with scholarly exegesis


1.
LUST is one of the simplest and most immediate spells for invoking ecstatic healing derangements.

It’s always available.
Eminently practical.
Free of charge.
No waiting.
Instant sacrament.
Potentially as effective as dreams, prayers, meditation, dancing, drumming, chanting, and drugs.

Legend:
• Dismantles habit mind’s shoddy constructions.
• Dissolves ego's precious armor.
• Melts rigid, rotting boundaries.
• Leaks sacredness into the profane.
• Pries open perceptions to bewildering aliveness uncontainable by reasonable analysis.
• Bestows rowdy blessings: small healing apocalypses.


2.
Sudden knee-shaking LUST for my LushBuddy as I spy her doing the yoga pose known as the Goddess Squat in the winter drizzle on the back deck with the creek at high tide. Even the egrets and grebes are watching her.

Admiring LUST for her as she calms a trembling homeless woman in front of a Starbucks, diverting her from pounding on the hoods of parked cars.

Hilarious LUST for her as she sings an erotic poem by 16th-century Chinese poet Huang O while doing a handstand in the middle of cooking dinner: “You held my lotus blossom / in your lips and played with the / pistil.”

Rakish LUST as she announces that her new performance art alias is Velvet Pandora Fabuloso and her title is The Angel of No Fucking Opinion.

Puckish LUST for her as she rams her bumper car into my bumper car at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk while flashing her asymmetrical grin.

Tickled LUST when she struts like a runway model along our muddy street while wearing an Egyptian pharaoh’s crown she says she found at the thrift store.

Wacky LUST for her on Easter morning when she gives me a chocolate rooster that sports a hard-on even though real roosters don’t have penises.

Humble LUST for her as she explains to me in a histrionic whisper why adenosine triphosphate is the molecular unit of currency of intracellular energy transfer in the human body. I did not quite know that.

Praiseful LUST as she tells me the psychological gambit she used to convince a mugger not to mug her.

Reckless grateful LUST for her when she prophesies I’ll live till I’m 98.

Legend:
• Disrupting the blasé.
• Debugging the obvious.
• Convulsing the lackluster.
• Confounding the drab.
• Agitating the humdrum.
• Jumbling the listless.
• Disturbing the perfunctory.
• Upsetting the banal.
• Boggling the insipid.


3.
LUST for my LushBuddy is the focal point. The nerve center. The command post. The dark source of light.

But of course my stupendously sophisticated and sagacious LUST for her reverberates out into the Everywhere and Everywhen.

I salute my LUST for the gaunt crone with waist-length gray hair winking at me from her Amnesty International booth at the farmer’s market.

I celebrate my LUST for the red-haired soccer mom wearing a plastic toy tiara and calico cat costume as she sobs at the red light in her Dodge Grand Caravan minivan.

I exult in my LUST for the toothy Lebanese bank clerk who takes her sweet time processing my transactions, keeping me entertained with the story of her great-uncle, a custodian for American Marines in Beirut who died in the suicide truck bomb attack on their barracks in 1983.

I honor my LUST for the ex-socialite with surgically enhanced lips and cheeks, who doesn’t tie back her thick blond hair or change out of her snakeskin pumps as she helps build houses for destitute Haitians.

I salute my LUST for the Emily Dickinson-lookalike in the orange vest who wields a hand-held stop sign while directing traffic around the road construction crew.

Legend:
• Lust as perception, not possession.
• Lust as expansion of empathy’s reach.
• Lust as threshold into the impossible.
• Lust as prod to escape the dead zone in everything.


4.
LUST for Goddess’s sake and Goddamn’s sake.

LUST in gallant service to everyone I’ve ever ignored and everyone I’ve hurt. LUST in the name of all that deserves to be broken or healed or changed into a purer version of itself.

Legend:
• Remorse, meet rapture.
• Grief, meet redemption.
• Shame, meet beauty.
• Damage, meet kintsugi.


5.
I can’t escape LUST, and why should I want to? LUST is my raison d’être, my modus operandi, my quid quo pro, my je ne sais quoi, my hail Mary full of grace.

LUST propels me out of my kingdom—explodes me free of excessively sober self-mastery—jailbreaks me from the sorry delusion that only I am real.

LUST delivers me into the shock of Everything-I’m-Not. It crashes me into the inviting light of all my lost others: the sparks I sometimes forget I am—the breaths I have not yet learned to draw—the voices that may someday flow through my throat.

LUST sucks me into the maw of what I don’t know, can’t imagine, and won’t believe in. LUST unites me.

LUST is the reason I’ve decided to stay alive throughout all eternity.

Legend:
• Sacred blasphemy.
• Reverent insurgency.
• Tender anarchy.
• Healing upheaval.
• Gorgeous transgression.


6.
I exalt my accidental LUST for the all-night drugstore clerk, who jokes about how many mirrors she has cracked in the last 12 years as she scans the UPC code on my mirror and bug spray at 3:15 a.m.

I cherish my confused LUST for the TV reporter at the scene of the car crash who tells us with a frighteningly calm face that seven people just died all at once.

I’m surprised by my garish LUST for the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis-like 6-foot, 5-inch football wide receiver dancing like a hetaera in the end zone after scoring an 89-yard touchdown.

I celebrate my LUST for the husky gardener flashing her cleavage while bending to prune the roses in the yard of the house where my old enemy once resided as he plotted my demise.

I’m amused by my sarcastic LUST for the silken-voiced telemarketer with the Alabama accent who wants to sell me tickets to the Policeman’s Ball and make me eligible for a lottery in which I could win a realistic sheriff’s badge.

Legend:
• Dispenses friendly shock treatments.
• Short-circuits lazy judgments.
• Exposes faux perceptions disguised as lazy judgments.
• Arouses awe in the face of discomfort.
• Sabotages the mundane with adoration.


7.
I won’t subdue my LUST, even when it makes me have to hide my true feelings.

I vow incorrigible and relentless LUST.

I promise bold and brazen and unapologetic LUST.

I guarantee extrajudicial and untaxable LUST.

I pledge my LUST for the pith and the pus, for the freakish and the bland, for the impoverished and the well-endowed.

I value my LUST for the wretched, the wrecked, the ragged, the wrinkled, and the ridiculous.

I multiply and expand my LUST for the hoaxed, the disappeared, the improbable, the chimerical, and the post-traumatic.

And I vow I will never foist my LUST on anyone or anything. I will only feel LUST but never display LUST unless it is welcomed and wanted.

Legend:
• Refuse to sterilize–sanitize.
• Rebel against conditioned compulsions to ignore.
• Break the addiction to edit in advance.
• Reject gleeful, overweening rejection.
• Ridicule cynicism.


8.
Worried sentimental LUST for the mallard with the injured webfoot limping down the muddy bank of Gallinas Creek.

Crispy musty LUST for the runaway terrier that bites my leg and spills my blood as I hike the path around Turtle Back Hill.

Dangerous LUST for the turbulent cumulonimbus clouds shrouding Mt. Tamalpais and the blizzard of hail they send to smack my face as I ride my bike carefully down the bumpy, soaked trail.

Succulent immaculate LUST for the souls of the slaughtered cows, pigs, chickens, and fish that fed all the people who built the roads I drive on.

Legend:
• Prayer disguised as lust.
• Empathy propelled by lust.
• Reverent awe fueled by lust.
• Homage schooled by lust.
• Adoration triggered by lust.


9.
LUST not for death, but for death’s sublimation.
LUST for the garbage dump where I practice the art of loss, abandoning mementos from childhood I swore I would never throw away.

LUST for the bitter wind that assaults my face as I wait in line to buy batteries at the candle-lit convenience store after the earthquake. LUST for the batteries, candles, flames, store, and earthquake, too.

LUST for the choppy, swirling currents beneath the Golden Gate Bridge as I ride over them, squirming with pain in the back of my LushBuddy’s Honda Accord on our way to the hospital emergency room.

LUST for Skeleton Woman as she combs my hair and whispers future memories in my ear, keeping me alive long enough for the doctors to fix me.

Legend:
• In LUST’s deranged logic,
even death may be an opening.
• Even endings may be invitations
to regenerate.
• Even loss may be a spark to fuck existence back into coherence.
• Even frights and confusions may restore the wild soul.



10.
Not just any vulgar reckless LUST, of course.
Not Dionysus without Venus. Not Pan without Persephone.

Rather, LUST leavened with the smart LOVE my LushBuddy evokes in me.

LUST suffused with the mercy and grace my beloved arouses.

LUST I earn through my empathy and respect.

LUST I refine by listening deeply to my Freaky Consort. Tinctured with trust and affection. Geniused with goodwill.

LUST that erupts from the heart’s libido. Stirred by a yearning to merge, not an urge to conquer. A collaborative jubilation, not a quest for control.

Legend:
• Lust = Love
• Lust = Affection
• Lust = Exaltation
• Lust = Intimacy
• Lust = Empathy



11.
I hone my justice-drenched LUST for the scar-faced Tanzanian ranger who stops poachers from killing rhinos for their horns.

I rejoice in my forbidden LUST for the hospice nurse who spreads her legs as she sits across from me in the room where my poet friend Fred croaks punk songs in his final hours. Spooky LUST for her death wisdom, awed LUST for her sultry threshold gaze, sneaky LUST to feel her adept hands on my shoulder.

I treasure my atavistic LUST for the 19 tiny imaginary friends with crooked smiles and sleight-of-hand kindness who lived in my closet the last two years of high school and advised me not to take LSD until my brain was more developed.

I glory in my wicked LUST for the dream of sucking and fucking high-IQ actor Natalie Portman in a hot-air balloon as we sail over erupting Mount Semeru in East Java on the mythical day when the Indonesian government announces it will atone for its genocide against the East Timorese people with a luxuriant reparations program.

Legend:
• Poetry as omnidirectional lust rebellion.
• Poetry as ever-renewing insurrectionary beauty.
• Poetry as salvific sabotage.
• Poetry as supernatural nature.
• Poetry as vow to embrace eternal transformation.



12.
Modest LUST for “The Candyman Who Couldn’t Eat Candy,” whose solitary gravestone I find in a remote stretch of a diseased oak forest.

Perplexed LUST for the gray-green moss clinging to the Candyman’s marble remembrance.
Angry and sorrowful LUST for the dying oaks.
Wistful LUST for the craftsperson who made the gravestone.

Brash LUST for the Candyman’s mother and father on the night they conceived him.

Idealistic LUST for the obstetrician who brought him into this world, and symbolic LUST for the teacher who helped him learn how to read, and well-honed LUST for the last person he saw before he passed out of this world.

Legend:
• Very specific lust heals strongest.
• Very focused lust overthrows status quos.
• Very articulate lust ruins tyrannies.
• Very precise lust undermines stereotypes.
• Very incisive lust foments liberation.


13.
The strategy is to keep expanding the LUST. With ferocious kindness and implacable sympathy.

Keep refining and educating the LUST. As a gift to the collective unconscious. As a boon for our descendants. As a splashy imprint on the Akashic Records. As an explosively kind blessing to humans’ evolving archetypal legacy.

Intensify the LUST. Trick it, coax it, love it into amplifying itself. With berserk generosity and ruthless sanctifications.

LUST for LUST itself. LUST for LUST’s evermore healing future.

But even further: LUST to transcend the LUST. To be so LUSTFUL I outstrip the LUST. Outwit it. Outgrow it. Become the higher LUST that renders all old versions of LUST irrelevant.

Legend:
• Insightful lust beyond mere wishes and desires.
• Sacramental lust that ennobles and apotheosizes instinct.
• Emotionally intelligent lust that outfoxes barren concepts.
• Disciplined, sublimated lust that kills off greed.


14.
And so LUST at last to disappear from my brain’s false memory of the world and obey the true fantasy laws laid down by the gender-fluid Hindu deity Ardhanrīśvara and the scientist poet angel Slywoman from the time before miracles became scarce—

as they collaborate to entice the entire solar system to LUST for me with bodhisattva fervor and grace, even the polymath succubi from the rings of Saturn and the anarchist angels on Jupiter and the volcanic muses of Venus—

so that all animistic sentience everywhere lavishly drools LUST for our union, spawning a hubbub of resurrected language in the core of my body’s upside-down light—

which inspires me to call everything by its secret underground name and become an ever-holier servant of the LUST for my LushBuddy, my cackling shamanatrix and analytical maenad—
whose LUST for me added to my LUST for her continually resurrects the crackling never-never music of the planetary spheres cycling through our blood—

as we collaborate to create our true home, our uproariously comfortable home, the home where the future no longer divides in two—

and we incite a new Big Bang through the perfectly reasonable and ebullient mojo of our wabi-sabi LUST.




Image by Howard Charing