the mantissa in glasgow

from 6/27/24

the see-er saw voids within me, the way i see the sea, the abyss that forms the core of me. i’m a sunken ship sometimes, a drowned lad, a sea serpent and a siren all at once. no one heeds my calls, not for help or for love, so i sit beneath the waves always alfonsina, always waiting. a penelopiad of sadness and longing, of stupidity and solitude. but do i prefer the solitude after all? isn’t it more useful than fucking and staring into stormy eyes that always look away in the end. 

i think of orpheus touching the mercury mirror, going to meet his death on the other side. she was so much more preferable to his euridyce. why do they always want the easy way out and why do i want the hard way? i like my lovers, my sex, my friendships, my entanglements to be intense, to overwhelm me, to put me back under the waves and remind me that i’m alive while i’m drowning. maria casares in her prim black dress and pearls, i have dressed like that death so many times in homage.  but my body reeks of fecundity in ways i hate, i don’t have the cool attraction of deaths, i have the gravity of the earth. the consuming dark that i think even if they can’t see they know. one almost lover would describe sex as oblivion, losing themselves, disappearing in me. but for me it was consuming, devouring, entangling. interesting to think of the ways we talk about the meeting of two bodies, how different that can be. i’m not the kind of women men fall in love with - i’m the kind men leave.

the see-er also told me about two dragons colliding, not knowing that i’ve been drawing my ottoman dragons for a year, that i tattooed my breasts with dragons a year ago. she told me that it would be like two dragons colliding, that i’d meet my match and it would be that. how wonderful that sounds to me, how overwhelming, how much i hope that comes to pass. i’m never sure the man exists who can match my need for violence (a metaphor for intensity i think), who has equal fire. they all seem to at first but it’s an act, or they’re afraid i’ll diminish them instead of raise them higher. how stupid, how silly, how tiring the fear that men carry with them of women who are greater than them. how they find and condition and diminish other women to feel more profound about themselves only when they could have so much more. the surrealists knew better, i read about them so much these days, these men knew they needed equals and superiors, they were fully realized in this