.
This is where I am now. This is what I want to do (there is still, amongst the public, the doubting belief that writing is indeed an activity, a doing, a motion across two physical planes). To be honest, I want to be the next Sophocles, the next Hemingway, the next Roland Barthes, or, even more so, the next Kenzaburo OÄ“. I’d like to teach, to pay the debt I owe to my mentor, to swing around others who have lost belief. I’d like to guide them because I have been there, in speechlessness (nothing is more despairing than that, even in wondrous moments: to be unable to place oneself in syntax, to be without meaning). To be a witness not only to my own life, as a writer, but also to the insight dawning on students’ faces, a new kernel of understanding in their eyes as they read Auster or Austen, Salinger or Perec. In the end however, it all comes down to words doesn’t it?
Each time I write, I have with me two layers of understanding: one is that, by writing, I can leap across into the imagination, into the unknown, into the something never before encountered; the other is a working knowledge of motivation and memory, of thought and language processes. I sometimes work twenty hours straight for a word, a phrase composed and transposing, having reached across and brought a piece of the world back to me, frozen and timeless. That is the purpose of statement: to reach across and bring back. This is my statement of purpose: I have something to say of our collective condition, or perhaps, something about my own humanity.

let’s say it was something blue
let’s say it was something blue and saying it now does
let’s say simply blue and something to it like putting a spin on a bottle
in a circle of children a bottle spinning
spinning the bottle beer brown in a corner where saying blue meant bringing something
into saying
into something with something other than blue coming out of the mouth in two parts
one part being clatter or clutter
part clutter clatter being children in one green corner of the world
chatter clatter of the one green corner of the world spinning around children
spinning blowing round round clutter chatter of children spinning one beer brown bottle
battle for attention
let’s say attention
let’s say something about being at attention
at a tension
of strings
blue strings cording through shipyard bundles against the seashore sand shore against the reefs
or bottles bundles of bottles
bottled bundles of joy clattering over the seaside sand shore floor in all colors in one corner
or one color of all colors blue
again blue again
let’s say it with some grace
let’s say blue again and something other than the saying it again
like the measurement between teeth or tooth or tooth and nail
nailing it
a plate to a yellow wall
yellow walls big and small all around and inside green corners of green fields of corn
corning this close to meaning a flat matte finish against the left breast
or the right breast
either without shame save for the saying and appropriate saving of such like saving orange curls
of rinds
against shipwrecked bottle brown beers spinning in the corners of children carrying chattering on
in yellow four walled rooms
saying something

well not really, i thought i had an idea, but it was the idea of a thought that was the idea in itself, but when i tried to push it further it wouldn’t go anywhere other than “i’ve got an idea..” and well, since i already started on this idea of writing you a letter about an idea i thought i had, or rather, the idea of a thought of an idea, i might as well go through with it until the bitter end (“bitter ends with rhinestones and lemon twists”, now that might be an idea, but i’m not quite sure, just one of those things i suppose, but it’s still not an idea so i better give it up) as i’m doing so, now. of course one might say that this is a letter full of ideas but they’d be absolutely wrong, i mean, you mean something when you got an idea, not meaning that you mean something at that particular moment, whether you, yourself have meaning or not, but that when you have an idea, and you start talking about it, it’s got to go somewhere, and i’m getting nowhere with this, so i’d best leave you alone about it, i won’t bring it up again, so just ignore this message. i forgot why i started it already, it might have been an idea.

what you live for what you love for forever for one moment longer than all the rest for the pain to end to uncoil to uncoil yourself from yourself to be free of yourself and all that you see I see the edges become clearer I don’t think you can understand this edging this clearing that happens you can feel time move you suddenly feel time upon you on you moving away and back again another wave but a wave that has no ending
I told you it was the mortality in me the pressing of blood thick walls on your ears you can’t hear it can you the sound of this reality to hear this to see and hear what you are seeing and hearing two times two times sharper suddenly aware and awake in the middle of a nightmare and here we go the feeling that it’s all there every inch of it laid out before you and you’re not exactly seeing it isn’t the object of your attention but rather you are of it pressing itself on you at all angles at all edges
to come out of it to step away from it don’t let go of me love I don’t know what will become of me of us of me hold my head together I feel it fly apart at the thinking hush don’t talk about it please don’t say anything of our life ahead of us I don’t want to think of it in the dark not in the dark of this city in the middle of this nowhere where we all have lost sight of our senses of making sense of it

(Here you are, speaking) here I am with nothing but words, moving my mouth to mouth sounds.
(Here you are moving across sounds) sounds, to you. Sounds to you like jabbering in the back of the head, the skull, the skull head, like charcoal crumbling.
(In the midst of a fist against my temple) here I am crumbling before you trying to say something to you, in words, with words.
(Here you are crumbling away with words, in words) like words trying to push their way out of my mouth, my flesh mouth, in one piece and I can not help but chew them out to all the wrongs sounds, like flayed syllables.
(You can not help but be chewed mouth flesh syllables)here before you and after you, left with somewhat an image of you, of what I meant to say, of dust, of you and blue dust clinging to the walls.
(Of my blue self dusting against the words you have said) sure of how much has been lost, in the saying, in the speaking of this here before you. Of you not budging from this chair, out to, towards these words, torn and lost the minute I move away, to the minute, to time.
(Being lost in minutes of time trapped in words) I can’t speak but before you, and after you, as if you were moving across this stage, into and out of the words before you, after you, from me, from my mouth into the darkness of listening, to this crumbling.
(To this crumbling of you speaking I find myself) as if I was speaking, and the movement across the wood of this stage being this, of you as my words, to the stage. That the stage being trampled on was the movement of our voice and feet upon it, our meaning upon, the speaker in relation to our words and movement. Here I am speaking.
(Here we are speaking as nothing but a dead blue corpse being held) togther by a string of attention, of tensions, being your tension to these words that are leaving me, unraveling me, me unraveling these words as I speak them to you, because I speak.
(Unraveling before me) here I am, speaking, of all things. Of all the things to do, to have between us. To be left. To be left between us, like bones, like a field of blue chalk, crumbling corpses, trampled syllables and flayed stages. Of all the things to have.

When she had left him, he decided to remove every inch of his skin that she had ever kissed, touched, or licked. The pain was bearable, especially after he had removed his left eyelid (gently, gently, she had pressed the edges of her lips against it one night when he had awakened from a nightmare), the membrane was too thin to merely slice the uppermost layer. Having one eye remaining open for always was a sensation that overcame any other possible mutilation. In fact, he was surprised that carving off his nipples, excruciating as he thought it might have been (each with a swift twisting stroke, one following the other, almost with the same deftness of the flick of her tongue as she had moved from one to the next), was nothing compared to the raw quality that the left eye had continued to see for a number of days, until it dried up, becoming useless.
The majority of the work he had done himself after having his scrotum removed and the testicles placed back into the abdomen. He had to go practically to the other side of the world to have the procedure done (a friend, who had gone to the airport to pick him up on his return, had noticed something in his step that made the friend uncomfortable and ill, but this friend would be unable as to explain why). From then on, he, himself, held a scalpel in either hand, without any sort of anesthesia, but with the help of his memories, meticulously went about what he had set out to do. He started with his face, the eye first, then the lips, which came off quite easily (when he had pulled the bottom one in particular, for the blade to slide across more fluidly, he recalled, and could actually still feel, her teeth playfully biting it). In front of his bathroom mirror, propped on a stool to give him as full of a body view as possible, he had worked his way down (his legs bearing the longest scars eventually, her having entwined her own about them), five or six towels underneath the steel supports. It was not a quick process, the face itself (where her fingers so often lingered on his cheeks and neck as she slept) took a full day and several hours after dinner. Never did he perceive the peeling tissue as his skin, equating it instead with uncooked pork, whose texture was similar. He was merely removing dead meat from his face, meat that had no purpose, not even fit for consumption, diseased.
In the middle of the night, he would awake, startled and sweating, the more recent of the wounds stinging (her voice in his ear, fresh, warm, close), having suddenly remembered, through his dreaming of her, a specific spot he had missed. He had tried to remain on, and skim from, one area of his body at a time, in an organized and orderly manner. The most difficult in getting to, nothing to do with a degree of sensitivity but with the mechanics of his shoulders, was the plane of his back, its indentation at the center. To solve this problem he had gotten fresh towels, arranging them by the door of the bathroom, opening it inward, placing the handle of the scalpel into the space between the frame and the door so that it would jut out. With his right-hand pulling the door firmly closed, his body practically sideways, he moved onto the blade until he felt the desired spot (her fingers would sprawl themselves wide, nails etching, digging at times, just below the shoulder blades, where her forearms were tight against the back of his ribs), piercing around it, and shift himself accordingly, in a semicircle, switching angles to close the loop. When he had done so, he used a sterilized fork to peel off the skin, a piece sometimes falling off the prongs of the utensil onto the red blotched towels.
It would only be after each successful operation, never during, he would keep his mind sharp and concentrated then, that waves of nausea and dizziness washed over him, and he would bite down on his tongue to bring himself back into focus (despite the fact that it was the tongue that she had most contact with, he could not bring himself to the point of severing it, he was sure he could not live without speaking). Afterwards, having given himself enough time for the brunt of the pain to be smothered by drugs prescribed from the operation abroad, he would carefully climb into bed, fresh gauze wrapped about himself, onto seven or eight layers of bed sheets. Each morning, numb but clear headed, he would change the bandages, checking each laceration for infection, applying creams, iodine, washing off the previous night’s applications. He had saved the hair for last, the body done (she used to scratch his head as they watched T.V., or tug gently tufts of it before she would climax, his head between her thighs). With a pair of shearing scissors, he cut as close as possible to the scalp. Because the sink was more or less always moist from the week’s constant rinsing off of blood, clumps of hair had clung together, resembling fur.
He finally recognized himself again. Until then, he had seen himself as something other than a person, more as material, a meat sculpture for an artist motivated by both an objective application of technique and a deep-rooted blind creative passion (mimicking the same recklessness with which she had taken off his clothes). Now, however, his name returned to him, a sense of ownership for the body before him: a sculptor recognizing himself in his work, the marking of his hand on the work itself, and the effect on him of the work being finished.
It was on that night, as he lay in bed, he felt that she was very near, almost atop him, not merely in his thoughts. He could not explain this knowing in his mind of her presence but he got out of bed, walked down the dark hallway, approached the front door, and slowly put his hand on the knob. Inexplicably, he then thought of the number of phone calls that were on his answering machine from his friends and his employer. They were, at first, concerned, then distressed, wondering, if he was still alive, why had he disappeared off the face of the planet? None were from her. While working, he had not answered the phone or the door when someone rang, keeping most of the lights off (as how often it had been with her here, dark and silent).
Turning the knob and pulling, he realized that what he had done to himself was not solely because of her. Opening the door, he stood there, the night clear, the air hugging him, cold and fresh, the street empty, seeing no one.