When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and the texture and simultaneous I, and simultaneously, and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappear from around the organs and detach itself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gleaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly revolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open your body and slip up inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of you, of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep, it makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

When I was diagnosed with this virus it didn’t take me long to realize I’d contracted a diseased society as well. Meat, blood, memory, war. We rise to greet the state, to confront the state. Smell the flowers while you can. Meat, blood, memory, war. We rise to greet the state, to confront the state. Smell the flowers while you can.

We are born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies and within that illusion of a one-tribe nation there are real tribes. Some of the tribes are in the business of sucker-punching people’s psyches in the form of maintaining the day-to-day job of government—they sell the masses a pile of green-tainted meat; i.e., a corrupted and false history as well as a corrupted and false future, and although that meat stinks of rot and pus and blood, this particular tribe extols these foul emissions as if they were virtues made of glorious sensitivities: "Raise Ole Glory while we do it to them again ... "

Then there are other tribes which work hand in hand with the government, offering slices of meat in the form of doubletalk; or hope—hope as a chain of submission. Then there are the tribes that suckle at the breast of telecommunications every evening after work and are fatally lulled into society's deep sleep. Day after day they experience waking nightmares but they've either bought the con of language from the tribe that holds out hope, or they're too fucking exhausted or fearful to break through the illusion and examine the structures of their world.

Then there are other tribes that experience the x-ray of Civilization every time they leave the house or turn on the tv set or radio or pick up a newspaper or suddenly realize their legs have automatically come to a halt before a red traffic light. A civil war and a national trial for the leaders of this country, as well as certain leaders in organized religions, is the war that plays and replays in the heads of members of that tribe. And it’s a volume of that war that sometimes reaches epic dimensions and when the person hearing it realizes they’re walking in the streets and subways full of thousands of people who appear deaf to the sound of it, and the person hearing it fails to connect with another member of the same tribe who can acknowledge that sound, that person can one day find themselves at the top of a water tower in suburbia armed with a high-powered rifle and firing indiscriminately at the ants crawling around below. That person can one day find themself running amok in the streets with a handgun; that person can one day find themself lobbing a grenade at the forty-car motorcade of the president; or that person can end up on a street corner, homeless hungry and wild-eyed, punching himself in the face or sticking wires through the arms of their flesh and chest.