Shotgun baptism

We buy silk ribbons for my midnight baptism

We, the perverts of anarchy

It begins like this: 

At midnight, you spray me

With holy water

I no longer want 

To be bad

My little Saint, I whisper, I still wanna be corpse-stiff

My body splayed across your shape

Bathed by candle’s orange-red shade 

Both morose, as if our own personal 

Primrose hells reflected upon painted mugs

The bells clang and I feel ungrateful

And—I still am bad

My own private guillotine

In another life, I owned a windmill

I spent my time trying to seduce a neighbor 

Who had murdered his wife and kids

I knew this and continued with my seductions

Because the taste for escalation always leaves me wanting

I have a wide-mouth that craves constant cruelty

And a body in which anger erupts easily 

Like lightning bolts shooting out of finger tips 

Even as I attempt rest on my zebra chaise lounge

The warmth of self-scrutiny, my natural mode, makes me boil 

I sometimes wish I was headless

As in, just a stub

An ol’ nub

Like a creature of fantasy 

I wish to vanish

Limb by limb

I only wanted to party

The fuckboy algorithm 
lies in a privately held 
database, says the hacker 
I meet at a house party. 
We’re all robots he says, 
mouth frothing with plans
to provoke an irreversible 
glitch in the simulation.  
I support your blase, 
apolitical attitude to God, 
I say to the hacker. He winks.

Sobriety is boring. A metaphor
-less absolution. Yet here I am, 
in all its glamor, documenting 
& synthesizing the rituals 
of your undoing. The Silicon 
urchin next to me speaks in slurs: 
a fervent defense of speech is 
boring, but the revolution? 
More boring! I look at her 
and realize hot people
and a freewheeling culture 
of misinformation make me
hard. An argument breaks out 
now between the stars of the party, 
and I think we’re all doomed.
Lately, this feeling prevails.

I adore giving orders but
recently, I see the danger
in pleasure. Don’t you?
And yet, unexpected 
pleasure brews: Barbie’s 
blue gown shines like 
Ken’s gelled hair and the 
fight continues. He raises
his hand and his glittering
cufflinks torpedo off,
landing into my palms,
where their warmth
feeds me. I notice now
on Barbie’s hat a small bird
perches, radiant like a ruby. 
A moment passes, the bird 
winks and flies off.

Stunned, the crowd opens, 
warped human emotions 
laid bare in our eyes 
and twisting mouths speak 
what we cannot. We all suffer 
in the discovery of new pleasures, 
but I would be lying if I said 
I didn’t only want to party.

Josh Vigil is a writer living in New York.