Placebo

I want to talk about desire, he says & the words take their too-torn knees & their

holy-bloodied knuckles & find a way to enter my skin through the old wound, one of my old

hauntings, you know how it goes; you’re trying and you’re trying and you’re

trying to get my eyes just right on the portrait of our love soaked in its

immortality, their color a sick shade, 

you’re trying

to get the paint on both of our hands, between fingers, where my body should

nest. You’re trying to capture something in a moving flash, 

a still life version of a life so malleable. You’re trying to consider

the camera’s sin, so let’s just stop now, let’s just stop—

Cameron, we both know how this goes, I take out my gun

and you take out yours and we spit bullets from our mouths

like prayers, like some fresh holy message. I hold my camera

and I capture you in its lens and you live within me forever. I pull the trigger

and I capture you in your vulnerable moment, the frail trembling fawn legs,

what I have reduced you to. I capture you. Say I 

capture you. Would we talk about desire then? Would you

admit it then? Could you say it out loud then, a blade

to the skin, heavy pauses between breath? Our lungs, our body. We

are this now: a life lived in two different directions, ships crashing

and shattering into both our present & our past. I like that word—

our. It melts on our tongue, it invades through the throat and out the back of the chest

in its hollowing consumption. I’ve always liked it. The thing about desire,

Cameron, is the fact that every fragment of love to ever plague history

was formed in my atoms, even before my birth

they rooted inside of my soul as stored on heaven’s dusty shelves. Desire

was born from my existence and I don’t think my existence was born

from desire. Desire, a creature that only knows how to eat,

would gorge and gorge on humanity until it exploded into 

scraps of fury and grief. Desire like the predator’s hunger — the predator, of course,

being us, the locked-away vault within each human body that contains 

sharpened teeth & a lack of remorse. 

So let’s talk about desire. About how it ruins you. No, about the positive. What it feels like to be 

in love. The warm feeling that envelops you when you feel that crackling shaking fondness. The universal emotion. I wouldn’t say

it’s universal. And you don’t know much about love. I’ve 

never had faith in it. Sometimes, people in this world, despite their best efforts,

are simply intended to face an eternal, aching loneliness. I understand 

that now. I understand the divine intention. I wish I could say

that we were placed in this universe to love but it feels more like

we were placed into an endless cycle of resilience.