focus on the good

like animal carcass.

I am splayed open, salted and tenderized.

My fatty bits sectioned off with bakers twine.

Red juices weep from my wounds.

Not blood, but the meat sweating

for better flavor.

A heavy palm comes down hard on my rump.

He lifts from the flank.

He samples the breast.

Hunger animates his body but he knows he must wait until the meat is ready.

He massages oils into the fibrous texture.

Working it in with the strong flat pads of his thumbs and fingers.

The meat is shivering.

The meat is shaking.

I’m told this is a chemical process.

Even once dead and removed from the body,

the meat dances on the table.

Due to the residual energy and nerve endings present in the tissue.

The flesh will twitch.

But it must be ready.

When it is ready he’ll carve it off in slabs,

and drop them into his mouth;

a mouse falling into the mouth of a snake

hanging by the tail.

He’ll glide the knife under the muscle

and it will slide down his throat

but it must be ready.

The meat is hanging but will not dry.

It drips

and drips

more juices.

The air is escaping.

The tendons are loosening.

He ties her off again and again.

Soon little lamb.

Soon.

i know people change and grief is unsure or complicated when it’s attached to a fond memory or the feeling a person gave you and not tangibly the person themself. i can see many of you on here are struggling with that right now and i understand.

a few years ago i purchased a home that Liam previously owned. there were rumors the house was haunted. He assured me it was not, and i believed him. because i know the ghosts that haunt us aren’t tethered to buildings. They live in parts of us that are harder to reach and they go wherever we do.

(@artzroberto on ig)

But. Did you know my most critically acclaimed album was also my worst selling? My only Grammy nominated album is the one without a single hit?

Listen, album time is coming and I see a lot of people nostalgic for the before-times for varying (and opposing) reasons and I just want to say: They won’t all be Manic. They won’t all be If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power. They won’t be Badlands because it won’t be the first time again, and they won’t be HFK because they all have to be different. They are all something new. They all become something unique.

If I wrote music, recorded it, and you listen to it? Then I’ve done what I’ve come here to do. The zeitgeist is fickle. And I just have to do the same thing every time. Write it, record it, release it. How it’s received and how it performs isn’t up to me. It’s not even up to you. (Well it’s a little bit up to you) but mostly it’s up to something entirely cosmic that I co-exist with. I am places I never dreamed I would be.

In the chapel,

in a bedroom,

in an alley late at night.

Always facing an inflated

godlike

version of some guy.

But as a girl you do what you need to survive.

You open wider, take the body.

Thank your father, you’ve been naughty.

2 Hail Marys, 20 lashings.

“I’ve been sent to punish you for daring to exist.

You will never know a love as meaningful as this.”

I’ve memorized

the lines

since I was 10.

From the Bible,

from the playbook,

from the magazines for men.

If you should mess it up, you’ll start again.

But, still, they only want

the women

they condemn.

I think that I’d have too much fun in hell.

With the pagans

and the hedonists

and sapphics there as well.

Purgatory seems the better fit

I can’t stand waiting in the corner,

but I do love being hit.

There’s not a torture you can prescribe

that I wouldn’t find

a way to like.

Every single second I’m alive

I’m sharpening an axe I’d like to grind.

“I was sent to punish you

for the way I was designed.

You will never know a love

that you fear more than mine.”

I want you to know that I am hard at work. There were some restrictions I was under, for a lot longer than it seemed, but they are no longer in the way. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks.

I’m always writing aimlessly and lawlessly as you know. But “album mode” is a whole other arena and the games are just beginning. I am working on some of my favorite stuff I’ve ever conjured. Wild to think that it hasn’t even been 2 years since IICHLIWP! I know it feels like so much longer. It does to me too. But there were 2 years and 7 months between HFK and Manic and honestly I think it was worth it. The time I took. And the growth that got me from that album to the next.

Thank you for having the patience and the faith.

It will pay off in the long run.

This feels like my debut all over again, in some ways.

Your love and support have carried me through a time where I thought maybe I only had a few albums left in me, but I know now that there are so many more than I could have ever dreamed.

Anyways, I love you.

Down the rabbit hole I go 🕳️

me in Paris,

pre-show Vivienne Westwood AW23/24

an hommage to Kate Moss