The title of this work is: THE BEAST, or, self portrait of the artist. . I made the body first. Built it and lived with it for months. It had another idea-life before it became this beast it was not something else entirely, but it did have an idea incarnation that gave birth to how the work lives now. . (I can talk to my own Soul here. In the making. This is a place I/we got myself to when I was in that first basement in homewood and everything was damp and fleshy with spiderwebs and I needed a surgical theater in which to attend to the life and death situation that I found myself in, precarious, between my own hands and capitalism trying to turn me into a mute statistic. . I cd hear my own Soul, here, in the making-rooms of being. This is a slowed-down place: sometimes i would hang out just outside the door of my own Soul and tremble that i cd not enter because it would be hard and i would hate myself for my own inconsistent communication with my own Soul, (left out to dry and what not.) but. My own Soul teased me into the room like a street cat coaxed in from an icy avenue with a line of vittles. (A thirst trap.) . This is how i got to love. This is how i got to love. I didn’t get there cuz i had a baby and looked into the life of a new human and said, ‘oh. I am alive and this is all love.’ I got there staring through the meanness of my own fingertips, loathing my body, loathing my own mouth, loathing how it felt to be awake in a day at all. . So. This piece: THE BEAST. Is a considered expression of an emancipatory ingredient—it has gathered up all of my beasty places: the places where I lay wide in bed with lithe lovers and hurt over it; the places where my mind went dark and scratched the eyes out of people who’d done me wrong in imaged scenes of gory get-back; the places where I’d let all the wrong voices in to barnacle me unrecognizable. Gathered all of these places into these long, light filled arms, sending it free into the spaceship of my own hands, into a galaxy of new shine, out through the heart and up into the buoyant light-body that new-age-y people wd get teased out 30 years ago, but now is recognized as common knowledge. Con’t.