Beauty provokes everything terrible and good in the world: why I made myself a man out of want of him. There are people so beautiful you skin yourself alive to slide inside them! This is the only good reason to do anything, injection or epyllion. When we first fell in love I was desperate for someone wise to witness the strange alchemical shifts boiling my body into curds and whey. I am soft sheep’s cheese I want to say, How to speak this and make it mean something more than simile? I mean something has happened to me. I mean a dream-bird came in the night and rearranged my face and now the deli man calls me sir. I mean my desires are covered in yaw marks. These are all shapes I will find words for later so instead I say it’s (his mouth, it) the pipe in the play: “A thing like that, it could change the course of events.” The closest names are always someone else’s spun oblique in an awkward mouth. Quick! Before we lose our momentum—
Aydan Shahd
THE PLAYER KING 33
