1/31/2025
Night Teeth: Cute Aggression and the Grief of the Afterlove (with Video)
I was kindly and graciously invited to participate in an evening of Poe-inspired performances recently. While others danced and sang, I got up as usual with a monologue/essay/poem thing, this time fueled by the oft-forgotten “Imp of the Perverse.” Rather than rely on the self-destructive impulse of man, I focused on another subconscious urge: cute aggression.
While the piece started somewhat as a joke, re-rigging a classic Poe story to be about biting my girlfriend, it has now become strangely important to me. The naked panic of the piece’s back half still makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Fear doesn’t show up in my work often in the way it does here.
If you’ve ever felt the urge to bite your lover, this piece is for you.
-Recorded and Performed in the Poe-Sessed show at Atlanta’s Redlight Cafe
It's 2:53am and I'm in a Philadelphia hotel room with my girlfriend. It's the day after Christmas, our first Christmas together, we are full of Chinese food, and I should be asleep.
But I'm not.
Instead I am watching her sleep. She's so peaceful, on her back like a portrait of Ophelia surrounded by the flowers of our stained hotel sheets, halo'd like a saint in her own messy hair. She is, I swear to God, smiling just a little, like she still dreams like a child. I watch her breathe, building every slow, snoring exhale in her chest like a ship in a bottle, piece by meticulous piece. She is perfect. She is defenseless.
And I want to bite her so bad my teeth are aching. I want to bend my mouth to her bare chest and pull pieces of her away like Autumn leaves as she gives in to the Winter of sleep. I want to snow angel our bed with red wings and gnaw her shoulders like I am an animal held fast to the trap by her limbs. Like I'm a trapped animal.
I am a trapped animal.
I am a contortionist bent into a box of contradicting instincts. I am wrong. I am sick. I see my sleeping and unguarded love and want to shred her body like kindergarten snow. I want to hurt the person I love.
But maybe that’s everyone.
I mean, don't we all see a baby and crook our fingers into pincers? Don't we all see a masterpiece and imagine putting our hand through the canvas? Don't we all see beauty and clench our fists?
It is a phenomenon called cute aggression. When something is so perfect and adorable our brains cross the wires. We love so hard it hurts a little. Like we know these things, these soft glowing great parts of life are too small and precious to really belong here. Like our fingers are red pens so rapturously ensorcelled by a book we have to edit it.
It is a heaving perversity held aloft on wings of love. We love things, and want to squeeze them to death.
Cute aggression is a common form of dimorphous expression. A kind of emotional hyperbole where our joys become so great we have to skip right to the ways they will hurt us, just to stand in the same room with them.
I am, on this cold christmas night, reassured by Google that I don’t really want to kill my girlfriend, that I’m not a monster, that I can sleep beside her without waking up with her blood in my mouth. I roll over, lay down, and try again.
But still, no sleep. Something about the tidiness of it doesn't settle. The urge to bite my girlfriend feels immediate, urgent, percussive inside my skull. It feels all consuming and massive and everything but cute.
She's not a baby. She's not a bunny rabbit. This is not cute aggression. This is something else. There's a taste in my mouth from all the way down. It's sour. It's sharp. It's metallic.
It's fear.
Watching her sleep, watching her breathe with all its mechanique, I can imagine the moment the machine breaks down. Underneath her breath, I can hear her not breathing. How many great loves are ended by someone dying in their sleep?
I think about biting her because I can imagine the moment she wakes up, barks high and clear as an EKG. I want to bite her in her sleep in case she doesn't wake up. I want her to feel pain as much as I can to atone for the moment she can no longer feel anything. I want her to hurt before she can’t anymore.
Because love hurts. It pulls your eyelids back and bids you look beyond the veil of tears at the griefful void of the afterlove. It is looking at your dog and imagining the last quiet trip to the vet. It is the shadow past the sun.
Here is the precious thing, it says, walking her up the aisle to me.
Here it says, leading her away, is what it costs.
It is an ulcerous pain to contend with love’s ending at the corona of its every kiss. I am so scared of any moment on this Earth we do not share that my brain graffitis every tenderness with torture.
Nothing keeps you in the moment like pain. Nothing keeps you present like teeth in your side. In order to reassure Thomas that he hadn't lost his Savior, Jesus first had to show him a wound. I need to wound her hard enough that life won't kill her instead.
It is the impulse that sees sickness and thinks of sharp instruments. It is a surgeon's lust. I need to see her insides to know they are still working. For as long as we have known illness, we have tried to solve it by cutting each other. I am groping with my mouth full of scalpels to save her. If we are biting each other, we are not losing each other.
She is my sleeping feast. I am her lockjaw lover terrified of starving.
I lean down in the flickering dark and kiss her forehead. My teeth are a riot of want in my mouth but I hold back. I whisper sweet nothings in her ear.
She wakes up.
She groans.
And she bites my hand. Hard.
Like she’ll never let go.
