After Judith Butler and Billy-Ray Belcourt
i.
I’ve been thinking about The Holocene, hollowing itself out. A whole new end. The beginning of this. I’ve been thinking about megatherium, Irish Elk and cave lions, the shape of fur leaping. I’ve been thinking about megaflora and all the big gay flowers I’ll never get to see in real life but how a hologram creates an approximation without scent. These gone things still haunt, fractured ghost light caught in landscape. Be so still you connect to connectivity and time forgets. Fall back far enough, there they are: momentary flare in iris, a hologram of earth remembering old poems, early draughts of perfume, distilled now, evolution herding in our zoos. Oh look, out there, a canyon. It looks just like a wound.
ii.
The world is a wound and so are you: a chasm within a chasm within a chasm. How many lives have burnt out inside of us, only to sear anew. How a meteorite can both wipe slate and repopulate. Each old self, cremate. Phoenix, augmented to adapt, resist, rename, refine, make demands, swing, fist. Secret chambers in all of us, each of them a fissure, a gape in the shape of a mouth. It’s talking about the connectivity issues, how everyone wants to be seen but they don’t really listen. How a body is transitory but concept is forever, baby. Fit a meteorite inside it because the world is a wound and so are you. Fall back far enough to ancestor self. Bring them forward. Eat Polari passionfruit. Give pansy headstones to the sidewalk. Go on a ghost tour and pick apart threads of the unravelling heteronormative ethics. Beneath? Utopia’s glistening glimmer. Put glitter on the wound of the world. Show us your star tissue. It looks just like a canyon, doesn’t it.
iii.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to be seen and not heard. And I don’t like it. I’d rather be a hologram. A ghost. A note in the landscape that gestures to the wound of the world that once was. An augmentation of reality, all voice, no body. Activate speech: did you hear about this theoretical moment and I know it sounds really out there, really queer, but seriously, just listen because you haven’t heard this, I know, and I’m telling you so when I tell you the next obscure fact, if you listen close enough, you will hear a pattern, how they are connected by the gaps, suggesting the absence of something bigger, which is the you who cares enough, and all you have to do is listen. No, don’t resist: if you ignore this, the next time the voice comes, you’ll miss the canyon, drowned in time, just out there. No, you can’t see it, but you can feel it, yeah? Oh. Unfortunate. We have been trying to contact you for years now about extending your warranty with awe and wonder, but you’re just not getting it. No, it’s always been here. Yup, more an archive of wild open places rather than picket fence citizenship and equality and taxes. Why the insistence? Because you’re queer and have the capacity. Because deep time goes deeper than any lover can. And it’s always hard. To understand. But when you feel it, oh baby, transcend. The biggest O you’ll ever know is that the world is a wound and so are you. And through that? A steam of data, connectivity of spirit. Upload yourself. Fuck that body off. Come with me. My apologies, I’ve been dripping with ectoplasm this whole time.