She’s like a concrete angel in a graveyard, raindrops flowing down her sheer stone face like tears. 

So I take up my hammer, and I chip away at her.

In fragmented form, she slips between my sheets; she’s crumbs under my pillow. She gets between my teeth, and into the pores of my skin. 

She’s like a concrete angel, but softer, sharper around the edges. She’s got a collection of razor-blades for wings; razor-blades she stole off of still-bleeding suicides. She stick them all up and down her back, until she can set loose and fly. Little droplets raining down as she cast out her wingspan; don’t worry, it’s never her blood.

She takes me into her bed, and she breaks against me, like the way the sea breaks on the shore. She’s as wet and wide open as the ocean. Yeah, she breaks open, just like a piñata, but she cries, just like a little squirrel. 

We stayed up all night. Smoking drugs, trying to look cool. We flexed muscles and laughed about subtle, little lies. The kinds only real friends share, in the dark, all alone. Yeah, we shared secrets between us like we had sexually transmitted infections for private jokes. Giggles up and down the length of our genitalia.

She’s like a concrete angel, the kind prayed to by skateboard kids and edgy goth who want to make love in cemeteries. 

But really, she’s just a cold hard bitch.
An’ I love her for it. 

I live like a frequency, all action and movement; my god is me.

It’s a war against gravity. It’s the poetry of immobility.

My lungs are full of warm bird-shit and thick black goo. I feel it rise and fall as I breathe; I feel it threaten to burst from my lips when I cough. My body is an engine full of molten metals, melting slowly into something unrecognizable. 

Yeah, sore muscles and rotting thoughts. Big ideas spoiling on the vine. Conversations that come a few minutes too late. People who weren’t quite nice enough to remember, forever returning phone-calls.

She was: pretty cool, for a day or two. But then she wanted something more out of life, and she tried to tear it out of my skin. I laughed, like I was breaking down. Like an engine sputtering, as a car breaks down, I laughed. 

I worship at an altar of pure kinetics. Pure kinetics altering everything. The earth spins about the sun, and the sun burns and burns. These are real religions, real facts, real gods. Gods of motion, and gods of gravity. Gods of moving forward. 

She was driving down the road at a million miles an hour, her car making a sound like a billion lawn-mower engines choking down gravel. She saw me hitchhiking, and she slowed down, to offer me a ride.

Her car had been bright pink, once upon a time. Now it was red like dried blood and rust. It was caked with dust that faded from canary yellow to shit brown. There was black mould growing on the silvery chrome of the back bumper. The upholstery had been shot and burned; the seat-covers were stitched out of expensive-looking silver leather, which’d had nacho-cheese and french-fry grease slathered all across. There were old take-out-food boxes in the back, and stray rounds of ammunition being held in empty drink cups, in the front. 

She smiled at me as her car stopped, the purple of her lipstick smearing on the filter of her bright red cigarette; it smelled more like marijuana and monkey-hide, than tobacco. Her hands were covered in cuts, and a patch of bruises ran up her neck, to just under her right eye. She smiled, oblivious to her own injuries. 

“It’s too nice a day, for walking,” she shouted at me, over the rumbling of her vehicle’s engine. 

So, I slid inside, and she tossed me a can of beer; it was as warm as blood and it smelled like aluminium and cat piss. I drank it down easy enough though, the can pissing its guts down my throat like my guts were on fire.

She smiled even wider as her foot went back down on the accelerator, and the car burst forward on the road like an awkward orgasm spurting wildly away. 

We made love on a big bed of angel-food cake, our sexual fluids sinking into the surface like icing melting in the ocean. We made love like we were in a music video, like everybody was watching and we wanted to make ‘em proud. Make ‘em envious. Make ‘em wish they were you, or me, or a little bit of both.

We went out robbing stores, robbing them of all their conveniences. We stole slurpees, frozen drink treats, down the front of our pants. We filled our pockets with artificially-flavoured ice cubes. She stole syrup, all over her skin.

The cops wanted to stop us, the media wanted to consume us, the public wanted to live our lives right by our sides. Everybody wants to be your friend, when you’re dancing like a killer with knives for a heart. Everybody wants to be your lover when you’re fucking like fiends on fire.

But we were still so still and still so solitary. 

Spinning with ourselves.

Spinning within ourselves. 

I bought her at candy store; I liked her wrapped, but I loved the faked shades of her sweetness, her sweetness beneath her wrapper. She was every colour of the rainbow, fused and melted together.

I bought her with the change in my pocket, and I took her home to enjoy her.

I peeled her naked, once we were alone. I wanted to get her in mouth as soon as I had her in my hands; I wanted to devour her right there on the street, but I knew she’d be too messy for public consumption.

But once we were alone, I stripped her down, and revealed her form to me, all angular curves and artificial colourings and well, basically, exactly what I wanted.

She was so sweet she made my teeth ache. Too much of her and I’d be on the floor, vomiting up my soul and breakfast. Too little of her, and I’d be angry for days. Months.

She was hard enough to crack a tooth, soft enough to get all sticky on my tongue, like wax melting against my body. Sugary wax, flowing over me, coating me.

I ate her like a snack, yeah. And now I can’t get the taste of her off my lips.

She backhanded me with her kiss, battered me with a smattering of affection. 

I said, “I really don’t think I deserve this sort of treatment,” and she just laughed. She laughed and put her heel down on my karma. 

I wish, sometimes, that I had a more heroic stature, that I wasn’t so small and petty minded. But you have to work with what you’ve got, and I’ve got a mind built for tearing apart smaller things, like a mad dog on a chain. 

She made love to me until it ended me, until I was left, dead and spent, ready to be black-bagged and hauled away to the morgue.  

I like her way too much. Always have. I’ve had a thing for her, since she was too young for me in that Halloween costume. She’s older now, and I like her even the more; don’t ask me why, because I honestly don’t know. Is it just that she’s beautiful? Nah, it’s something else. She bugs me in the best of ways. Gets under my skin like tattoo ink.

She got in trouble the next day for what we’d done that night.

I was drunk. I never know quite how she shows up in my arms, but usually it starts with me being a little fucked up.

I had hands on her, mouth too. She said something like, “you won’t do it.” She giggled and struggled and said, “you won’t.” She was so sure I wouldn’t, and I wasn’t, so I did.

My hands went tight on her throat. My lips smiled unpleasantly, revealing wolf-like incisors that went straight for the jugular, or maybe one of those big tasty veins around the side.

She was good for about a second a half. “Okay,” she said quickly, “you will.”

Of course I will. How was that ever in doubt?

She’s nice in my hands; no, she’s not nice. She’s a wild animal I’ve tricked into staying still long enough for me to ensnare. She’s the happiness that is a warm gun. Maybe she just makes me happy because I like bad things. 

I got a message from her the next day…

“i got to enjoy my boss schmearing anti bacterial gloop on my neck today and giving me a lecture.
thank you, captain dracula”

“Make your mama sigh,” I mutter to myself, steering my jet-pack across the city.

Deep in the dusty subways of the city, the last of the royal family is slithering, laying eggs the size of human-head that hatch into scaly flesh-eating monstrosities with hides as dark as black magic, and hearts as ugly as sin.

My aim is sure and my blade is sharp and my jet-pack is very fast. I am scared, but this fear drives me, drives me on, drives me on into darkness. 

The Queen’s got claws that can carve through cement like it was soft butter. The Queen’s hungry for human hearts and the fingers of babies. The Queen breathes cruelty and soft curses, muting the air around her and depriving it of oxygen. Yeah, it’s hard to breathe around her. Her great, bulbous eyes can see through time and space and city walls.

She knows I’m coming.

But my aim is sure, and my blade is sharp, and my jet-pack is very fast. 

I meet her in the darkness, of the abandoned city’s abandoned subway system. She screamed for vengeance in a language spoken only by the great extinct lizard who used to rule this land. She screamed for my life. She screamed that she wanted to tear me into shreds. Her eggs trembled with anticipation, still-sleeping lizard-monster-babies dreaming of destruction.

She wants to kill me. She wants to devour me. She wants to destroy me.

But my aim is sure, and my blade is sharp. And my jet-pack is very fast.