This is for you, my muse. The man who I would do anything “for”. Stalwart, strong, honorable. And far enough away to run the electrical line for the current to flow. The man who would infuriate, infatuate, baffle, delight, never ever be pinned, leave me slack jaw in awe of his generosity and cunning, his warm heartedness and precision withdrawal. I love you in the loop of all things chased, the eternal run of cat and mouse and the play that bestows meaning. That play so noble that when the world with its profits and losses, its spreadsheets and its demand that all expenditures be accounted for, not only justifies itself but is the meaning everything else is for. You who would graze my lips but never kiss, play the song for me but quit at the peak, meet my gaze to allow me to glimpse the eternal light show that animates what to others is but a face. I do it because I have you and because I do not. I do it because it is the lust of my function to create for one who functions to inspire my lust. Funktionluste. This is us.
And to your, what I suspect are merely perfunctory (although with you I never know) instructions to unhitch my ardor from your star, to focus, yes on the celestial, but the impersonal, the primordial, the undifferentiated, I must apologize. I am slow and I am weak. I am weak in the flesh and the beating of the heart, that comes with a liquid that the honorable prefer be dry: tears; letting them see you sweat; the lubrication that lies between the legs. I am, at bottom, on the bottom, on the ground of Eros. This means to always live in the gap, the in between, the volatile gasses rather than the fixed substrate and the perennially unconsummated.
In that gap between having and wanting, grows and has grown my love, forest dense and oxygen rich. Liberated potential that has awaited he for whom I would do anything for because the anything he would ask is noble gold. It is all for you. It is for you to distribute to the beings you would aim to benefit. That is too abstract for me. I cannot offer to an idea, an ideal, a concept. I offer to the squirrel in my backyard squirrel colony who is getting more courageous in coming to get his peanut and sunflower seed each day. I offer to my friend who got the diagnosis on Tuesday that we were hoping (although he’s so equanimous he would never admit it) he wouldn’t get. I offer it to the woman who smokes crack on my stoop, who I leave the Poland Springs water for and 3 tangerines like you taught me. These you said speaking of what I know as tangerines, are special: they are not oranges, they are clementines You have a funny way of speaking sometimes, like you forgot to pull part of your identity out of the 1800s. I like it. I do it for that.
So all of this, my art, my writing, my leading armies, my facing attacks and fears alike, my sitting in my little temple holding my breath in a vase and talking to a red dancing deity, my interviews and my visions, my training screen full of people on how to find their way to you , my putting up with women who think how I see you is wrong or inappropriate, the heartbreak you warned me about that visits me daily and the way I hand write out reminders that I want to commit to this world because I think you would like it if I did that. Everything that I do and don’t do is the story of woman, this woman, once again doing it for a man, to please and delight him with her prowess, her sophistication, her ability to build worlds on demand.
There will be worlds built in your name, there will be people liberated by what you have inspired in one woman, there will be kindnesses given from kindness in you that I have witnessed, there will be people fed in Harlem and there will be prison residents tended to from the well you filled up. There will be new songs written by the Chowchilla Blues Band and books that are best sellers. There will be documentaries and women breaking from chains that bound since the beginning.
It will all be but a feeble attempt to express what I have been granted but a glimpse of, the stunning display that is the man, in all his dimensions, that you are. And know, that it is but a small token of my love, the best that I have to offer at this time, and what I will spend my life developing that I may begin to craft a vision of what I have witnessed in you, that the world might know as well. That is how I aim to benefit the world, to show what I see when I see you.