Free Mature Themes by Andrew Durbin Page A

myself before I go to bed, chanting and rechanting them like a nursery rhyme: Martha Incas / Booming Ben / Lone-some George / Cel-i-a and Ben-ja-min.
    ENDLINGS RUINED DEATH.
    Tim writes to me to say that an endling triumphs over extinction because it is literally the death of the death of its species. When they disappear or are stuffed and mounted in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., they take with them the demise of everyone who might have survived them. I love these endlings and hope that love, within its power, can restore them to life. Or it is love, I think, that allows the future to finally emerge out of linear time in order to bring us back to the starting point. Or love is an engine that reroutes the disappeared and returns them to their rightful place in the hierarchy of things we’ve lost but which will soon reappear in the present more alive than they were before. Or.
    Repeat yourself a few times, say goodbye, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Tumblr, take a shower, read the news, play “Love Me,” say goodbye, love me.
    Repeat yourself a few times, read Dennis Cooper, text a friend, go home, say goodbye, drink coffee, buy a chair, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Tumblr, say goodbye, go to bed, wake up in the middle of the night, say goodbye, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Wikipedia, read the endlings, say goodbye, love me.
    SELENA GOMEZ RUINED LIL WAYNE.
    Selena Gomez’s “Naturally” is a counterpoint to Lil Wayne’s “Love Me” in its radical affirmation of the other as an animating agent within the self and suggests a status update in terms of the relationship between her and the subject of love. I stand on the roof of my apartment on Park Place and Nostrand Avenue, looking at Crown Heights in early spring, waiting for the rain promised by my weather app, listening to her unravel the logic of pure, scattering desire as she channels the voice of another, a voice which she internalizes to express in her own stunning hit the maximizing effect of listening to someone you love speak, a lover we do not hear, but who invigorates us, too. “How you choose to express yourself, it’s all your own, I can tell it comes naturally.” The act of speaking as one would “naturally” speak takes her breath away, supernaturalizing her romance into the compatible forces of thunder and lightning. She is nature. Pink sheets, fluttering skies, summer noon, drawn shades, lava lamp, flaming jet, purple light, server crash, shadowed face, smudged dark, my home, your islands, Martha, Incas, sure thing, August palette, hands held, lips, lipgloss, Benjamin, new job, smoking weed, Lonesome George, as it was, Booming Ben, yes of course, Crown Heights, Celia, flash drive, sleep well, cab ride, good night, forever forever, forever certain, it comes naturally.

TRACK STAR
    all day I dream about
my Adidas tracksuit
    *
    I wrote this fragment in my notebook a few weeks after I had fallen in love with the tracksuit. My obsession began when a friend wore an Adidas jacket and black pants one night to drinks at a bar. In the dark, I misread his outfit as a full tracksuit—a surprise choice for what I had (wrongly) thought of as a date. Later, when I told him that I thought he looked good in athletic wear, he said he wasn’t wearing a full tracksuit, just the jacket. Still, I really thought he looked hot in his imaginary tracksuit and after that night I often fantasized about boys wearing the semi-form-fitting synthetic fabric—in bedrooms and soccer fields, subways and dive bars. The tracksuit defines enough of the body to describe its shape but not enough to reveal the higher definition of its contours. The tracksuit, like the plastic it’s made from, works for different people in different ways, and this difference diversifies its social use. The tracksuit evokes the English, English skinheads but also the London riots of 2011, when thousands of impoverished Londoners exploited