Addiction

I wish we could control this revolting want of control: these people with their spongy eyes, their mouths of trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penises and bear traps for vulvas. One taste of sunlight and at once they can’t do without it. Water, the same, and food, and air, and a dozen other squalid habits. Some—like their copulation, a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck— are not physically compulsive but the partners can’t stop wanting them to be: so we desire to be raped by love, who would fill us, they say, with an oil from the lit braziers of stars. What if, doing it every day, we resemble pistons, and the slow poison cuts our lives off at 70: it’s the grim determination of our passion. And beyond this, even I— defended in childhood by my strong father the piano and my mother the virtuoso from knuckles among warehouses—even I am addicted to the mild light of words.