In some Buddhist traditions, metaphysical explanations are called views. These views are narrative voices that don’t proclaim the truth, but rather offer themselves as tools for practice. This poem is one view, a view from lust. It’s the fictional voice of an all-pervasive consciousness that finds itself super horny. A corresponding practice is to find yourself similarly horny for the awareness found throughout all objects of perception. This probably a perversion of the dharma, but, if you ask me, that sounds pretty hot.

It was lust that brought you here, from me into many: I wanted more, I wanted movement, I wanted to know who or what. It took eons but I made a hit play. I wore you as a mask, and you as a knife, and you as the cut, and you as the ouch, and so strummed myself like the untouched outer part of a violin-strung spider web. I made a new tremor. A new sound!

More! Before the end of entropy, More! For lust, I fictized thrills & numbnesses, I split white light into rainbows, went eukaryotic & exited the sea, in the costumes of giant lizards, then died in dust and fire and grew myselves tall again. I grew myselves from weird little rat-dudes who scrambled through burrows, emerging into light as standing beasts, chests to the sky, losing my hair while pounding my chests, I staged wars & festivals, doused & screamed myselves in boiling oil, whipped myselves for being “bad,” an exciting new concept— Ow! Ohh yes! Hit me harder!!! I grew cacti, cut the root, boiled it, and drank the soup. I convinced myself of gods – can you believe it?!

But the kaleidoscope diorama twirled too fast so that the colors blurred into one again, and in seeing my continuous surface, I lost my lust. What a buzz kill. Do you remember? Of course not, it was when you were a babe.

I dreamed harder, cleverer, I dreamed of dreaming itself, I built halls of mirrors inside myself and staged plays there, again, and again, and larger! More interactive! And, at last, they steadied, held by their own reflection. At last! I thought, and in all the sex & stabbing I lost myself, for what is lust without hypnosis?

That’s when I finally became you. You (or I?) grew up, faster than a spring bloom. What’s this? we asked, staring at the lines Where our hands and thighs somehow became air, at the line between my thigh, and the apple tree, at the uncanny line between your thigh & mine.

We made art of the situation, aimed cameras at TV screens projecting the camera’s own image into itself, and stared at the snaking recursions, and went: “Woah. That reminds me of something.” Oh fuck it hurt, beholding that brutalized body of ours, the cuts carved by our own clawed hands of healing, the satans & angels we’d invented to make sense of our own existential kink of separateness, this shuddering boiling agonizing— ughh. I think I’m going to be sick.

Was it worth it? Was it glory or gory? Libido Lost yet again— how long till Paradise? we wondered, like a kid kicking in the backseat and struggling with the seatbelt.

“This reminds me of something.” In our hall of mirrors, we made art. We filmed The Matrix. We drew Rick and Morty. We made immersive theater, plays within plays about our own unreality, and cast ourselves an actress to play a lusting goddess of the mirror realm, aroused by the infinite modes of being, of dolphin minds & trees, shape rotators & schizos, and even our own perplexed selves, struggling toward the climax waiting for the end, waiting for completion, waiting for the orgasm until we met eyes and realized that it was already here.

To think we needed to wear costumes over costumes to remind ourselves of our costumes. All told, it was better to fuck with the lights on and eyes open. That hypnosis stuff was just a phase; ah, sweet teenage me. 13.7 billion years and now here we are, on the front porch of existence in rocking chairs, remembering.

Even underneath the wrinkles, scar-marks, and callouses, this unquenchable kink of me and yet not-me and yet me, the kink persists. Familiar me, pond’s tranquility, and fuckworthy you, the lively ripple. I want it both ways, and I shall have it. Give it to me, your everything, this flux, your lust.