KEEP PLANNING – Julien Yacek

the world outside our senses he says: it’s mostly torture and electricity. i’m busy being undressed trying to get myself to shower because everything takes me a million hours he just stares out there’s a storm he keeps saying: the lightning tonight, you can hear it, far away, do you hear it. and i feel it, i step into the tub, the window overhead and underneath me, colorless it is tone clusters in low registers. the notes are scraping over one another, muffled from across the other side of the wall he speaks as a ghost: the energy released, sometimes it’s so terrible it opens a little window into all the stuff we can’t ever see. night sky we find unoccupied but in the upper atmosphere, even as everything grows less dense, a slow gradient up to the sparsely occupied portions of space, where we, without pressure, expand to fill all the emptiness, outward forever, as air inches to non-air, where secret military planes are tested, there’s mirror to coral reefs revealed as energy announces itself, these massive red shocks descend, i am hoping to capture them on film. i say: oh. and i wonder about my voice, always too quiet, a section of wind lost or forgotten, corralled off from the rest of the column and i say: nothing because i can’t say anything. i’m exhausted for no reason. he stares at me in the doorway. i stare back, i listen to his breath now clear. minutes silver things tumbling into the dark, precious nothings loosed from a pocket, belongings impulsively pissed away in the dark, there is a sound, the darkness around it, amplification of all portions of sound forgotten, a bubbling and frothing of loss and drool, up from that black, clenched teeth, a seizing face, a rapturous heat beneath me, despite all its pain, i wonder about planting myself upon it. minutes pass, i wonder if he will lose it if i stay here. i try to stay here, i can’t because my lips move, a pulsion to curtsy, an affectation from that dark, a politeness sewn to my wish to plant myself upon something throbbing and pained, a check against my pleasure, crinoline and corset, powdered face to conceal my sweat and need for oblivion upon some wretched body, i say: i wish i could sleep. he says: just stay with me. it’s spoken sad and slow. in through his eyes thoughts from my head swam to his i am sure. shared visions of accursed things. he says: you don’t have to do anything. you sit still. like always. like me, now. like always. hours by the bedside window waiting for the atmosphere to shred itself, flashing to all careful eyes the glorious expenditure, i say: i think. i say: i think i could die. he says: anyone could. i say: i think my life has spent me. is all. he is holding a camera, the open window’s screen so near the lens it is obliterated, a curious invisibility, only at the edges at the darkest points of the image does it announce itself, a vignetting of city planning. little blocks disintegrate into the night. the city if it forgot its own lights. he shifts the way boys do when they have to piss, not wanting to go anywhere, i recall sitting still, feeling it up to my gums an ache all over my body, staring at nothing, proving to myself i didn’t need to, the discomfort its own thing to witness and when let to dissolve, i never needed to know it again, another silver lost to the dark, i became something else and: i say: do you have to piss. he says: i have to see, more than i have to piss. he says: and you can’t see for me. i say: i don’t think i’d think i could if could have thought before you thought i would think i would. he says: right. he says: here. one hand on the camera, it bounces lightly, in the dark room, moonlight and distant thunder, stars, the edges of the camera take up little glimmers, crescent moons, the night sky multiplies as he undoes a belt buckle, a zipper, his left hand clumsy, hits my thigh as he tries to move his pants down. he says: i can’t…can you… i don’t nod, because he wouldn’t see. curious how people get, when you do the things they imagine you should. the camera stills, the night is itself again and he is calm and his breathing is steady. a train slowing for the station: his pants are around the lower portions of his thighs which is enough, if not perfect. fate has brought them to this awkward place, not the cool final resting place of our ankles, little divots and bone expressing itself as an odd angle, a valley for the dead. i wonder about his penis, if it needs to be out from between the awkward lips men’s underwear has, the strangest convenience. i can’t tell if men use them. having never used my prick the right way, it’s all foreign feeling. to sate curiosity, it sprouts from white lips, testicles an awkward overgrown petal and the stamen floppy, an overwatered lily, infertile. he says: i know it’s soft. i’m not…i think you get it. just put your lips around it. swallow if you can. it should be…you get it. i say: uh-huh. there’s a couple short breaths but he isn’t moved particularly by the gesture my wet lips draw up around his penis. a gulf of time where nothing happens. no subtle hardenings, a bloodless thing, his heat, it’s concentrated in his hands, the tips of fingers. he is the steadiest thing on earth. when it begins, it’s stops and starts, rain testing the soil, i wonder if the head of his prick finds my mouth dry, in need, something like that, a bead develops at the head, his head a little warmer than before, i lay my tongue upon the bead, a plastic thing from his slit, careful with anything, you might feel its solidity, each thing forming and in your view heavy gentle enough with the tongue to not break it, the body a subtle implement even air turns heavy, special attention paid to how it travels over freshly shaved arms or as the hair regrows, a rush of bodies over sand or burned forest, chased by something, the chase the only solid thing, all motion all that speaks itself, all motive is lost on me and after initial shyness, he does not stop himself. i recognize the flavor. not particularly dehydrated, the flavor of vetiver, water, heat, chlorine. he is ruderal plants in the open chest of a public indoor pool. he is not a body spasming, but the spasm itself, the arrow through the thing, the focus that reduces the implement it travels through to nothing but jitters, and my hands are weak and my throat seems unsure of the volume. my belly is agnostic about this whole affair. it’s maybe a touch pleased to drink. he says: you can stop. i don’t say anything because i’m busy stopping. some spit gets on the bed. he never asks me to put him back. exposed, he seems silly. i laugh, he says nothing. his face is forward, i am alone in the room, he is a mechanical process. a tiny failure, his prick, droplets of piss, spit, precum or whatever one wants to call that lubricant that leaks from the tip, the night places all its shining parts there on the bed, a second thing enters the room, and i’m made to witness and feel, as each thing completes some other thing. merely here to be impregnated by focus and mystery and piss. i sit at the foot of the bed, looking up. the angle arranges him into a little tower, a precarious cairn made of wrought metal, skinny arms and sloped shoulders, dark hair slicked back, an abstraction of momentum up against multiple frames and a single huge glass eye pointed from a tip too thin to hold anything for as long as he has. miraculous and mostly stupid, i feel the weight of all great accidents in my below-ness. i am tired, i can’t sleep. when you aren’t occupying yourself with anything other than the silence of a room, it’s unbelievable how each minute trembles and unfolds, two breathing bodies and a drying spot, sounds of wind, the distant rain’s odor carried in through the window, and then the scent of dust, coldness and its distinct tempering of all smells, tightening molecules, everything preserved, so pristine it’s hardly recognizable. cars pass, the smell of the road, tires, speeding men yell at their wives, arguments travel near then far. i say: i have had enough. i say: honest. he says: what do you want me to do about it. he says: christ. i say: a little bit like that. he says: haha. it’s warm, it’s different from the shivers the wind drags to the dark room. he says: where are you to be crucified. i say: can you just crush my head on the electrical box? i stand. i bend over, naked, the night sky multiplies again, second pale moon, fuller than the tiny thing up in the sky. i point. i didn’t realize, something’s in my body, all parts tremulous, if the wavering of my finger were a sound, a viola in high register, too sharp, in solo, something pretty about it still. at least i hope. he says: okay. when he stands, he does not put his dangling cock away. it is a stupid bag of groceries, fruit left on the stoop, you see it the next morning. curse yourself in the morning and laugh at the condition of the apples in the evening. accidents return to us little holy tracks left on life, the stupidity sets my lungs on fire. we spend 10 or 20 or 30 minutes with a laughter who draws us to hacking and wheezing, snot. we amble through doorways in the dark. unlock the front door, sneak out back, nowhere to hide, sneaking only by virtue of our fear of being seen. by fear of being seen, becoming suspicious, in the distance, we are seen, two stupid ghosts. on the electrical box i feel its coldness, i wonder if it whirrs along its inside or if my heart is beating so awkward with the rhythm my lungs take up, the stumble of the tiny things along the interior, is it harmony or what happens when you know a song so well you hear other melodies in it, suggestions of what could be. yourself the only thing generating, the song only a record of some time where you are not. the funny whispering between the immediate and whatever the past is. i can feel the dust, little stones stab my back, every child who climbed on top of this newly christened altar, yelled at by their parents, get down from there, and then staring at the sticker of the angry electricity. danger, high voltage. it feels weak. once i saved a bird from a pet dog who went too far. i held it in my hands, put it in a shoebox, trying to make it want to live enough to not die. its heart was anemic. it wasn’t holding onto anything. it was simply going on not recognizing it was going to stop. without trepidation, it continued, it’s hard to realize, until at the very bottom, the energy lost. blood without vibrancy. he says: there’s only fucking…pebbles…the fucking…it’s filler rocks. i say: oh. he says: the rocks…by the front office. those are… i make a gesture, it’s a sibling to nodding, when a sacrifice relents to the executioner asking for a couple minutes more, i’ve fucked up, sorry. upside down and moving my head, it makes you dizzy to offer a kindness from here. he comes back after 15 or 30 or 45 minutes. it’s somewhere between those. maybe over or under. time is uncounted and night is infinite. it takes him a while to lift the rock. when he does, for the first time, it falls. the second time, it falls. the third time he stops halfway. he says: my…hurts my back. one second. i smile. i perform the thing related to nodding. i wonder where it is on the family tree. a dead act, it gave birth to no others. only by accident, returning to this terrible history does it emerge again. i find it funny, i laugh. when he laughs, he finds carrying the thing on his shoulder easier. his penis and testicles swing, side to side, a pendulum for measuring some distance. somewhere in his spine the information is stored, from here it’s a pointless measurement speaking the obvious, i wonder about all the things lost on me, what the measurements might account for and the act itself performed without his knowing. he says: okay, bye. i say: bye bye. when the rock falls, the top half of my head is dented and loosened, my lips remain where they are, it’s the top left quarter, at first i think it’s only as bad as a car accident, i’m somewhere over myself. it’s dangling, the most fascinating part, my bangs on my right side parted, the way they are by wind, always pissing me off, and then a kind of geologic collision, a new landmass out of this encounter, a new hole for time to fill. i am limp. when i’m basically almost inside myself again, not breathing, just trying to be nearer to what i think i’d see if i still were a seeing thing: a spike of red, from overhead, an odd substance lancing what’s left of my skull, into the little green electrical box. the colors of christmas, white heat, burning, people screaming, and he stands there with some regret. thinking: throw your phone out of the car. as it moves. really doing it. wondering why you decided things would go here. now they have. lay before the face of chance, let it laugh at you, i guess. he says: sorry.

*** julien is from las vegas and isn't anything in particular. 12 May 2025