A Conversation Between EU and a Friend
(secretly taped by the friend)
Oh G I can't marry you "Why not?" this isn't the time for decisions "But you know how it hurts if those you love and need abandon you, and it's worse because you're not even dead" I love you G, but that's what love does, it creates victims, it's normal "What do you 
mean?" G the trick is I believe it when I say it, so people take me seriously which they should and later they say "Remember you told me abc" and I don't, sorry, I forget, oh now I laugh because I make you cry which makes me happy because it shows you love me G people love too easily everywhere so I never need them personally though I hate people who don't love me, don't you? "You're so used to everyone loving you, it's disgusting" think of it as arrangement like coming up with new positions in bed "But why shouldn't everyone love me too?" because I'm a closed circuit G and I spend my time forgetting, plus love is death: rule #1 "Eu, I swear, you're bad medicine" yeah, it's like having sex inside your skull, a mental humidity, but I can't die G till I stop having to speak, I am a hundred lbs. of choked flesh stuck at the silver edge of a suspense that tells the story of liking itself to anyone who'll listen "I don't want to hear it" I know what you mean I hate people who think sex is an occasion to talk and tell their lifestories afterwards wanting me to be themselves in the mirror, who can't see that I can't focus or distinguish between my senses but I'm stuck in this orgasm "God, your vanity is so dense, it's the universe!" I've been trained in disaster G like Frenhofer I guess "Who? Now listen Eu, I want to move in with you some place else, an outpost, get away from all this crazy talk and I'll cook for you and buy.." G I suffer from my charm enough, like certain photogenic landscapes, don't toy with it "Can you be monogamous? I'm not a jealous guy" good because I want to teach my kids how to have sex "Oh my God, don't say that!" OK I don't mean sex, it might hurt, but it would be like the back of my stomach jolting me to a stop for once "I'm worried about you" I know, and it hurts my stomach, when people say "Don't you wish you could stop your mind for a moment?" I say no, my belly, stick a knife into it, pop-it-out "I just love talking to you, you're so insensitive, you always talk in circles" doesn't everybody? "You are weird-like the day I first saw you, you turned to me very serious and said 'I'm sorry, you know anybody who knows how to fuck?' I went holy shit and Vincent said 'Gabe, you know how to fuck, you wanna fuck this woman?' I thought Christ! but came up to you and said 'So you need someone who knows how to fuck' you said 'Don't call it fuck! You've such a sad aura!' I went 'Well, I'm not hurting anybody' and you yelled 'Oh, no?' eye falling out of its socket, then you started making fun of my eyes!" oh G I wouldn't do that "You said bridges gave you orgasms and was that a pathology, and that there was a saying in Greek about how old priests who've got nothing to do go about fucking their own daughters, you said that's how all we'd all end up" that's spooky "'I'm the suppressed romantic who becomes a criminal from all the listening,' you said, I thought Better stay away" do you remember all this verbatim? "See? You should love me because I'm such a stool" so now you retell my old stories G as if they're still usable like during sex I always say I love you but mean love you while I've sex with you, I'm always starting over G, wanting what is right in front of me, like a gesture, I can't go back, but do love me, it will kill me if you don't "I don't know! You'll be the death of me, Eu" no, you have to be the life of me, now you hear that like you'd say it, pretending time has no end, so it'll give you hope, making you hurt more sooner or later, and that's normal too G, I don't go back to old lovers: rule #2 "I know it's how you are and it hurts, that I'll never feel that burning desire from you again but I still want to be with you and no one else, I don't care" it's just the tension between the classical and the romantic in me "But will you choose an idea over me?" of course, that's my job, I'm not a grave, I am the jar where the masses empty themselves to fill me up, they just want to watch the sex and the death, that suits me fine, all I want is to lie on the world naked one dawn, my huge body spreading over busy streets through which men and women and especially kids run over to touch me with little animal cries, from this orgasm will come the real start of revolution, the sort of orgasm that only the body knows, not the orgasm in people's heads "Sex is like your stigmata, to live and die of, but there's no time for all that now Eu, believe me, if only you understood time, Eu, do you love me?" of course but it makes me sick, love gives me guilt, for Nathan who said I'm his body half and Eve who gave me bloodstained letters trying to force herself on me and I said No, not after Clara, unless it's Mommy, and Eve committed suicide because of it, and it's OK, I don't even remember my Dad often, why do all these people want things like kids from me? even my Dad asks for a kid, just go hug a kid G "I never actually believed I was myself when I was a kid, and now I feel that I am somebody else, I don't know who, I only know that you know" you can't believe that literally I "Believe? I know!" know anything, take for instance how I know now it's my turn to die, but I don't feel like it, death is aphrodisiac like sucking your own blood or kissing a blind boy, but I just get horny too easily and too totally to remember and to remember to die, of course one day I'll go out and explode but not yet, so I may feel guilty sucking oysters with '81 Petrus wine or using clean ashtrays, guilty for being alive and trivial while they are all dead which is big and serious like if my hand snapped in two right now, but I also say I feel guilty because guilt's easy to understand and people can love me if they think I hurt and I'll use any word for love because I don't understand meaning "You know how my whole family's into guilt too" because G the narrative is the excuse "You'd make a nice postage stamp, you're so impossibly the way you are, do-you-love-me?" to erase our presence, like in sex, sex is finished from the start, you know what will happen, and the only things worth wanting are the obstacles, "Like me!" same with every story, it's already been told, but the readers don't suspect mockery in its reuse because they stop reading and start staring within and stop time by placing themselves in the story till it's too late to wonder how it all works and recall the trauma of time "Are you talking to me? I think we have a break in communication here" yes G like when you read my poems and suggest that I change a word, I do on the spot, but then you feel uncomfortable, because I don't think, you feel so grown-up that you laugh and say "You're so funny" because I talk and say This is a miracle! when you enter me "Not me, honey!" because I feel I'll die this instant and any lover is a beak or blade "I wish!" cutting through me pushing to come out of my mouth, and maybe that is what's coming out through my mouth, ossified spurts of sperm, then I choke and you laugh "Why you do that?" you ask "Are you talking gibberish?" no, I talk in French during sex like when I talk to animals or kids "But Eu, you'd flirt with the air!" so I tell my lovers what to do and can't understand that they can't understand the language, like after Oleg ran out I knew he'd be jumping off and I ran out roaming about and ran into a man I knew a little, I said Listen, you wanna know what happened to me today? he looked scared a little, Well, I said, I thought when Clara died that was that then one of my other friends died and another and another will die today so I have to die now, I should, it's my turn, but I don't know why, I don't want to, am I being a wimp? Is this a cop-out, that I don't die? Is it low? and he didn't know who they are who die and why I had to die and he looked lost but said "No, you're not a wimp!" and I felt good I said Oh, thank you so much and hugged him and didn't understand he couldn't understand until now that we talk about sex and it's all the same, writing and sex, all that matters, writing is my long-term orgasm "You sleep with too many people so the only ones who stand out are those you ruined or something, now if you don't pay attention to me you'll lose me just like everybody else, it's my birthday this week, give me a card and I'll have an orgasm" OK I'm just out of it, whatever it is, it's insignificant like some western lovers become fast "It's like someone gave you a push long ago and you've been rolling like mad, you must slow down, you'll kill yourself, you must step outside of yourself sometimes and look in" but my self is a facade and it's funny, the deeper you go, the more faces I shed, you only get another mask, it's not defense, it's just I don't have a self, that I know of, and you all say "You have to get to know yourself Eu etc." but I do, I know that once it goes up who cares where it lands because if I reach a great speed I'll reverse myself, and that reality starts where words stop, and that when they put me in my grave I'll be blue which is the color of beginning, "Your pride is all the self you've got and you're hunched over with it" that's why sometimes I whisper to someone who's going to love me: Don't trust me! but it makes things worse because people don't forget like you G you love telling me how we met "Well, the next day you came up to me sweetly and said 'Will you be my friend?' I went 'Well, I don't know you' and you got angry and shouted 'You won't be my friend?' so I said 'OK I'll be your friend' and you went 'Now that we're friends you have to tell me all about yourself, oh good, la la la, fun' then you stood me up all the time" then people worry that I never believe what I say which is stupid, of course I do, if I say I'm afraid to love you because I don't know people like you who say "Sex is a dialogue, a language" I believe what I say as I say it but not of course later and it's all real, so people choose their own self of me which may be why people love me "I love you, but not for that silly reason, and you must trust me, for both of our sakes, this is why I say you should change, you can't keep talking like this" G "I love you so, Eu" why? "Because you're the only person I know when someone tells you I really love you you'd ask why" I asked Dad that as a kid all the time it took me years to believe him oh G you talk like my Dad only he's responsible for what I am and can't abandon it "I won't either! So give me his address" oh no! he's all I trust I don't want him corrupted "But Eu! Do you love me?" now that was when I gave that talk on Mallarme at school and at the end asked Are there any questions? The audience sat stiff and staring at me, was this a gag, the College president was there looking at me like little-boy-lost, oh Blake, like he was drowning, which is the look of men attracted to me who won't give in because they fear I'm too much or too fleeting and they're the ones who start to see but I never get them or else the lights fail when the moment comes "Every man stands in this eternal line to fuck Eu!" it's like the film adaptation of a text G where you go from the visible to the director's mind to the author's sign to the author's mind to yours and through all these frames that co-exist with infinite interpretations of the signified thing, divine it, it's like getting an ulcer and trying to figure out what's eating you "Shit! You won't talk normal, you don't want to help yourself or me out" I want to tell a story here so I asked again if there was something they might like to discuss, and I was going to sit down but I said instead in my little French voice Do you love me? the audience clapped and laughed, and for months strangers shouted at me across campus "I love you" it was no joke to me, because I have to go out and get little bits of love from many people so I can add up to my daily ratio "How long do you think you can go on like this?" until all my loved ones die which is impossible because after that there's no script at all, "You're full of shit! What do you mean?" I am always somehow fully dressed and for ever getting undressed like death which you continue to undress but always stays dressed, so I can't die, I'm dice, metaphorically speaking, which is all there is, words come-and-go like some women dance with the just-for-an-instant look of the northern lights that glow all over your body and when you whistle turn red and sharp and break down falling in a shower of shooting stars all around you, like shaken yellow flour or powder soup the Americans sent after the war which really is your father's ashes "What are you talking about? Whose ashes?" when my Dad was a kid in 1945 my grandmother made soup every day from powder-mixture that came from America in boxes, she added olive oil and oregano to it, that's all they had to eat, one day a box arrived with gray powder not yellow, they cooked it of course, and later received a telegram telling them it was his dead father's ashes which he had wanted scattered over the harbor by his sons but he was in their bellies muscles stool by then, and my father and his brothers don't eat soup anymore, you think they should have peed in the harbor? "Don't be crude! That's terrible" luckily my Dad will never die "Sure he will" shut up! I say he won't and neither will Mommy, "But Eu..." I won't talk about this, it's closed, there're limits in this world, boundaries: rule #all, you can believe what you want but don't tell me, "I wonder if maybe you need drugs, medication, we should ask my Dad about this" don't be a fool my Mommy is simply one of my favorite objects do objects die? "I haven't even told him about all the suicides, I'll have to" she is a moebius-flowing silver ribbon forever flying out of my hands I can't put it in words, genetically chained more to fish and birds than to these words that make one white space with no horizon and only reflections around shining so bright I can't even see to call up the dead, "You've told me about our mother! Your mother is a fucking Christmas ornament" and thanks to her I'll never cut off my hands to feed the pigeons "Aren't we just the most? The world revolves around Eu" G pick your own subject, that's all we can do, in the end the language is the resolution, it's the closest you get to death trapped in sentences that push you into perdition, "Did you ever talk to your Dad like this?" he knows this, that every reader is a gambler following the loop like something very large in the way, like Clara's body when she hugged me so close it hid the street from my view, "Eu, you'll die because you'll suffocate yourself" G I say things only because my vocabulary is limited, which is why I live, if I didn't have defects I wouldn't have reason to be, the weaker I get the more alive I am, the more I need to say, I don't like being strong: rule #4 "Eu, you are strong, now please have my children?" I love feeling fertile thanks G but every word is the flip of a coin or else we'd be bottles with sealed-off messages sailing the boundless seas "Stop twisting everything I say, I mean this, and it's up to you to say Yes, why don't you?" you just want to make up for all the dead, get some balance before we're pulled under, but making decisions is like holding hands with death to me, I like to close my eyes and put my finger on the map, that's how life works, so we can't really care, except in the moment "Alright, we'll get married Eu, you'll treat me like shit and sleep around with priests, you'll love it!" and that's fast said, but a moment lasts long enough to get excited in it and speak before I think and though I've no opinions get beaten by cops for my beliefs because it feels good to give into some worldly punishment for the moment "No wonder you get ulcers and migraines" because every word is a sacrifice, like sperm you pour into the glass where you keep your semen and call it exodus "I do? And who's responsible for that?" not me, I always change, like one moment I see and hate and avoid someone like disease and badmouth them because they seem to me made of straw like spaghetti colorless squeaky and flat and I change people's opinion of them because I can't be with them and it's incredible how hard it is for people to like something once you find it repulsive, people's opinions change to their opposites in no time it's boring like a perfect order and because I like to disturb I always say the opposite of the norm with conviction and soon people say I'll buy this "We Americans love buying" the next day the person I dislike may offer me a ride or something so I turn to look at them and love them at once and want to be with them now and tell everyone about them "That's why you're always sick, because of all the time you waste with weirdoes" I like their empty confounded voice perhaps now or how they lick their lips or sigh or a mad glint in their eye, of course the people I really want are dead like I say I, whatever that means "Don't say that!" except my Dad and Mom "And me, honey! What's wrong, honey?" my life G is inside out, I can't make out my words and maybe every text is a foreigner "God, I remember our first talk, you said 'Who are you?' you put your little hand on my thigh not in a sexual way and you cried, for me, I told you about my Dad whipping me, it was raining, you said 'Do you love me? Good, do you know why I love you? Because you're so normal, G, you dress so normal, you walk so normal, you don't fuck girls you don't love, oh you're so silly, you want to do the right thing and you're so insecure about sex, that's cute,'" but I don't remember any of this "I had to take you to the hospital for an ulcer attack, you ran your fingers through my hair in the car and said in that tiny voice 'Coco, you love me?' 'Yes, I love you,' you said 'Good, I love you too,' then everybody got jealous and people wouldn't talk to me at school" when I have nothing I can be silent G now my blood is dry and loud and look how this bouncing ball can't stop, this writing, maybe it can put an end to this, maybe it understands itself which may be why it goes on and we go on because it needs us and I like being needed: rule #5, so I like this because it needs me more than anyone else G "Bullshit!" except Dad maybe "That's nice, what about me?" and it doesn't talk to me telling me what it needs "I bend head over backwards for you for nothing. When you get scared you act like a jerk, like some animal," I am an animal "This hurts me so much" I know, me too, it's normal, and even if this text doesn't understand either, at least a text follows itself and may go somewhere but I live stuck inside the preludes "I just hate that word text, what kind of subject is this?" That was just a preamble, I tell men who say "This was great sex" "Do they now?" The threshold, it turns me on to say that, and this director made a film once called Anal Gaze that started with black leader while I was reading a monologue in French about how I was staring at the audience then my ass loomed out of the darkness, "Oh, sick!" A little introduction in the narthex, I tell them, "Them who?" but I can't follow myself to the end or I wouldn't write, I'd be, the text, I can't be written: rule #6 "What you call your text is just covering up your poop" so what? a text is no map a text without words is what people call God "How can you know that? Listen, for the last time, I love you Eu, you know why? because you're so abnormal, you dress so abnormal, you talk so abnormal" exactly, the text doesn't care listen ask it only is and I'm not talking buddhism here, I'm not talking literature, I'm not talking, because the text as we know it can't be the text as it knows itself, if it does, which is implied and hopeless, but the funny thing, what I'm leading to, the joke is "I have a feeling I'm the butt of this joke" that I make the text right now, I am making it as you watch and I love being watched watching myself be watched is the highest sense I have, so it's leaving my belly now, making me nauseated like an initiate coming out of the Nanda cave, "Jesus Christ!" the text eats me up from inside and its tingling words spill from my orifices "That's enough, Eu!" G I've survived, "You don't want to go through life like this, like a fucking word machine" God I'll break now like a glass brimming with fresh gurgling blood "Are you OK?" I'm the mouth that vomits like an unfolding wave "You just want to make me feel bad, and boy, am I fucked up" no, I'm fucked up "Everybody hates me now" not me "What's the point of trying to get through to you anymore" now look into this vast white space out of which squiggly words swarm like black scraps of rock washed out on dry land like a busy storm of cockroaches that empties the city of its people who say "The bad luck is when they fly up your dress" buzzing in soundworn stacks with the grating click of countless keys turning inside numerous locks and because of this I can thrust my hand though not my eyes outside but I don't have the stomach for this "Who does? Let me get a word in here, which is, I don't think I can survive this" one second I'm into this now G so I draw the words back inside me and get filled again, filled with not having died yet, and dream I have sex with gray mice "Oh my fucking God" that crawl into my orifices I caress them horny and horrified being prisoner of my cluttered body so I can't say no, "I know" until the text inside me grows too menacing again and makes my fate which I like because what interests me is what doesn't want me but swallows me up slowly and indifferently "Like death. Oh God. I'm telling you, you can't live your life without meaning Eu" I love you G because you cry now and I mean it this time, thanks for hurting, thanks for wanting to force me to be kind, be cruel to me please, when you read it, it's good for it, makes it grow, and it may one day take over, it will take over, given the time, and I can die then, which is incredible, now, "I think I'm gonna go out and puke now" yeah, now I still have this body that's always in danger and afraid of falling or being sick or cold which is great at least "Be nice, I'm the one who remembers, remember? God, I'm sick" but the body doesn't remember it doesn't care who is what so long as this who can touch, no names no pasts no jokes just each bite and this is not philosophy it's not gravedigging exactly because of the body that fortunately doesn't know what it is why it smells that exists in a clear indisputable way "Sure" and likes to rest or be felt or go numb and then it's full for a moment and it's maddening how much it needs and how namelessly, it has such a mortal selfish life G so as I was saying the joke is " On me, me, me!" oh shut up, that a text is the creation of the body and the mind is like the polite limits, "God-damn-fucking-me!" the brain is the silverware we use like a pantomime G "Oh my, oh my!" because it makes it all more refined like wearing clothes, "God!" which is too bad because I'd love to see all the hidden butts white and naked around me, "So the die is cast!" well yes, I'd live more that way but "Being civilized is the finest quality in a person a nation it's elemental absolutely necessary or there would only be wilderness bloodshed and ugliness" my Mommy has always said, and I will never contradict my little lovely Mommy, I just can't.
..I can't escape, I can't be complete, I hate renunciation and I want the world. You may call that religion.
