Lonely Christopher states that his new book Crush Dream is the second installment in a trilogy of books titled The Death & Disaster Series. Maybe it is because Halloween is just around the corner, but as I moved through this fierce and sensuous little book I felt like I was finding my way through not only a house of mirrors (queers writing about queer bodies and queer desire always projects my own queer desire onto me; always reflects my own queer desire back to me) but a particularly qualitative house of mirrors.
There is death here (“narrative equals death” / “something evil happened in her skull” / “ashen dimensions”/ “will you love my body when you watch me die?” / “a dog is crying to death” / “everybody died in the white of your make-up” / “we are the same living as we are dying”), there is definitely disaster (“the exact sites of provincial freak accidents” / “little girls who toss themselves into the spring” / “she was bleeding on my futon” / “naked and nearly weeping with bizarre horny shame” / “repugnant in my grief”), there is also defiance (“talked out of defiance for a swan” / “the plump and sallow trick held between my legs” / “petty histories” / “ a boy in an off-the-rack suit waist deep in a lurid pond hands in his pockets and staring at a swan”), danger (“I am severally dangerous” / “searching inside the boy for my own grief” / “crass and submissive” / “a friend tattooed in her own remorse” / “what would you tell me if we were in the room alone together, what would you save from your burning house” / “the dynamics of a whipped shadow”), desire (“I can still taste you therefore you still are real” / “the sex at the bottom of my heart” / “if you have me till I smile then I will be your “faggot”” / “god is masturbating to his high school yearbook” / “I used to buy cigarettes [] before getting a guy over here to fuck on a swan” / “I just want a dick in me I suppose, or the other way around” / “the only thing I’ve eaten in the last two days is a boy’s ass” / “your ingress in the lick of our intolerant hour”), and even some destitute-narrative (“something I know that I will carry but fear that I will never learn how to say” / “what is hardly translatable not even to myself in poetry” / “there are only the things you invest in my genius” / “unless we put our souls to the floor of the hauteur of the heart of god herself” / “I sit sullenly in the armory listening to my lover’s hair” / “till and ending or till you” / “I’m the whore and the holy one” / “I am the star of my own truncated privacy”).
Sweet house of d-minor mirrors!
I intuit that Crush Dream (“a minion of [LC’s] definition”) is not so much a place where light is opposed to dark (or even where light is stated as a relief of dark states), but where dark darns dark (“you are somehow famous inside of the darkness of your ordering”) into a loving zone which makes more and more dark visible (“love is encompassed in dark animals”).
