She kisses with her lips. She breathes electricity down my throat.

I met her for coffee on the edge of town. The real edge, where there’s just a little cafe with half its foundations running off the side of a cliff. Look over the side and you’re looking off into forever.

I’m scrolling down my matches on the internet dating site while she flirts with me and waiter at the same time. She blinks and giggles like an animated gif, shaking loose pixels free in the rain.

I think I want to sleep with her, but honestly, when I wake up in these grey rainy mornings, I think I probably want to sleep with everybody in the world. Even the snorers. I just want to be comforted. I want to be consoled. I want to be told that somebody cares. That something’s going be alright. 

I want to be consoled like a video-game, my smile and charm turned into bitmapped boyishness. I wanted to be squared away. I wanted to looked upon as a love-charm, or some sort of sextoy for the superstitious.

Yeah, I get her laid, but she’s still unlucky. What happens next? We find out where she lives, and take her home. Repaint the walls while she’s straightening-up. Smile and lie when the questions start coming.

She starts coming; I finish my letter and send it off.

She was one of those girls. You know the kind. She had a head of hair that thrashed around like a fistful of snakes, and a cunt that snapped shut like the kill-switch on a mousetrap. 

Her name was Bethany or Bev or Roscoe or something like that. She had eyes, and several toes. Two breasts, and a criminal record. 

I met her doing eighty miles an hour in a school zone. She was the beautiful woman, I was the young boy clutching the hood of her car, paralyzed with fear. Ahead of us was a road of unlimited potential. Behind us was a city that smelt of tire-fires and authority-figures. Behind us, were a thousand police-cars, their engines and sirens screaming like fitful babies as they careened across the road, in a futile attempt to chase her down.

She was one of those girls.

One of the ones I was familiar with, for a while.

She was toxic and giggly and sort of stupid when the sunlight hit her just right.

She got me high on my own supply. She used me like I was going to curdle and go bad at the end of the week. 

She was one of those girls.

For all I know, she still is.

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. 

Every day I come crawling back to you. 

Can you see the scars on the palms of my hands? They way my knees are scratched up and bloody? I’ve come crawling back to you, the house’s Ghost Key dangling from my lips like a secret I want to tell you. Unlock something and let it out, why don’t you?

Fuck. I’m out of words, and blurbs. I’m tried of flirting online, trying to get you to notice me, hoping you’ll look my way, or write a nice letter full of curious questions. 

I wish I could just be happy with myself. I wish I didn’t need to leave my own head to find satisfaction. I wish I was outside, walking around, sniffing the cold air and feeding the cold animals, instead of sitting in here, with nobody, pretending that I’m doing something that matters when I’m sitting here talking to myself.

I forget that my fingers are moving. I just think words, and they appear on the screen. It’s just like that pop-song said back in 1997, everything is automatic. 

I feel so quasi-futuristic. I feel so trapped. I feel like I need to leave early for work today, so I have more time to stand outside the store, smoking away my troubles. 

This is my download. This is what I have within me, and I’m putting it down here for you, hoping you’ll pick it up. Do you understand? Do you relate? Can you function with this fiction? 

I feel like I’m drowning in my own inattention. 

I feel like sand, melting into sheets of glass. 

She opened up her mouth, and puked up an alien language she’d just swallowed down a day earlier; half-formed characters dribbling down her lips, staining the front of her shirt with bile and unknown concepts. 

My plan, originally, had been to seduce her, online. I was going to say such clever things to her, that she was going to strip down for me, in a series of photographs, until she was wearing only her philosophic ideals. 

We were romantic idealists; terrorists of the heart, the media called us. We were armed with guns and drugs and love, and an unwavering desire to fix the world, and everybody in it. Freedom for all, and a bullet to the head. Candy for dinner and sex for dessert. 

We formed a team and then took all our clothes off, so we had matching uniforms of naked skin and observable want. Yeah, it makes my tongue hard, just thinking about her like that. When she’s all obvious and translucent around the mind. 

All I want’s a mouthful. All I need’s a chance.

She wanted to be used, loved, adored, torn-apart… She was like a desperate crying for physical intimacy, and a locked door. 

I sent her letters with graphic descriptions, depictions. Words creating illustrations in her mind. Just enough detail to really imagine something compelling. Clothing stripped away. Bodies revealed. Where are we? Her secret apartment? An imaginary hotel room? My own little dungeon, where I chain up such lovely things to devour as my leisure demands? 

She smells like a sacrifice.
Something you would give up, to get something better. 

The letters I get from her read like pornographic how-to manuels. She tells me where to bite, and where to bend. How to bend her back so she can see her own past, flickering dimly like a forgotten birthday cake left burning in the rain at night. 

She tosses me a kiss, like it’s the last thing I’ll see before I go down, under the waves. Sinking down the ocean floor; watching it rush up to greet me. Yeah, she hates to watch me fall, but she loves to watch me going down.

We danced like two great lizards fucking in a mud-hole, fucking or fighting, bloody of tooth and claw, in the style of the savage. 

There was music; there’s always been music, in my mind, ever since the stroke. The broken parts of my brain tune in stray radio signals, and transform them into rhythms and beats. 

As she moved, I studied the rise and fall of her breasts, as though I were watching empires form up and fall away. I imagine the cultural implications of it all, as she jiggled thusly, all mammary glands and nipples. 

I felt like a runaway train on melted tracks; and endless phallic symbol falling into ruin. The tunnels crumble and the sky falls in. The sky cracks and goes black, like nighttime or urban culture. The sky cracks, and falls away, and does not come back.

I pull her down to my level, which just happens to be where the bed is. We get inside, slowly, cautiously, like we’re setting a bomb to go off. We’re all trigger-switches and sultry stares. Until the lights go on, and then we swap roles, and sometimes clothes and spit. We turn all crackly and sharp like bacon burning in the pan.

She puts her lips to mine, and takes a bite.

She came into my life riding a sixteen-foot long purple squid with bright green eyes. It’s name was Lyle, and she called herself, Jennifer: Queen Of FuckAll. 

At first I asked her “what’s a fuckle?”, but that just got me a dirty look and a hard backhand across the front of my face. I bounced back pretty fast though, and had a couple of drinks ordered for us before the blood had even had time to dry. 

We lived that way for a while, getting by on nothing more than nonsense and stolen candy.  We slept liked bats; naked and going “eee-eee-eee” all night long. We made so much noise the neighbours mistook it for the end of the world and started tearing wallpaper off their walls to make room for the rapture. 

Fuck, I didn’t mean to make trouble for anybody; I was just hoping we could crumble a little together, like two cookies dunked in a single mug of milk. I just thought maybe if we were both gonna fall apart a little, maybe we could fall together. 

Or just near each other.

She wakes up like a flaming being struck; she comes to life in a flare of heat and light, singeing my fingertips and growling grey smoke around her edges.

She wants to rob the candy store; she wants to steal sugar-bombs for all the cute girls that live on our street. Yeah, she wants to blow pink bubblegum bubbles, and to flirt with all the pretty girls. Make them notice, make them dizzy with a suger-high.

She wears red liquorice lipstick, and she carries a gun that shoots cotton-candies in big clouds that burn like mace if they get into your eyes. You want a taste of that? Sweet, sweet vengeance. 

She has six cups of coffee with artificial sweetener. She stirs them up with a silver spoon that’s twisted like a corkscrew; the silver spoon was twisted with strange mental powers that were capable of warping hard metals from across the room, with nary a touch or sound.

We’re like lovers in every way, except for the affection. There’s nothing warm or caring, about the ways she loves me, or holds me tight. 

I tell her, “My brain is like a playground; it’s full of sand and poo. Children frolic in it, and wild animals defecate there.”

“I was hoping you’d still be here when I woke up,” I said to myself, coming to in the big bed all alone. 

I woke up, with all my keys twisted into knots. All my coins folded into little bent bits of meaninglessness. I’d written a book of love-letters, but they all blew away in the breeze, and got carried off to snotty pretty teenagers who’ll never appreciate something like love until they’re too old be beautiful anymore. 

My best friend was John, the Locked door that lived across the hall. 

“You want to understand it?”

I’m imagining the sky caving in. I’m imagine if all that blue just collapsed down upon us, like a bunch of cement stones that could no longer be held aloft by pencil-tracings of belief. 

“You want to understand me?”

I’m flicking lighters, trying to light fires. 
If you cut my veins, I’d bleed black flames.

She’s somewhere else, waiting tables or waiting on me to suddenly appear. She’s sleeping in other beds and answering to other names. She wears make-up like seven different masks, which can only be peeled off underwater. 

She wants to be taken underwater. She wants to be held under. She wants to lose her breath. She wants to be breathless, so I hold my hand over her nose and mouth while we make love, and even when she thrashes I hold it there, and even when there’s panic in her eyes, I hold it there, and when I release it, she cries for three hours, and then tells me she loves me, pays, and leaves. 

If she was ever there at all. I notice things showing up in these hotel mirrors; fake lives and faux lovers that just whistle through the empty space like a masturbator’s conversation with the unknown.

She breathes easier when she knows I’m okay. 
So I lie to her.
Because she doesn’t understand how I get off on my own pain.
She doesn’t understand how much I love my stupidity.  

This thing you call “cosplay”… 
I’ve been doing it every day of my life since I was five.
Of course I always emulate my heroes. What kind of a life are you trying to live?

She was my teenage girlfriend. Big eyes, like flying saucers, crashing down out of the sun. Big, sad eyes, like silver flying saucers falling down in flames, falling out of the sky.

“I don’t know if I’m falling love,” she admitted, taking my hand in her own, “or if I’m just falling.” 

Falling forever. That’s the best way to fall. Never hit the bottom. It’s just like flying. Falling’s just like flying, if you never come all the way down. Failure’s just flying, if you never quite make it down. 

“I haven’t done anything useful in weeks,” I said in that hollow voice I use when I have to tell her something honest about myself. “I’ve been listening to music and thinking about girls I’m attracted to.”

She smiles, that sort of sad distant smile, like when your last man dies and you realize that you’re out of quarters and it’s really just time to go home now. 

She was my teenage girlfriend. She was better than me at video games, and she owned her own double-edged sword. Her battle-cry was the chorus of some pop song by some young-kids band that I’d never really got around to listening to. 

She wore purple eye shadow, and she cried all the time, in big muddy streaks down the sides of her face. And she laughed sometimes, too. Her laugher was the sound of loose change in an otherwise empty pocket, or a pair of keys that couldn’t unlock anything. A pair of keys with nothing to unlock anymore; that was us.

We went out at night, robbing candy stores and kissing strangers.

“All we talk about anymore is sex,” she said, scraping the goo off her face, as her robot lovers waddled off towards the shower.

And she was right. All we did talk about was sex. Wanting it, having it, paying for it, being paid for it, emailing about it… She liked to send me little updates on her orgasms, like a little girl telling me about her cat having kittens. “Four more last night,” she mentioned, and I imagined her moments of intense passion in wet, mewling forms. 

“Do you think,” she asked me, stripping of her latex and strap-on body-parts, “that fucking is more like a blade or a bomb? You know, something sneaky the slides in and does irreparable damage, or something just goes off, and take the roof with it.”

“This is a very gendered conversation,” I noted, as our genitals connected with the soft ‘clink’ of half-empty wine-glasses. Her cunt was smooth and polished, like a very expensive automobile from the 1950’s; something designed for highway racing. My cock was like the space-shuttle, a costly way of investigating strange new worlds we’d probably never return to a second time. 

She flicked my nipple, and inadvertently, broke my heart. 

Cabby-wack. Shaddylack. Touby Shaloobanwhack.

I walk around making nonsense sounds to myself. I say “beep” very quietly whenever I run something over our de-security-device at work. When I do something quickly or smoothly I got “choooo” real soft, because that’s sound it would make if I were a huge space-ship, moving around very quickly or smoothly.

Eep eep epp. I say, almost worriedly. That’s from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, when he’s on adrenochrome.

“Well tie me to the front grill, and drive me to Beirut.”
I woke up on the floor. She was gone. I could taste smoke in my mouth, and blood. I was mumbling to myself. And I was alone. Which meant she was gone.

She broke up with me the same way she broke into my apartment - not at all sneakily. She used a fucking crowbar. She did a bunch of damage on her way in and out, not really caring if she left any evidence of her passage.

She broke up with me the same way she broke that asshole’s neck that night in that bar that time. We were listening to cool punk-rock covers of classic rock hits, and dropping hits of acid and laughing so hard we were nearly blacking out, and then somebody said something one of us didn’t like, and then there was more laughing and blood fucking everywhere.

She broke up with me, and then she broke my nose. She caught it right between some immovable object and an unstoppable force, and yeah. The snap of cartilage, the rush of endorphins or pain sensations or whatever. Everything flashes real bright and loud for a second. 

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sorry to see her go.

Like any illicit substance, you taste better when you’re slightly burned. 

I push a match-head up close to you, and pretend like I’m listening to you smoulder, like you’re a curled bit of paper with some plant inside, like you’re a long glass stem with a smooth round bowl at the end.

Your end is smooth and round. Was that a little too obvious? I’m tired of not getting to be obvious enough. Obvious enough about why I’m here. Obviously I want you to explain yourself, to unfold, unfurl yourself. Of course I came here to expose myself out on the dance-floor; we all read the tickets for details-upon-arrival. 

I lick my lips and taste smoke. You’d get high off my sweat right now, and I’d recommend it. I’d recommend you wrapping your lips around me, and inhaling. 

Empty rooms tempt me into pyromania. School yards make me daydream about the apocalypse; swingsets blowing in a nuclear blast, slides and jungle-gyms melting like Dali clocks. 

I’m killing for a living now, and I want to take you with me. I want a mouthful to spit.