someone else's dread

and the dread of not knowing if you like a short story, despite its undeniable strain of dread

Two (from the collaborative project Seconds by Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe)

The meanness of the satirical essay you wrote hit me yesterday like a baseball on the chin. Those Sundays we lay curled up in each other on your hard futon kissing and discussing Marx eventually gave me serious lower back problems but at the time I was having like these day-long orgasms in my brain. You said, "Satire will be an important tool for the revolution," and maybe it will but it also can be a place for someone to hide from the intensity of any real feelings he may have and also to transmute them into a very painful projectile to be hurled at the person he has them about. 

It felt so good to be able to unburden myself to you re my inner conflict over my job at the ad agency, so then to see it lampooned yesterday on your blog in what was basically a "humorous" open break-up letter to me - "I'm hoping my $10 million campaign for the US Army is offset by the fact that I buy only free-range organic granola" - made me feel, well, I don't know, what does Marx say about how it feels to be betrayed by someone you lay naked next to for a cumulative total of fourteen months of your life, someone whom you let pull your hair - hard! - during sex because it game him so much pleasure even though it really hurt you although you sort of liked it but only because of the obviously intense pleasure he was deriving?

Also, do you think those cool hand-printed signs in the window of your bicycle shop aren't advertising?

After I read your thing I had a lot to say and even if you thought you knew what I was going to say and didn't want to hear it from yet another person, it wasn't fair to not let me say it, and the beautiful mixtape you gave me didn't make up for that because if I've gained any knowledge from my time with you it's that beauty is one thing and fairness is another. 

You said, "The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law." So you keep posting those satires of me on your blog from the back of that little storefront were you work and sleep, and I'll climb up to the roof deck of my nice apartment building and advertise to the world till I'm hoarse that i loved you.