Peter Moore

STUD SPRAY

Bernie doesn’t need artificial retardants.
He walks around with carpet burns.

“The key to sustenance…” Bernie begins.
I lean in, listening intently, his High Karate cologne
Numbing my septum.
“The key to sustenance is to think about something really
Disgusting while making love.
Not good disgusting. That would defy the point.
You want bad disgusting.
Mentally sift through the contents of your garbage.
Not yours, I mean, it’s never disgusting enough.
Hell is other people’s garbage.” He says
And takes leave.

I am the more wise.
Bernie is a genius
Who quotes Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

What is the greatest experience you can have?
It is the hour of the great contempt.
The hour in which your happiness, too, arouses your disgust,
And even your reason and virtue.

Ever the diligent pupil, I want to improve upon his theories.
And my practices.
Hell is other people’s garbage.
But what if it were more intimate, yet still maintained its
Otherness?
My lover’s garbage?
Would that throw the mental game into desuetude?
I advance my theories.
My lover’s garbage…Her kitchen!
No, her bathroom.
How I loath emptying her bathroom pail.
A rare instance when women are more disgusting than men.
A place of lewd residue and impressionable beauty.
That’s no good.
That’s bad disgusting gone good.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007