Dear Chris Kraus
To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else’s presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.
– Chris Kraus
1.
while you ode to Dick, Chris
Kraus, i’ll pine after
your theory: the long-held conviction
the female ‘affliction’
desire,
grotesque.
us girls can’t run away from those pheromones!
He was a Kerouac-type cowboy, she,
a “Dumb Cunt”
and thus, the making
of a crush.
Chris,
you call it “Lonely Girl Phenomenology”
and until then, I never knew I had a name
is this the most natural form of a woman?
desperate, wild, teary-eyed, wide-eyed, vagina-wide open —
I, a Lonely Girl, he,
a barely legal, semi-attractive, slightly psychopathic, scarily charming New York actor.
2.
Sheila Heti has a chapter in her book where she prays to God
except this one’s phallic all over and squirts juice
but if Dick is God
then he never really existed &
Chris, you said it yourself:
it’s more legitimate if it’s not real
we actualize him just by getting down on our knees…
( We Created You / We Made You / We Are You )
Dick, you were never just Dick
you’re Dick and dick and Warhol and Wayne and Rama and
if I drink God’s Kool-Aid will I be immortal?
suicide is a funny way of saying ‘I love you’
3.
Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it’s neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?
– Alice Notley
if you menstruate then you are always concerned with the psychological
or so my mom tells me
when I cried over you, my already-stained bedsheets stained once more
I toyed with the possibility that I might be a masochist,
Like you,
Like Kraus.
& Proust & Freud & Rousseau
but then why does my heart feel decapitated?
Chris, your mid-life crisis a
“perverse longing for rejection,”
a return
to hopeless adolescence
while I
am stuck
in this trope
& sadly,
my personhood is not a case study.
you said you felt “teenage”
or alive,
but I, I have never felt more dead.