Pastoral: Interapocalyptacourse The obliteration. (A convulsing hole.) How when you fuck me so hard it hurts, I feel protected. The end days. (A blue-hung cliff.) How when you fuck me so hard it hurts, I finally relax. The slipped coil. (A gaping violence.) How when you fuck me so hard it hurts, I believe spring may yet come. The annihilation. (A viscous, rhythmic lack.) How when you fuck me so hard it hurts, I persist. The destruction of the planet. (A darkened peak.) How when you fuck me so hard it hurts, I have faith, or stop caring about faith. The apocalypse into which I grind my teeth. (A swollen weapon.) How when you fuck me so hard it hurts, I temporarily imagine the possibility of safety. The little death. (A set of gasps.) How when you fuck me so hard it hurts, I am relieved.
It’s hard to breathe. It’s hard to sleep at night, living in the crisis world as we come, through consciousness, to know it. Is this the postmodern condition, or was it this way in 1915, 1815? 715 BC? I imagine it was: every time is a wartime, an end-time, and us a race of mortality-driven survivors. Not as good at it as rats or roaches, but just as pleasure-hungry, drawn toward sugar. The sun will explode. The clean water will be gone. Nuclear or meteor, we are not meant to last. And yet we obsess about lasting. The only time I don’t obsess about lasting is when you are deliciously destroying me. That’s why I need it harder. More. Fuck the pain away, the song goes. Fuck the pain in, more like it. The pain is a way of being alive. An aliveness that temporarily glosses over, goes deep, fills a void. Being in the constant crisis, one may understandably want a vaccine. But I’ve never trusted Big Pharm, and the only kind of disruption of my immunonervous system can bear is the one that comes from your well-intentioned slamming of my internal organs. In these moments, I think, I am meant to be demolished. It is my good purpose. In these moments, I blessedly do not think at all.
The big death. (A warm abyss.) How when you fuck me so hard it hurts, I am the Zen nothing that connects to everything.