My mother worked at a desk. My father worked at a desk. My mother’s mother’s family owned desks, beautiful hand-carved desks, cabinets, bureaus, and they owned land, when the red guards took over. They were considered landowning intellectuals who needed to be imprisoned or executed in a public square publicly.  

Growing up, I would have terrible dreams. None of them included being labeled nebulously, not nebulously, Chinese trailer trash, all of my friends growing up were trailer trash or good Christian working-class of course I don’t include the near classless Taiwanese-American immigrant enclave I was also raised within. These breeders of ours had already been obliterated by someone else’s class-consciousness. Growing up, we weren’t good enough to be with their middle class, so we occasionally settled for their trailer trash. We saw the hypocrisy.

My first time alone in the new house I invited a friend over to put on makeup together, a friend who would be considered trailer trash thus.I try to remember everything I’ve already said… When I lie on my back now, I feel depositional to my own understanding of being seen. Having been. I am not alone.

Even now, when I am, completely alone, I feel nothing, spots all over, roughly, protracted and towards the wall. Advertisements would find no relief here. Where gravity is worth more. The dryness in the air which consumes the dampness brings the lameness of the shadow back to the sun and wall, whose arrangement I had misconstructed. Odd then. Being faced with it.
And so when I approach, like that, all of it can just vanish. Away from me. You take for granted things like cut fruit in a bowl in the mini fridge without cover. I will learn quickly. I am still learning.

On the farm I only ever lived on vegetable and roots, sometimes cheese, some cured fish. Two cheesemongers, a couple, who were not the only nomads of the village of course would come by to visit us quite frequently, sometimes once a week, sometimes twice, and when they did they would bring us their cheeses and I was fond of them and their visiting as though it was my own home, one of them sharing my name freakishly.

When the day turns into night, I think of the land,
the pesticides, all combed through, as well as what exactly it is that has nourished us for so long.

The woman who let us through at the toll booth which reminds me of the safety of another kind of booth and where we would be wanderers says go. Before I change my mind. A laugh. I taste it in my mind not like a lozenge but like a licorice root. I have a friend. I have an old friend.

I know the pied-a-terre has already been combed through by local authorities. Because I felt less perverted in that neighborhood because I trust any perversion there would be more rooted, less separated from the core harshness of its belonging perversion, I know it's been combed through.
I guess we speak of life en fuite.

In the black box, a revolution might occur. In the black box, two students might escape. In the black box, two students might become two lovers. In the black box, one student who doesn’t speak English might give up on theater. In the black box, one foreign exchange student whose country is torn apart by a civil war might discover the language of insignificance. In the black box, the shades are already drawn. In this country that leads in innovation of magnificent warships, rocketships, etc, we must practice in a black box and accept the fact that this black box is, too, a stage but not the actual stage of war. You are not allowed to leave this black box until the war is over.

*

When we speak of the artificial we often speak of an act. This is why the artificial has many secrets. This is why the artificial contains (the man-made). Like so, it takes many deep cuts for one to comprehend that sincerity maneuvers out of years and years of maneuvering uncomfortably in one’s own skin. Being comfortable in one’s own skin comes from years and years of practicing different ways to move through the world with a prosthetic limb.

*

The prosthetics of this now is the reason why an employment of falseness comes with an awareness. The prosthetics of this now is the reason why with this awareness one may travel through pain to incomprehension, from loss to embodiment, from the hacked-off to the hacking off of and from the tortured to the glossolalia of sleep-talking. It can take many years for the onlookers to understand that they do not have to look away from the prosthetic because it can take many years for the artifice to become completely absorbed by the god-given. For the artifice to become a gift to god itself.

*

Whose will? We have learned to not see things in black and white. Some things are black and white. But not history and the present. Certainly not nature and culture. What are we against? Who do we fight for? I ask these questions though they are not the beautiful questions. On a bridge, a woman does not have to say a thing. On a bridge, at the outbreak of a war, a woman does not have to say, beauty, how it has abused me. My people.

*

A woman does not have to say a single thing. But she can begin by talking. Once the written words are heard outloud, the practice begins to disappear already. Once the words, which are a writing, are spoken outloud, in the black box, the trance begins and the people begin to form nations. Though we might fall out of a habit, like thinking, like obeying, too, through the use, the employment, of language.

*

In a world where singers are asked to sing for their supper, the one who is caught between song and thought asks if all humans of all occupations must pay a price that feels more like selling a piece of their own body, that feels more like literally sleeping with a stranger for money, to be paid in a currency accepted by restaurants. Between song and thought, questions of nourishment hold the key to governance. Of self and of others.

*

There is a theory that a secret code must be given in order to enter the bar in the foreign city where the most beautiful creatures go to people watch. What appears to be a fake door masking the passage to the real door though is really just an ornament, a suggestion, just, for this theory, which watchers of beautiful creatures, carry a belief of, dark within themselves. All stories, even ghost stories, are betrayed by this process of beautification.

*

You will know when this experiment is over, has ended, not because you want it to be, not because the this tells you that it is or this is the end, but when the clock finally runs through, not out. People watching people watching people, this is the real experiment. The experiment of humanizing the most beautiful thing. Now that, they will say, once it is history, is just criminally beautiful.