In the Estonian film in which I star
as myself but prettier, or Jean Genet
when he was young in the one
black and white photograph
I have seen of him. And a room
with cameras and photographs,
piles of film and white tubes
and jars of matte, bright pink
and mint-green Golden paint.
Honesty, Sabine said,
is the antidote for shame. She is
beautiful in her oversized pale pink
sunglasses and cropped blonde hair, a bit
of Marianne Faithfull, circa 1974, mixed in.
Berlin is strange in that it exists
only in black and white. And photographs.
The trees billow like in the deep
South, but larger and more delicate,
stranger. In the prison, Genet felt more
at home, and safer. Containment
does that. I don’t like him, but his calmness
masters me, he wrote. I love him
and his desire; his resistance
to self improvement, aspiration.
He stayed what he was: orphan,
thief, hustler—and of this, he made
an intricate world, a semblance.
When I was in the hospital,
the other girls and I
changed—we became
deviant, aberrant. We morphed,
or warped. And I never
changed back.