Once I asked my parents for a dictionary. I wanted the boxed kind, navy with a magnifying glass. But Dad doesn’t get gratification deferral in that way, so instead I got the kind with two volumes, six columns inside. According to it, desire is both a longing and an absence. It’s sexual. And desiree is a kind of potato, pink-skinned with yellow waxy flesh.

When you’re a teenager, which doesn’t always mean age, and you don’t fully inhabit your body, you don’t totally get desire. Or maybe you do, but it’s, like, messy and indeterminate and needs a mixtape. It’s good to poke at, to carve out what you desire, and then name it like a flower or a country. Keep it like a pet. Of course all kinds of complicated stuff comes afterwards, but first it helps to name. There is no hierarchy until you engage, and no lasting joy if you don’t. I’m still learning this.

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A trickster taught me tarot, said my card was Death (which it is) and suggested the Frankie Albano facsimile. Because of its color. Acid green, mustard, theo blue. Nine is a woman in red and cream, her dress printed with roses and Venus mirrors. There is a bird on her hand, a bird with a tomato-shaped head, and until we saw the glove we didn’t know it was a peregrine falcon. Peregrines, explains J.A. Baker in the book where he becomes a bird too, peregrines kill by biting necks, severing the cord, then standing on the body to pluck out the feathers. Eating takes thrice as long as killing. Or longer, depending on size. Afterwards, they fly home.

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In Cometbus 43, Aaron says how he doesn’t remember his first words, but his mom says once he saw an elephant in the sky. Only he wasn’t pointing at a cloud; he meant the blue space in-between. “She couldn’t have been happier,” he said, “than if I stood up and recited the encyclopedia.” Sometimes your desire seems totally nutso, but that’s okay. Still you carry it like a hungry baby bear. Still it helps to name.

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Once a lady said she used to go dancing. She’d work all day, work until the bell, then hustle over to the hall, because if was before six o’clock you could still get in for a quarter. She’d have smell in her hair and smoke in her sleeves, poke guys in the ribs when they tried to grab her. Back home, the lady said, back home she felt badly about that. The poking. So she’d scrub and braid and color, put on a fresh skirt and fall asleep that way. Arms at her sides, just in case any of the boys dreamed about her. That way, she’d be ready.

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Patti Smith: “The guys I fell in love with were completely inaccessible. I didn’t want any middle-of-the-road creep. I always wanted the toughest guy in school, the guy from South Philly who wore tight pants. Y’know, the guy who carried the umbrella and wore white shirts with real thin black ties . . . But I couldn’t make it with guys. I used to dream about getting fucked by the Holy Ghost when I was a kid.”

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PJ Harvey has this song about desire. It's also about this guy Joe, Joe who walks past sunset. There's a long cold night, but then Dawn comes, and the great thing is how you don't know if Dawn is mourning or morning or a person. Joe turns to Dawn, they face each other and Joe's no longer scared. Another great thing is how the song is not about peace, rest, or soothing pastel cucumbers. It's about desire. An itch. It's about want, which comes just after who. Who can be you, too.

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My sister and I shared a room for eighteen years, and a bed for eight. Sometimes when she couldn’t sleep, she’d lie supine and press fingertips into her eyelids. If a car came around the cul-de-sac, she’d blink quick and the headlight lights would mix with hers. But I was scared of monsters in the bathroom, and wouldn’t close my eyes until I had to. For years, I was sure I never slept.

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In workshop, a man said his greatest desire was to be alive on November 3rd. “Because this,” he said, and that’s when he took his sunglasses off, “this is the first time in history that a man of color is nominated for President.” Note, please, that he said “to be alive.” Nothing about winning. Nothing about November 4th.

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Specimen #341 in Klara G. Roman’s Handwriting, which is about what people’s handwriting looks like and what that means, Specimen #341 didn’t have any money when he was a kid. So he earned some working as a candy butcher on railway trains. He liked it: rails cutting through wilderness, fancy women, smoke and sugar and how quiet it got at night. Roman says that’s why his adult handwriting looks like tracks. ‘T’s cross like smoking locomotives. Steamlined motion and emotion. My grandfather was an engineer, and I know nothing about that except that he drove with one hand out the window. Tanned it a deep nutty brown, even when the rest of him was white as clams.

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Of course there’s danger there, danger in defiance and defining. In Tournier’s The Ogre, Abel Tiffauge asks what a monster is. “Etymology has a bit of a shock up its sleeve here,” he says. “‘Monster’ comes from monstrare, ‘to show.’ A monster is something that is shown, pointed at, exhibited at fairs, and so on . . . If you don’t want to be a monster, you’ve got to be like your fellow creatures, in conformity with the species. Or else have progeny that make you the first link in the chain of a new species.” Progeny: babies, dances, stories, songs.

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Once, Mom called to tell me something she’d just seen on Animal Planet. Komodo dragons are always mean and hungry, she said, so their babies are born knowing to roll in poop. That way, Mom said, their mothers don’t try to eat them. Then she laughed.

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From Chris, who is allergic to flowers: “One of the best things for me to do in order to sleep is to fantasize the music career I never had – I go over the sequences of songs that were collected on albums that never existed; and file each b-side to the singles off the full-lengths, and their time lengths, and envision their picture sleeves in the UK and France.

“Before this I would imagine my friends and I were the last people on earth. Everyone else is a soulless zombie-vampire we are free to slaughter if we come across, and we all live in an enormous tank-train with huge amounts of painkillers and military C-rations and canned goods.

“Before all this I basically fantasized about sex before I went to sleep.”

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Alas, I can't sleep, so you get two haikus. The main one, the one I decided to get out of bed to send, is one of Rexroth's loose translations, I think, and I want to be able to do it from memory:

I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body

To express oneself
In seventeen syllables
Is very diffic

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There’s this guy, Antonio Gramsci. He says people with power keep their power through force, yes, but also by controlling ideas. Ideas in the media. Screens and magazines. And this other guy, Paulo Freire, says ordinary people limit themselves by rejecting their own experiences and adopting thoughts, wants, structures from the ruling class. Oh, and C.L.R. James, who believes artistic expression and social change are total homeslices. All this is why you keep a pen in your pocket. All this is why you listen.

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I remember a teacher, every day he wore a gray sweatshirt and hood. This teacher studied dragonflies, which are bugs that can live underwater for a really long time and not die. Dragonflies, this teacher said, dragonflies have two penises so they can scoop out the other guy’s sperm, make sure they’re the baby daddy. Dragonfly penises, they were this guy’s special thing. We asked him how his dates reacted to what he did all day, in grad school, and he smiled. That’s how we met, he said.

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When I first moved here, I dated a guy I met in a coffeeshop. He had bad eyesight. Sometimes it was hard to see anything at all. The bedroom floor tilted so he propped up his bed with books, and every twice in a while he’d wake up in the middle of the night for a chocolate sandwich. The brown spread on his teeth made them glow. Once it snowed and the morning was cold, full of white light. I pointed outside, then realized he couldn’t see my finger or the ground. But I was twenty, which is another kind of blind, so most of this was my fault.

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There's this word: vulnerable. It comes from the Latin vulnerare, which means "able to be wounded." You're vulnerable to friends, lovers, listeners, bodies in the room and some other people too. It's encouraging to know that vulnerable is different from naïve, which comes from the Latin navire: "newly born." Babies are naïve, blank and mewly. Vulnerable comes later, when you know some things already, have a bit of a shell but are still learning. Starting the frosting. It's you – losing and hearing; wandering, wondering and gaining.

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I remember one shrink, her voice like milk curdled in whisky, she sat across the room and said, “This, you know this never gets better.” Part of that’s true, and it’s also a secret strength. But another part is she saw my chest, which was so caved it made an M-shape when I brought my hands together, like Dante’s men’s faces except I wasn’t really anything. And whammo! she boxed me in. Sometimes you just tell the world it’s wrong, it’s wrong, fuck off that’s not me. That’s really hard and sometimes you screw it up, sometimes you blow it up, but whatever. It’s worth it.

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In the introduction to The Walking-Away World, whose cover is yellow and has something like an aborted squirrel on it, Jim Woodring says, “SEE YOU IN THE MORNING: it was a phrase I used to use without thinking until [Kenneth] Patchen shone the light of his selective genius on it and allowed me to see it for what it is: an excruciatingly tender, pathetic genius of hope.” Did anyone ever sing to you in the morning?

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One summer, my friend drove to Mexico to clean his dad’s house. He sent envelopes stuffed with beer bottle labels and Spanish postcards and scrawled-upon looseleaf. Blue ink. “A friend told me about one of her dreams where (in short) her goldfish lived inside her. His name was Jonah! After some encounters/experiences, she wanted to set him free. So she started cutting herself open, but her mother stopped her for fear of salmonella. After my friend told me her dream, I had this intense desire to kiss her.” And I him.

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In the dream I had last night, he was a cat the color of his hair, and she was a cat the color of hers. They curled into a circle and fell asleep on each other. In another, my mom and I were pigtailed, little, playing. I asked if I could be the Mom this time, and she could be the girl. “Okay,” she said, and laughed.

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There are marvels, curiosities and paradoxes, all of them arms, legs, and noses of the body dialectic. There are opposites and reciprocals, constellations and becoming. It’s all specific: those opposites, that reciprocal action, that relationship between those elements, in that becoming. It’s all in your blue ribbon hot dog self, and when you meet another one self and the differences join, open out into the world, sometimes it’s really brilliant. Of course, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it sucks twelve rocks through dry dusty cheesecloth, but whatever. It’s worth it.

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Once, Rob and I, but mostly Rob, we made a movie about a cowboy going West. When Cowboy hit the Pacific, the guy just dove in. And what if, asked J. one morning, what if Icarus could swim?

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A lover has freckles and once I polka-dotted a finger down his arm, said how you could link the constellation into a flock of birds, a lizard or teeth: like this. He smiled back, and I think that means something too.