I dreamed I fell in love with my teacher. She was left-handed, like all the geniuses I've known. I loved to sit in her office with nine dark windows and pretend we were the same person.

She trained me to baby-talk in a once-dead language that made me see her face was very beautiful. I'd watch her soft lips as I disclosed myself in a trance, trying to remember the big sin of childhood she said had not yet completely decayed in me. Her eyes were sometimes grey and sometimes invisible. Her sweat made me nervous. I wanted to believe she was smarter than me, that she'd find virginal songs in me that I wasn't allowed to discover myself.

For once in my life, thanks to her dangerous listening, I felt I could tell the truth. I told her about mopping the floors of scummy nightclubs in North Carolina with my old right-handed wife, back before I knew how much my body was really worth. I joked about my career as the wrong-way healer. I confessed my sarcastic visions about the "democracy of proud voyeurs," and bragged about how much pain I'd learned from my chaotic father figures.

She believed my fantasies were real; I didn't have to pretend they were symbols or disguises. I told her how I'd practiced alchemy as a lesbian sufi baseball player for the Detroit Sphinxes in the Middle Ages. I showed her how to play Naked in Hell, a game I learned in childhood from two loving medusas who taught me not to be afraid of strong women.

And then one morning she smelled like a thousand lotuses; one afternoon she had sharp fingers on her hands and looked at me from high above; one night she told me that I was too beautiful and loud and that I didn't laugh right.

That night I dreamed she was a delicious young priestess singing to me from a kitchen below the equator. Somewhere in Samoa, maybe, or a lagoon called Soma. No man is an island, but many are atolls, her voice fermented as it tunneled to me under the nightsea like a black river. I listened hard, trying to feel her menstruation in my body for the first time.

Fantastically Tame Criminal Performing The Grimace was the first title she gave me, then Imagination Fat, and then Modern Singing Indian Addicted To Electricity Generated From Trivial Wastes. Her mermaid's sound ripped like a lawyer's. I felt I was her experiment alone, her story, and she was giving me the long-lost names of my ridiculous powers.

This was my total collapse into her life of constant medicine. The agony was perfect--a gift that was stronger than love. It required me to believe that I was not myself, but the dream of a magical animal in the advanced stages of putrefaction, very close to being born again in an immortal body. I felt I'd lost all my debts, had no more need to learn, had been initiated into a sanctuary of deathless longing--longing with no need for satisfaction or frustration.

A fish light from my eyes came alive, and I felt myself slipping out into her black river. I drink you black river, I sang without drowning. This was before sun or moon, before white furnaces called stars pulsed at all, before personalities or climaxes. The bestial stinging water hissed in my broken mouth, tasting of drowned worms and rotting pearl. I was a red string of muscle swelling all the way to that kitchen where she spread out a million humming bloody muds for my arrival, soaked me up and then exploded me into her autumn tornado full of menses and shattered doors and burning furniture.

In the last memory before I died, I saw the book she wrote about my life. It said that I laughed wrong and wasted my imagination until the end of time--but that I was a better lover than even the very slippery, very smart white wolf she had allowed to worship her once.

After that I tried to fascinate her with suffering I imagined she'd never seen before. I became a famous singer with claustrophobic eyes, smashing myself against the cruel plates of food she wanted to watch me eat. I cut my left arm with a knife every time I used the words "be" or "am" in her presence. I torched all letters I'd ever received from my admirers, planted the ashes like a seed, then hid in her closet and watched her all night without hatred. I decided to desire her as strongly as if she were the exactly wrong woman for me to love.

One night she danced the spiral slam dance for me. I laid down and adored her as if I would never know again whether I was really a good person or a bad person. Then there was indigo again, indigo the killer, indigo the rejuvenator, and I pulsed until I thought I was food myself and would be eaten like a god. The way we moved was like one fish digesting itself. I'd never been so forgotten, so unmystifying, so unhealable.

When I woke up for the second time there were no lights, no eyes, only her stories about me. She said then that this was the scariest night of my life because she was turning my body into my soul and when she was finished I would no longer be famous with anyone but God.

There was no naked Jungian dreamworker breaking our piano with her high-heeled shoe when we got home, friends; there was never a naked Jungian dreamworker.

There were no bums in dirty yellow pants crawling over us when we made love to Magda the doll-maker on the moldy clothes beneath the Goodwill trailer.

We made it all up. We were just kidding. We were just faking. We were just trying to get attention.

There was no son of an Irish diplomat coming after us when we stole his neglected girlfriend, and he did not pound us with pots from our own kitchen as he cursed us with Dylan Thomas poems in the middle of the winter night.

We were not famous. We did not encourage our admirers to have sex in public. There were no gorgeous Catholic crones humping the home-made crucifix when we woke in the bright August afternoon.

We never went home with the Russian translator of Gogol and finger-painted her white wall to match the maps of the solar system that we used to love to draw as children. We never put her underpants on our heads and sang Rimbaud songs in her mouth until she cried a thousand years of joy.

She wanted us to but we didn't.

There were never any magic housewives our own age trying to convince us that we would someday be mayors and shamans and environmentalists. They did not tell us to wise up and control our cocks better, and they did not make fun of our poems.

The truth is, we were already mayors and shamans and environmentalists in our dreams, we controlled our cocks better because we were tired of fucking too many different women who were too good for us, and we did not write poems.

But the main thing is, we did not let Liz Beth piss down on us through her red lamé pants from the top of the oak tree in the parking lot behind the Catalyst bar. There was no gentle hot stream falling down through the mist on our hands and faces.

We did not get turned on; we did not crawl around the tree yapping and barking. There was no beautiful young nursing mother who was crazier than us.

First you always pretend you mean
    the opposite of what you're saying.
Then study the people who hate you,
brag about what you can't do and don't have,
and make fun of people who make fun of people.

Plagiarize only the most life-like automatic gestures
    from the sleepiest walkers
Be compassionate in the cruelest way.
Imitate the janitors who know about beetles in shit with
    man-faces.

I hate myself for loving everything so much--
    no matter how stupid or worn or sick it is--
    and you should too.
Be my friend and confuse me with your help.
Be generous to the Ugly Watcher of My Wounds,
and be kind to his son The Cult of Broken Noses.
Feed my next ten breakfasts to the joking women
    I can never answer.

Personality is a performance. Never act like yourself.
Never act the opposite of your parents
Invent memories. Improve yourself with lies.
Give presents to people who refuse to admit you're special.
Lust for the poor. Break laws no one remembers.
Use your problems to trick people into doing things your way,
exaggerate your faults until they're virtues,
and heal yourself by catching more of the same germs
    that made you sick.

If you like this religion,
then you should find omens every night
in the steam from a bucket of hot ammonia water
and sleep with the freshest breath of any slave who ever lived.

If you find the most beautiful crucifixes in the world
and clean them so hard they dissolve in your hands,
then you are beginning to belong to the same Christmas
when I met the woman
who paid me not to be a human being.

If you scratch an emerald light from faces in the sink
and beg me to sleep and dream of the dirt you need,
then you are almost my blood.

If you live in a closet with fathers
who love how you're jealous of every girl,
then you can be happy and survive just to make me mad.

If you tell dyke punk witches to make me nervous
just when I'm trying to argue
with the lewdest Christ in the world,
you must be my helper,
the one who tells lies into empty rooms.

Do you really believe that everyone should be like you?
Then I'll let you love me.
The words you use to get here
must crawl five bodies deep
into my sleep without police
and wipe away my faces
one at a time.

LOVE BOMB

I feel much closer to all of you when we pretend we're all fighting real dangers together in order to stay alive. The telepathic links among us heat up when our bodies register the information that we may really die horribly together all at once.

The nuclear bomb is our group totem. It's the ultimately powerful and sacred taboo, the most terrible and the most valuable thing, the superhuman profanity on which all life depends and against which all values must be tested. Shadowing every one of our personal actions, the bomb is the god that won't listen, the fascinating blasphemy that won't shut up unless we're all very, very good.

We fall down before it, believing in it more fiercely than any other secret. We agree to be possessed by it, to be haunted by its image above all other images. Nothing else has more life.

We love this bomb because it's the most spiritual, most supernatural material object in the world, the only material object that's ever had the power to literally change all life on earth instantly and forever. It's the one most precious fetish, the obvious and hidden revelation that can by itself redefine the meaning of all history.

And yet how few of us have ever stood next to the magic body of the bomb, breathed in its smell, touched it, communed with its actual life. Its presence among us is rumour and mystery, like Christ and flying saucers. We hear stories.

At night our dreams turn the bomb into the philosopher's stone, the ark of the covenant, the alchemical gold, the magic body of the messiah, the potent drug from the beginning of the world, the ecstatic and shocking moment of religious conversion. In our deepest darkest juices we are alive to its divinity, as we are alive to any god that offers the brilliant and blinding flash of irreversible illumination. We believe in the bomb because it reveals what it is to become the dangerous light that's as pure as the sun.

Let's call the bomb a love that's too big for us to understand yet. Let's say it's the raging creative life of a cleansing disease that wants to cure us so it doesn't have to kill us. Let's say it's the last judgment that promises not to come true if we can figure out what it means.

It's our bomb. We've made it. We've loved this bomb so much we've imagined it to exist. We've created this bomb so hard that it's come alive and possessed us. We've turned the bomb into our bodies; we've given messages to chemicals in our brains to make dangerous images of the bomb, messages to nurture and worship and flash those images through our nerves.

Remember. The bomb is the most beloved thing to us because as we all together imagine it now our brains are burned with the true hallucination that we are all one body. Whe I fantasize the bomb vaporizing me into its own pure primeval heat and radiation, I remember that you and I are made of the same stuff. The bomb frees us to imagine that we all live and die together, that we are all born out of Adam, the indivisible hermaphrodite god of our species--and we can return now because we've never left.

We need the bomb.

We need the bomb because only the tease of the biggest, most original sin can heal us. The bomb is a blind, a fake, a trick of memory we're sending ourselves from the future that shocks us better than all the Christs and cancers and UFO's. It makes us. It makes us remember. The bomb has been with us since the beginning of time because it's the imagination of the end of time.

We have supernatural powers and genetic potentials so undreamed of that they will feel like magic when they come. But they remain dormant in us until we're scared shitless not just of our individual deaths but also the the extinction of the human archetype.

Bless this fear. Praise the bomb. O God of Good and Evil Light, let the great ugly power fascinate us all now, hypnotize us and fix our terror so precisely that we become one potently concentrated demonic imagination, a single guerrilla mediator casting an irreversible spell to bind the great satan bomb. There will be no nuclear war.