Men believe in logic. Control. Only a man would tell me, as you often did, "It's the thought that counts." Not my body or what dress I am wearing or the day of the week or the words of my dreaming pussy, the ones, I am so sorry to say, you never heard. But they are all the same, Love. What I think is in my body and clothes and words. No matter how often I told you this, you never understood. One day, I gave up and said, "Listen, Honey, I'm sorry. Maybe I'm just having a bad day." That's when you gave me that tape called Reason Your Way To Bliss. I tried to listen to it. Honestly, I did. But I stopped, every time, at the point where the speaker (a man, of course—only a man would equate reason and bliss) was saying: If you take a rock and examine it beneath a microscope, it is no different from a human beneath a microscope. Everything is just atoms and molecules. But can a rock have a bad day? Can a bad day be seen beneath a microscope? Of course not. If a rock is smart enough not to have a bad day, then how could you be having a bad day? In truth bad days do not exist. Humans and rocks do. I had to turn off the tape. This, Love, is male logic at its best. I could never master it. Only a man would use a microscope to define a human, a rock and a bad day. Only a man would think what cannot be seen beneath a magnifying lens does not exist. That there is no such thing as a dreaming pussy.

Recipe for Amnesia

Of every priest, guru, nun and rishi, of every therapist, lama, swami, and saint. Of every drug addict and several strangers on the street, I've asked for teachings on forgetfulness, transmissions, rituals for purification, drugs and whiskey, any form of magic for erasing your voice from my mind, your image from my days and nights, your scent of salt and lemons and warm summer rain like a tiny flame traveling beneath my skin and down the sidewalks where we once walked, where I still hear your words and the songs of the cicadas, and the shadows falling beneath the acacia trees at dusk and the strands of light coming free from the sun and stars and your hair slipping loose from its silver clasp, and your footsteps walking away with your legs, and your skirt swaying like a curtain in the wind, and my soul scissoring the air like the wings of a bird overhead, warning me—resist, resist, as it shapes the spaces around me into a shimmering of what was, a mirage, a fantasy so intense, I can taste it in my mind, like a recipe for summer, a familiar anguish that arrives and leaves without me, until at last I am so alone, I know nothing. I can't even say who I am.

 Nin

 Andrews