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DANA:
It isn't that you're beautiful; you're not, I lied. I know I lied. But somewhere along the line, I think I forgot that your hair was stiff with turpentine, and discovered the sunlight running through it. Somewhere along the line, I forgot that your fingers were stubby, and discovered that your painted nails, so gaudy, were glorious. Somewhere along the line, I forgot that your teeth were crooked, and discovered that your mouth felt damp and warm against my forehead. I forgot the details of you, and discovered the blocky brush strokes, too vivid to dislike.
Dana Dana Dana. It's not that I'm in love with you, either. I'm not in love with you. How could I be in love with you? I'm a poet, a ******** poet, I don't even know why I'm writing you this, I never was good with honest words that I couldn't sling about like paint, eliminating the need for context and order. I should have written you an elegant, bloodless, fantastic poem like all the other elegant, bloodless, fantastic poems, it would have been so pretty, so lilting and pleasant and false, you know, and now I'll never write it. Instead you have this letter, because I don't love you, I don't, I don't. I'm a poet, I only have eyes for what is fair and sweet, which you are not.
We will be miserable, you and I; You too often ravenous and exhilarated - yes I know about the weed, about the dust, about the acid, I know everything, Dana, you really think that I don't go through your drawers while you're sleeping? - and I will be ravenous too, for a muse, for someone/thing to outlive me, when we both know that I'll write elegies for your children. Imagine the children we will have, Dana. I would hate such children, for the mingling of our selves, which ought to be sacrosanct, and you would hate such children, because they would not love you any more than I. And I'm not in love with you, Dana. You are everything I hate. You are striking and unsentimental and temporary, you are a brief flaring of something fierce and meaningless, cheap firecrackers, burning gas in the bowels of the earth; you are the antithesis of good language - how else this letter? Oh, but how I could hate you.
I do not.
I think it was the sex that betrayed my right and proper rage. It wasn't even good sex. We are both dominant and clumsy, such naive artists, and so bitter, however romantic you may think you are. Yet there was pleasure in spite of it and afterwards you closed your eyes. You looked like a baby, round face and pot belly and all. ********, Dana, you weren't anything like innocent, stained and sluttish, you liar, you. And so you made me wish for mortality, humanity, for a goal imperfect. For sloth and for that which is not immaterial ambition. And it won't last, because I'm not in love with you, because you're not beautiful, because it wasn't very good sex: but but but. But.
I'm an arrogant little s**t, you said, and you said you fell for me a long time ago, and I said - I don't know, what did I say? - never mind, never mind, but I thought, I never fell for you, I never fell, I never lost control,and that means it's all wrong, Dana: will you marry me? Dana, I'm sorry.
:AARON
Recycled.
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