We were down in Mexico when we fell in love. I’d gotten food poisoning off of a bag of tainted Doritos, and she was described by the waiter as “that mean chick with the Korean eyes”. 

Fuck it; we burnt the place down, and walked out hand in hand. She was smirking like a movie starlet, like somebody who had a real good career outside of food-service ahead of her.

We went hunting gangsters, because fuck it, why not? Guys with arms full of tattoos and names like The Killer and Hard Boiled. Guys who knew how to spill blood. Guys in love with the sound of gunfire. 

She wore bright green g-string underwear, and tight black dresses. Black lipstick and too much eyeshadow. She smiled like a well-paid porn star whenever she had a bottle in her hand, or murder on her mind. She was like a cartoon caricature of a hard, rough fuck. With quiet, dark little eyes.

We were down in Mexico when we fell in love. We took over a temple to the sun, and we set off fireworks all night. We lived on liquor and laughter.

And when it was time to go, we disappeared off into the dark like legends. 

We leaned up, into the light, and took our chances. 

She was the last living descendent of Jesus Christ; her body was the Holy Grail, which held the blood of the Lord, here in the realm of man.

I was her boyfriend. I got her stoned, and fed her corn-chips. We listened to rock & roll records, and I introduced her to role-playing games, like Dungeons & Dragons. We ate hot dogs for breakfast, and ice-cream sundaes for dinner. 

I remember she had these weird powers. We never waited in lines, and she could chemically transform tap-water into cream-soda just by wrinkling her nose at a glass. Homeless people knew her, instinctively, and covered her head with their hands when it started to rain. Birds followed her, wherever we went, stealing loose hairs from her head to weave into their nests. 

What we couldn’t pay for, she shoplifted, happily. “This belongs to my dad,” she’d say, picking up something small and slipping it into a pocket. “He’d want me to have it.”

She wore skin-tight clothing, like a superhero, often with a long, flowing robe, which doubled as a cape. She wore a mask, which was the face of a lion, to disguise her identity, when she wanted to really go out and kick a lot of ass. Her big black afro would flare out from behind the mask, as she took to the streets; she’d almost seem to glow, like some radiant star, hidden behind tinted glass.

She was a ten kinds of bad-ass and her kisses tasted like burnt carmel taffy. 

She was kind of perfect. But we still broke up after sixteen-weeks. 
It just sorta happened that way. 

She kisses like a mouthful of smoke. Yeah, I can push up against her, and feel her immaterial surrounding me like a cloud. She’s not there, not here, but she’s all around me. Have you ever missed somebody, like not with your heart, but with your hands?

I got broke-down car and nowhere to drive. She’s got all my change in her pockets, jingling around by the curve of her crotch. Everything about me changes in her eyes. She exchanges that look in my eyes for something sexier at the store. Sunglasses and broken glasses, digging into the thighs. Yeah, fistfuls of broken glasses, digging into her thighs like fingertips.

Baby, I wish you’d bleed me. I feel to thick with bad ideas all caught up in my head. I need you to set the leaches on my lap, and suck out some of this all-too-much that’s caught up inside me. I need to be drained and set out to dry. 

She only sings the instrumental songs. She gets down like birds taking flight.

Watch her now, dancing, in my bed. Ten naked toes and an ass that makes you bite your lower lip and look away. 

Don’t look away. You’ll miss the best bit.

I want black skin and a hoody. 

I want a jetpack and a ray-gun.

I want to be an ancient asain master of martial arts.

I want to be a Jewish Cowboy Poet. I want to be a Rastafarian Assassin. I want to be more gangster, more cutting edge, more hardcore, more streetwise, more smooth, more capable, more of everything.

I want to be toughest guy in Cell Block E. 

I want to star in porno films, getting sucked off by beautiful girls and boys. I’ll use my real name, and show off all my tattoos. I’ll be famous. Everybody will follow my Twitter account. 

I want an English accent. No, Irish. No, Scottish. 

I want a prison tattoo tucked up under my eye. I want scars that tell stories stretched down my spine. I want a motorcycle and a hotrod and a giant big truck full of guns and drugs and germs and steel. 

I want to wake up as myself, but comfortable.
I want to fit inside my own skin. 

We met, well, here, amidst a mess of text, a haze of words and thoughts all blurred together on the page. We met like we were strangers in a park, looking for somewhere to get naked, for some way to expose ourselves to the sun, or you know, each other.

Exposure. Getting some publicity from the elements. Snapshots of rain and lightning. The water on your skin is spelling out everything in braille; I just need to put my hands to your skin to read it all.

She laughs like I did something funny, or failed at something noble. She laughs, and her hands, her sounds, are all around me, like water or honey. 

Kissing her is like drowning in honey. To sticky to swim. Too heavy to float. Sinking, sinking, sinking, lower and lower into the golden amber mess of her. Losing myself. I can’t touch the bottom; I can’t see the surface. Everything is as bright as sunshine and as thick as molasses.

I feel myself; craving her, loving her, losing myself. 

Burn them. Burn my words, my impulses, my thoughts and deeds, my satisfactions. Burn all the things I loved, burn them bright and hot, like I like my lights to be.

Burn them for inspiration and warmth. Burn them to watch the fires make a mockery of all our time together. Burn it because fire is life, life that is living and real, and life is all there is. 

This isn’t; this isn’t all there is; this is almost the opposite of that. This is all that isn’t. All the things that do not exist, happen here. And often. To me, and to you, and to all of them. 

We slip between the cracks between the paragraphs, and tumble off the white of the unwritten page, and on, and on, and on into grey. So much grey. It blinds me, drives me numb. Numbly tripping over myself, up against myself…

Outside, the police are waiting for our bodies, for our half-truths and our misshapen little lies; lies like the legs of crippled children, like taffy, like my sex life - all twisted into chaotically esoteric patterns that might never repeat. 

She says she wants to be a girl on my page. She wants to lay down on the cold white mattress of my prose, and she wants to become it.

She thinks she’s got a crush on me, when she’s really just hungry for the bait. 

There’s something about her that wants to be helpless, but that’s just one word for it.

She wants to be held (down). She craves comforting and compassion, and maybe at the end of it, something a little more mean. 

She tries to distract me from what I want with what I want. I let her.

I tell her, “We’ve already met once before, in that nameless hotel where you stood before the broken sink and looked upon your blissful nudity in the cracked mirror. I was the man in the mismatched suit and the blood on his tie. I held your hand while you were crying in the dark, but you kicked me out of the room right before I could suggest that we make-love on that whore-stained bed. You said you’d never forget me, but you didn’t want to know my name…”

What’s a good time for you, baby?

We’re going out smoking, and shooting down soldier boys. You know the kind I mean, those senseless jarheads that’ve never questioned an order for a day in their lives. Those big pushy fuckers who always thought they’d just get their way by shoving somebody littler out of the way.

Well. We’re showing them what’s about what, about now, huh?

I got my eye-patch on, and I got a bullet between my teeth. I think I caught it, but I might’ve been spitting lead. I might’ve been loosening chaos from my lips like an unearthly cry; the type you might hear in a spooky movie or from out in space.

Smoke trails from her lips like she’s full of napalm. Disaster trails from her fingertips like blood in the water. Sharks, metaphoric sharks, follow in our wake. Bodies, real bodies, fall dead in our wake. 

Wake up, wake up, wake up. She’s three days and a wake up away from being free of this nightmare; that’s fictional talk for “we’re going to ride this road until it’s broken in half.”

Yeah. Ride it out and out and on.

I start to slide; I start to slide in all directions at once. Spreading myself, spreading myself too thin, spreading myself like butter on toast, spreading myself like sunshine melting into cold stone.

She looks at me like she’s a bomb going off.
Like I can see her exploding, right before my eyes.
She’s a climax, she’s a rush to get off.
She’s sparking in gasoline, and she’s speaking in tongues.
She’s babbling a tower’s worth of songs. 

I start to whisper, I start to unfurl all my secrets. I never wanted to be so unknown, I just wanted to spare you all the burden of my bullshit. I catch her by her hair, I catch her with a little note I want her to have. A note she can’t help but try to capture. 

She tries to capture my song in her lips. 

I start to slide; free. 

She stole my heart, and replaced it with smoke. 

So now my veins pump pure grey puffs.
Now I don’t bleed, I just sort of evaporate quietly.
The sun turns me translucent.
A strong wind can, baby, it can just blow me away.

I miss you, I’m mad at you, we were never right together. 

You were a rainy day without an umbrella. You were a thousand red balloons released into the sky, a hail of crimson spots rising up towards the sun. 

You were like crying in zero-gravity, tears floating up and out and away. 

You were my hero, my villain, the character my cast didn’t have room to take on. You were the problem with my plot. You were the fly my ointment, you were the cock caught in my flight. You were all the fight in my cocks; the thrashing of angry animals bashing out their own brains on the walls of their cages. 

And now, now we just stare at each like hungry hunters waiting for a kill. 
I wait for you to bleed, so I might drink.  

I asked her name and her age as I stripped her down. Glasses first, revealing big blinking eyes. Can she see me close up? Far away? 

I move down her form. Unbuttoning butons. Zipping down zippers. Peeling things back, unclasping clasps, revealing her form underneath it. Revealing the contours and colours that she fades to and from all over. 

She’s darker here. She’s lighter here. She breathes a little faster when I look at her this way. I’m inspecting her, she can’t tell for what. It’s a little sensual, a little exciting, a little embarrassing. She doesn’t embarrass easy, but she strips down real nice.

Everything goes. I can see the spaces between her fingers, her toes, her legs. I can see the spaces between her thoughts when she gets nervous. I can see just how I’d fit up close to her, I can see just how she’d take me on, if she was going to turn this around and go all predatory on me, which she might like to.

All those extra bits of her are in a pile on the floor now.
She stands there naked, like she’s waiting for rain or kisses. 

I wanna know what you know.
No, wait… I wanna know what you wanna know. I wanna know what you’re wondering about, what kind of questions you have in your head.

Me, I’m playing my own game of attraction and denial. I’m surfing waves of social paranoia and taking wild shots at my own self-esteem. I time it just right, I think I might be able to put three big bullets right through that fucker’s head. 

I want to see you fill your mouth with questions, and I want to see those questions take on the form of deadly killer wasps as they jet from your mouth. 

You say you want to know more about me, and that just makes me tremble inside; with anticipation, and with fear. What if there’s nothing more to be seen in me? What if I’m a mud-puddle, one inch deep and full of muck, and all that beauty you’re seeing is just yourself, reflected back.

You never seem to notice just how amazing you are; that’s part of what I think my job was supposed to be. I’m here to help you appreciate yourself. Ideally, I’m here to help you love yourself, but that’s more of a physical exchange. You are such a lovely, lovely thing.

But that’s not a compliment.
I just like to fuck about with lovely things.

She’s always trying to disturb me; she says can’t watch porn unless they leave in the parts where somebody cries. She says she can’t cum with me unless she imagines getting to kill me right after.

She says it like that too, she says the word “cum” with a ‘u’. I’ve dated different girls than her; I dated a girl who would come, and it was a whole different sort of a thing. A different lexicon, a different sort of person all curled up inside.

But they were just passengers in my bed. They never made themselves at home. 

But, this other one, you know what I’m talking about well, maybe you don’t. 

She shows off scars like she’d like to peel off her skin and use it tie me up down. 

She looks me up and down like she’d love to reject me, but she doesn’t have the strength or the time to find something more better than the bit of useless nothing that I represent, metaphorically, in this little story she’s writing with human lives across the canvas of the city.