How to be indecent with a piece of text.
on the soft thrill of improper annotation.
A beginners guide to intrusive reading.
Before you begin, loosen your grip on correctness.
I
like
the way I feel when I'm
drunk.
It
drowns
my
voices
in
thick
intoxicating liquid.
Their voices turn to chokes and
gasps
under
the hard liquor and
cheap wine.
→ The subject (“I”) remains in control grammatically—how deceptive.
→ You like it? Of course you do. Of course you do, you soft-burning thing.
→ An elegantly bleak opening. Nine words to confess the kind of pleasure that tastes like surrender.
→ May I say, with all due restraint, that the casualness with which you admit this is... devastatingly beautiful.
→ “Drowns”—not mutes. You don’t wish for quiet, you wish for obliteration. I wonder if you know the difference.
→ There is something erotic in the drowning. I’m sorry. I won’t say that again. Not yet.
Ah. So the “I” contains multitudes—each one loud, each one unwelcome. I wonder which voice you fear most.
→ The use of “thick” makes the liquid feel viscous, almost animate. As if the substance itself is complicit in your undoing.
→ And the image—chokes and gasps. You do know how to make suffering sound almost seductive. Almost.
→ You write as though the alcohol is gravity—pushing the voices down into silence like a boot on a throat. It’s violent. It’s poetic.
→ “Hard liquor” and “cheap wine” — a pairing I find unexpectedly tender. You’ve democratized your poisons.
You are, quite frankly, unfit for public consumption.
I should mark you down for obscenity, but then again,
I haven’t stopped thinking about the boot on the throat.
Carry on. Slowly. And for christ sake let me catch my breath
between your sentences.
→ Placeholder commentary one.
→ Placeholder commentary two.
→ Placeholder commentary three.
Placeholder
text for the second piece goes
here
in the same literary format
as before.
More placeholder lines, properly spaced,
formatted like real annotation text.