Wake up.

It’s time to go again.

She wakes up like an alarm’s going off, but really it’s just sunlight, breaking through the clouds and the wreckage of the burnt-out amusement-park she’s calling home for now.

Paint-chipped clown-faces leer out from the background, like fetish-items designed by some ancient primitive culture to keep away evil spirits and bad weather.

When the wind blows, the loose chains on the broken merry-go-round rattle and chime like heavy bells, or the bones of fleshless skeletons clashing together in some sort of a ceremonimal dance.

Yeah, the chains in the distance sound like a ghost-dance.

She wakes up, and rubs the sleep from her eyes. Her hair is short and messy and coated with grime. There’s dog’s blood and hamburger meat under her fingernails. Fingernails painted camouflage to help her fade into the backgrounds. 

They say she lives alone out there. They say she commands an army of feral cats, but only by moonlight. They say she smells like burnt candy and cinnamon. They say she can’t kill a man without breaking his heart first.

Wake up.

Look into the sky.

And go.

We fucking marched right into that ice cream parlour, and we went to work. 

She had a pick-ax, dirty with grime and miner’s sweat, and she knew how to use it: quickly, and with purpose. Up and down like a metaphor for emotions or sex, she raised and lowered the thing. Glass shattered, and spurts of iced creams dotted the walls like sex crimes turned to graffiti.

I had handguns, one settled snuggly into each of my palms. I felt the recoil sting my flesh as the guns went off in tandem bursts. If you don’t aim right, the bullets just go straight through stuff. You have to direct the bullets to the target, if you want to see things blow up.

The cash register exploded in an ugly eruption of small metal bits and loose change. Dollar bills on the floor, keypad digits on the far wall.

A siren was going off, or maybe that was just the noise inside my head. They make drugs for that sort of thing, you know? Good drugs. Drugs that come in shiny clean bottles. Drugs that taste like candy. I love drugs. I’d love to have some drugs. But I cannot. My mind may be aching, but my body is a temple. And it craves only ice cream.

Yeah, big handfuls of the stuff, gone gooey from the heat of exposure to the world. I put down a gun so I can cup a mouthful up to my face, chocolate hazelnuts running down the sides of my face. It’s like I’m smeared with the ambrosia of the gods, like I was eating out the crotch of some great chocolate bitch-goddess from on high. I feel charged. Full of life, and light. Yeah, I’m all lit up from the inside, like how serial killers get with they snuff their prey. 

I know she’s killing spectators, somewhere in the background. I can hear them screaming, and I know the sound that pick-ax makes when it tears a person’s stomach out through a hole that was carved in their ribs. 

I know. Times like this, I feel like I know everything. I feel like my brain is as big as the sky, and that it holds all the stars you can see above you, and stuff on beyond from there, too.

I know stuff. So much stuff.

I just don’t know much more time we have before the cops show up.
Then, things are gonna get ugly.

We go out for a walk,
On the edge of my UFO.

She’s so pretty, in her skirt and her socks. We stand on an edge, and we look into the depths of the city. We’re counting concrete cracks, from where we’re standing. We’re looking at the way the city fades into shadows and oblivion. 

I want get above it all.
I want to climb. 

She catches my breath, in a bottle. Stops it up with a cork of melted wax. She saves my words for me, so she can let them go later, like lightning bugs into a storm. She records me on empty air, and traps me in sticky little promises that can’t be undone. 

I want to get
High on her.

Her scent, the chemical trail of her skin. She drags me through graveyards and makes me fight all her ghosts and skeletons. Those zombies she dated. That chunk of black gravestone she fell in love with. I skin my knuckles on the dead, and come out a vicious victor. 

She’s so hot,
She burns me where I stand.

Tuesday hit like a bucket of soggy hammers, splattering her enthusiasm and goodwill across the pillow like a bunch of brains spilled out of stool-pigeon’s skull. She breathed heavily, wishing she had some whisky, or cigarettes, or cigarette-flavoured whiskey.

But it was all gone now. The money, the smokes, the booze, the cheap partially-artificial prostitutes she’d brought home to finish cleaning the grout out of the bathroom sink. 

There was just the emptiness now, and the gnawing hunger that lived in her belly like an angry rat.

She gave a name to her pain. And that name was the day of the God of combat. Tīw’s Day.

Tuesday. 

She glowered at the sunshine and set her underpants to “take no crap.” 

Of course it had to be Tuesday.
Wasn’t it always?

It’s raining quite heavily outside.

Soon I’ll have to walk into work. I need to laundry first, and lord knows there’s barely a clean dish or spoon left in this apartment. Everything needs to be cleaned. I wish I could leave it all outside in the rain that’s falling. 

It’s a half-hour walk to work. 14 blocks; I just counted them in my head. It’s almost a perfectly straight-line from the front door of my apartment to the front door of my store. I only have to move on block to the left or right, depending on which way I’m going.

Along the walk, a couple dozen crows fly with me. They ask for snacks, which I provide along the journey, and sometimes they land on my head for a split second, and I can feel their little talons digging into my hair, and resting lightly on my scalp for less than a second. 

It feels like a long walk, from here. It feels like the sky is trying to be just as grey as the streets. It’s a good time for rain though; about half of this city is plant-life, and ever hour of downpour now will result in another ten square feet of brilliant greens in another couple of months. Leafy greens, coating the city with warm glow of organic growth.

For now I’m sitting in a T-shirt and pyjama-pants. My T-shirt is stained with delicious foods, and my “pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can’t find a rape victim.”

Or something to that effect.

I used to date this girl, let’s call her Amy. She was bald when we met; she was manically happy, and I thought she looked like Tank Girl. She had a face like Winona Ryder, and way nicer tits, though her teeth looked like she used her mouth for opening old tin cans. 

I told my friends she was the first girl I ever slept with, even though she was really the second, because my friends weren’t allowed to know about the first. 

Amy wanted to date me; she wanted to sleep with me right away. On our first real date, she took me into her room and stripped off her clothing, to reveal a bunch of crazy tattoos she’d drawn on herself with marker. I remember there was a big long snake, coming out of the dense bush of pubic hair that she refused to trim back. The snake ran up along the inside of her back.

She hated to fuck. She had a bunch of illnesses, mental or otherwise, living up in her head. She was always sick in some way or another. She always wanted me around, always wanted me to touch her, to hold her, but she was uncomfortable with having it go further. She wished she had a surrogate who could fuck me, so she could just watch, and be with me. I was nineteen, so fucking was all I wanted. If we’d found the surrogate, I’d probably have just dated that girl instead.

Amy was interesting. She read good books and she got all my jokes. She had an ex-boyfriend for a roommate for a while; he’s one of the few people I truly regret not kicking the shit out of. He raped her one night, and claimed he was sleepwalking. He was scared of me, with very good reason. 

But Amy and I, we couldn’t maintain, so I let her slip away. I took a pretty girl’s virginity Amy’s bathroom floor a year later, and I fucked Amy behind her boyfriend’s back the year after that.

Some time later, years later, I got a call from her. She was in an institution, between sessions of electro-shock treatment. She sounded like she was barely there at all, just this little lost confused ghost of the girl I knew. She couldn’t remember anything, and she sounded so sad and alone. 

But then, Amy had always sounded sad and alone.

She’s out there still, somewhere. 
And I guess, so am I. 

I’m a time-bomb, waiting to get off. 

She’s got big goth circles painted around her eyes, and she’s got a porn-star’s vacant stare plastered across her face. She’s not smiling, but she’s welcoming. She’s welcoming me in, into her life, into her type of trouble. 

Have you ever dated a troubled girl? I got a phone call from the asylum one night; she said, “they’re trying electroshock on me now,” but she sounded so far away and fucked up that I couldn’t even be sure it was her.

Yeah, I’ve had lovers with shaved heads. Girls who panhandled. People who had nowhere to go, if they couldn’t go there with you. Souls that lacked direction. 

She winds me up, sets my clock, and licks my thermite connectors. I buzz in her hands like a box full of bees. 

I let her strip me naked, and slip away between her fingers. I don’t feel like something that can be caught or grasped, today. I feel sort of adrift and hungry. 

Two girls, a boy, a car, and a daring mid-day raid on the biggest ice cream manufacturing plant in town. 

Agent A had skin the colour of chocolate-mocha-hazelnut, but the reds of her eyes were like cherries jubilee. She had a gun in each hand, which made six guns in all; the four extra-arms were bio-mechanical additions, crafted from cybernetics wrapped in cloned monkey-bat tissue, and attached at the spine.

Agent X had skin like Butter Pecan swirled with caramel, and her eyes were tiny dots of Peppermint Bon Bon; green dots of malice like traffic-lights saying “GO”. 

“Go!” Agent X screams, her hand-mounted flame-thrower belching white-hot fire from her fingertips. “Move, move, move!” She gives orders like a military man, though she fills out her uniform like a sex bomb that wants to get go off in your hands. 

I take the lead, when I can. When I dare. A pirate’s cutlass in one hand, stolen from the maritime museum, a .45 automatic in the other, firing off thick lead bullets that’ve been streaked with wet paint; the paint leaves little laser-like trails of coloured motion in the wake of the bullets. It’s like art. Art that kills.

Bullets seek out bodies, as do blades and fire. Fire breathes and lives and consumes. Machinery melts. Men scream and die. An old hound dog barks twice, and then pads off to wait out the storm someplace a little more quiet. 

We blaze and blaze and blaze, like a trilogy of stars falling down to earth with so much crushing weight it’s almost as though a baby black hole just burst to life. We’re hungry hunters, out stalking prey.

As their world crumbles around them, we rob the ice cream barons dry. We steal their secret recipes, which we’ll post online for free, and we sample their private flavours, like Orangutan Orange and Genital Grape. We taste creams never meant for common-folk, and we leave a trail of sticky destruction as we go. 

Later, we’ll kiss together, showering off our sweet victory in the communal showers of some tucked away hidey hole. Just me, and my team of secretive agents, and our vendetta against the world. 

We didn’t have so much as a conversation.

We just stripped off our skins, like snakes unraveling in the sun, and got down to it.

We divided, we unified, and we conquered. 

We breathed smoke and ash and tiny glass fragments. Our eyes were wide and white, dripping tears of blackened blood. Ash and tiny glass fragments get in your eyes, like smoke. You cry thick tears of the blackest blood.

Outside, the wind is shuttering the walls of this ramshackle home. Outside, the world is ending and the sky is falling and the night is crying - wailing - to be let inside, like some long-lost lover dying from the cold.

Inside, she’s all broken promises and languidly soft sexual desires. Her mouth makes a perfect “O”, and breathes a smoke-ring of steamy thoughts in my direction. 

I follow her; of course I do. That’s everything that I am. 

Sometimes, looking at you is like being hit in the face with a very attractive brick.

You shatter my teeth, bloody my lips, leave me choking on my wet, damaged flesh. You smile, like some punk teenager about to punch a molotov-cocktail through the window of some fancy suburban coffee shop, or a fashionable downtown shop. You smile and my world goes wavy, my vision all askew as my blood plummets down from my brain, and into my cock.

You make my voice take on that growly tone, like I’ve been smoking cigarettes all day, or I want to give you some sort of a command. An instruction, or an order. My voice feels raspy, and full of needs. Thick with blood. 

I feel thick with blood, like my pulse is a tide sweeping in from the sea. Full of dangerous sea monsters and unknowable depths. 

Sometimes, looking at you feels like a sex crime, or a disaster. An earthquake, or a house-fire that burns the world away. 

She kissed me with a mouthful of sugar; she kissed like pop-rocks melting into liquid LSD, acidic and sticky sweet. She kissed me like there was honey dripping down into her lap.

We’re killing time like Temporal Assassins. We’re killing motherfuckers like it’s cool or something. Yeah, bad-asses, watching our watches, watching the sun fall down into the ocean. 

Everything fades to black and blue. Black like the spaces between the stars, blue like falling deeper and deeper into deep, deep waters. Yeah, swallowed up by the infinite and absolute; how’d you like her for a lover? 

I’ve got internet girlfriends sending me digital seduction transcriptions, and a living doll recharging her batteries in my bed.

“I am a man,” I warn her, meat in my teeth and blood in my eyes, “of constant sorrow.” And I am. I am a rake at the gates of hell. I have fallen from the grace of god, and no doctor shall relieve me, no whore shall reward me. I’ve fallen from the grace of god; I’m just a weakened signal now, and only the radios of sinners shall receive me.

Is it weird that I might be, fetishistically, thinking about asking you to eat that ice cream, real slow, and naked, on-camera, for me?

Baby, how about you and me go out for milkshakes, and burn this fucking world down while we’re at it.

I want a drink, I want to dance, I want… yeah.

I want a big glass full of smooth, creamy dairy product, frozen and stirred. Chocolate, or caramel. A little bit spills over the top of the glass, and slides down; it looks almost subconsciously sexual, and it tastes even better.

There’s a fire that starts in the centre of you, and if you let it, it’ll burn and burn and burn, and turn everything you touch to smoke. Clouds of black smoke, spiraling off into the sky. Let’s get that fire burning. Let’s turn you up and loose.

We had butterscotch milkshakes and nuclear annihilation. Atoms splitting angrily as cool ice creams melts across your tongue. Everything burns from the electrons on up. It tastes sweet, and smooth, going down. 

She was a pretty girl, made of broken mirrors. 

Yeah, you could see the world in her, just cracked and flawed. Everything you’ve ever loved, but shattered slightly.

I held her hand, and felt her cut me, little slivers of her sliding into the grooves in my palm. My blood, sticky, holding us together.

She sang to me; little broken dreams spoken of with her little broken tongue. 

As a lover, she was a horror show. She licked the skin right off of me. She slit me up and down. She shot my tongue through with silver and light; crisp thick beams of the stuff that pierced me, and turned my words red.

She was a pretty girl, or parts of her. Parts of her were  stolen from prettier girls I’d known before, all stitched together with broken glass and reflective metals. 

She came into my heart like a house-fire; she burned up my precious possessions, my memories, the icons of my past. She burned and burned and burned, until my skin was ash on the bone. And then she burned the bones.

She said, “You scare me,” as she stuck her knives into my skin. She said, “I don’t know if I can trust you,” as she put a bullet to the back of my head. She said, “Do you still want me?” and then her hand went tight on my throat, like her fingers with the rope I was to be hanged from.

She broke my feet so I could wear her shoes. She broke my fingers so they’d fit inside her, inside her gloves. Yeah, she wrapped me in her gloves, like the empty grasping of her hands on my naked skin.

Reaching for something you can never hold.

She came into my heart like an unbidden burglary; she stayed, once she realized she could make it a home.