God Air-Fucks a Red Chair
The Second Coming is a drag show.
Towards the end of my marriage, I became obsessed with this drummer. He had huge eyes, a shy face, and played the drums with a demand I’d rarely seen.
It wasn’t just attraction—I recognized him. I would study his face, try to place it.
I saw those exact eyes again, years later, in a person I had never met. So this was how I knew him, not a recognition but a premonition.
Behind golden glasses, these new eyes roamed, submerging the room. We all subtly adjusted, clinging onto the booths and chairs and bar seats underneath us. One could get swept away.
She watched performers without smiling. She watched like a connoisseur. Like a man. A gaze that refused to dole out unearned praise. And all the while, a bubble around her, like dark water, like grief– a shyness unending and without name.
30 minutes later, she takes the stage. She raptures the crowd, air-fucking a red chair in a luscious wig, dressed head to toe in a man’s suit. She casts a spell so lightning that everyone screams and cheers without knowing the sound is their own. We’ve rarely seen such demand. Such command. The water encasing her turns transparent.
I want something sharp to puncture it. I think it would leak gold, like Japanese pottery. I want the water to gush over us, mouths open to the placental nutrients as she is reborn, soaking and free, terrible and toothed and God.
She would be God, and we would be drowned. There’s no other way I’d like to go. I want to swallow, in a room full of gasping queers, the water that suitcases her. To witness a true birth. I would die for it.
Would die to see her fisting bloody gobs of the fleshy silk into her mouth as she becomes strong. As she sheds the grief that topples her and emerges uncageable and changing. Bloody, wet, terrible. She answers to no one. Who is left now that she is God?
We know that a new becoming is upon us and we are unafraid. We are one breath. A wave ready to wash the earth, as the placenta water becomes flood and all is destroyed.
Chairs float in the water of her grief, God’s, which is ours now. We are Noah’s Ark and no one is getting saved this time. It’s up to us to find the drain. We dive for it, at first urgently, then lazily, with secrecy and without looking.
It is found.
Now all that is left is to let the debris of cities form a new pattern. To live among the outsize chairs and haybales.
We try to remember what pies are, make them out of sand, trade for shells.
We try to remember what lovemaking is; we squiggle our bodies against one another and smile, not caring that we aren’t doing it right.
Words are rearranged now, and mean less. And more. All is punctured, and freed. The new time has come.
.