She wants to be seduced; I can see it in her eyes. I can see a misplaced sense of longing that longs to be pulled upon. I could unravel her sweater with a word, and leave her standing there naked, as she longs to be.

I want to hold her down, without holding her back. I want to help her fly, or maybe just suspend her from my ceiling, by rows of little fish-hooks.

We go for walks in the park, out where the paths are littered with the skeletons of little birds, where empty balloons bounce around fields of green glass that smells of broken booze. We hold hands and watch the clouds evaporate into the sky. Everything fades away, higher and higher, into the night.

Fades, and is gone.

She’s not gone, she’s still right here. There’s a sadness in her eyes, and I want to replace it with wanton longing, or some form of cold compassion. Any kind of passion, really. Almost any kind will do. 

She always remembers my birthday, but never gets me gifts.

That’s okay. I can take what I want from the edge of her lips.

“In the time of getting clean, I was junky.” 

She gave up on sex just in time to date me. “You got lucky,” she told me, not understanding what I was there for, “if you’d caught me yesterday, you’d have found me still a whore.”

“Yeah, that would have been a shame,” I said, sitting awkwardly to hide my erection in folds of my clothes. That bulge in my pants? That’s just the drugs I carry to distract myself from the way every day seems to feel. That’s just a weapon I have for in case of emergencies. Emergencies like you.

Yeah, she’s got the look of a house-fire in the night. Her eyes are like space-satellites falling to earth, out of the sky. Her skin is like a battlefield, a place where untold scores of unnamed men threw down their lives. Her life is like a lie, like a big long story, or a series of unfortunate cookies.

Her wisdom’s worth a fortune to me; tell me how to touch you, how to find you, how to fuck you in the dark. She likes body-parts and personalities. I like legends and samurai swords. 

We’re not just dancing, we’re dodging a much larger question. Slings and arrows of, lets be honest, pretty outrageously fortunate circumstances. 

So, here’s my story: she was trying to ignore me. She was out on the street, selling free love by the pound, and I had a receipt for services rendered. I was looking for a refund, for a chance to relapse. 

She took my karma in both hands, and blew me away. 

She feels like butter, melting against me. She gets between the grooves of my fingerprints. I feel her staining my shirt, and the front of my pants. 

Her teeth spell out her name, a signature of bites torn into flesh. 

I want to take drugs and betray all my friends. I want to rat out my lovers to the cops. I want to fall from an impossible height; I want to fall into love, like love’s a dozen giant creamy cakes all laid out for me to topple into.

She has a mouth full of stolen words. Her teeth are all twisted sideways, leaving a signature of bloody traces up and down the parts of me that she’s the most orally fixated upon. 

I wish I was a warrior of the all-hit-record scene. I wish I hadn’t partied so hard last life. I wish I’d partied a little harder last night. I wish I could remember her name. I wish we’d had a bit more of a conversation before we’d switched underwear. 

Now I’m running; cheating; stealing. I got a mouthful of memories dripping down the page, and an agenda of totally taking over your silly little precious little world/life.

“Baby, come dance with me,” she said, flashing that hammer she uses for breaking fingers and legs and collecting money from bastards. “We got one more bomb to drop.”

I don’t know if I’m falling in love with her, or maybe I’m just drunk and high and listening to too much pop music; my heart starts beating faster and I assume that there must be somebody close by who I’d be willing to die, at least a little, for.

I slap goggles on my face, and light up the engines. Her fingers dig into my shoulder as our jetplane digs up into the sky, tearing through clouds like tissue paper, tearing through the night like kids on speed.

We’re super-heroes, we’re vigilantes, we’re lovers with a love for chaos. I hate big business, she hates the government. 

“We are beautiful, we are doomed,” says the tape in the deck. Los Campesinos, playing it up as we head towards the end of the world. 

Beneath me, the world is a maze of unsteady pixels. From up here, human souls look like ants; great crawling monsters consuming all they find. 

The trigger switch is in my hands, she’s steering the jet aircraft towards just to the left of the centre of the sun. I blink, and the switch blinks with me. From the belly of our airborne beast, a big metal egg is scuttled loose. 

It falls towards the earth.

She accelerates so hard it’s like my body is collapsing into two dimensions. Tears stream from my eyes, and something not unlike the starting of hardon struggles to life in my pants. G-Force times a thousand, we bleed into the horizon, even as the metal egg touches down.

And gives birth to a cloud as big as half the sky. She’s laughing so hard it sounds like screaming, and a mushroom cloud is funnelling up into the upper atmosphere like a big beautiful fountain of dust and death by radiation. The cloud is made of sand and angry particles, and it is glowing green, green, green.

“I got a fist on fire,” sing the lyrics. I can’t helpt but agree, or emphasize or something.

My life is made up of all these little separate moments, but I can’t seem to see how to connect them up into something worthwhile. 

All along the watchtower, we sat, getting high and ignoring our responsibilities. 

I was eating fistfuls of gummy-bears, orange and green and yellow and red and blue gelatinous artificial food-product sloshing around in my mouth like a water-colour image set to “semi-solid.”

She was crushing jawbreakers between her teeth, seemingly striking sparks from the force required to shatter the miserable little fuckers. They burst like fireworks in her mouth. 

Down the side of the wall, the hordes were massing, in their revolting displays of aggression and general distaste for our human lifestyles. The hordes of the dead, the disenfranchised, the few remaining original members of The Clash. They wanted inside our precious little kingdom; they wanted access to our fancy teas and dry socks.

But to get in, they’d have to get past the watchtower, and the guards that guarded it. 

And that was us.

Down below, the monsters of tomorrow were beating their heads bloody against our seventy-foot tall wall of solid steel. Up above, we sat, stoned off our asses and full of sugary treats. 

Oh yeah, I saw you there, noticing me. I was pretty sure I did. I mean, I was watching every little fucking thing you could do, and I was just knowing that eventually your eyes were going to wind up on me, and why wouldn’t you like what you were seeing?

I feel a little funny, I feel a little off. I’m milk that’s been left in the fridge for maybe a couple of weeks too long. I’m chocolates with nuts inside with maggots inside. I’m something that looked so much tastier than it turned out to be. It seemed so cheap, before the hospital bills started coming in. 

Oh, yeah, I thought I saw you there, dancing slowly in that coolly indifferent way that girls like you have of doing everything. You wanted me to see you, that’s why you wouldn’t let me ask you any questions. 

I saw the window breaking in, as you stepped out. I felt the surging push of “you know whatever” as you looked into your drink and then, before I knew it, we were dancing to some other stupid tune. 

I put on some Leonard Cohen, and in a burst of lowly-uttered tones, I am reminded as to why I keep writing about the end of the world, and a desire for softly yielding female forms. “Right, right, that’s why I write that way.”

Cold, with a desire for heat. 

Girls with smoke for skin, playing about the fringes of the ends of all things, 
Apocalyptic ruins dotting the edges of our civilization in little unstructured bursts, like wild-flowers erupting from the cracks in the sidewalk. 
Girls with starlight in their eyes, and the warm soil of graves, under their fingernails.

Deep in the dark, she sticks something into my mouth.
I thought it was a gun-barrel, but it’s the tip of her tongue.
She triggers a bad memory; blows me away. 

She carved my heart out of wood. She put fingernails of sharpened metal to a living tree, and she carved out a heart that I could wear inside of myself. 

She came hot ashes into my hands. She looked in my eyes, and I felt her arrive, heard her say my name as it happened. Then there was a smouldering between my fingers, then there was a smear of hot black-and-white, the leavings of a cigarette or bonfire. 

My lungs are full of fire, and my head is full of sick. If I could drink a glass of her blood for breakfast, I might start to find myself. Find myself full of her, full on her, full to the point of not wanting her anymore.

I wish she was a little afraid of me, of the consequences toying with my broken little self like she does. I wish she could look me in the eyes when she was sticking her blades into my abdomen. I wish a lot of things, when I’m alone in the quiet of the dark.

My perfect lover lays sleeping in another room, like a lion dreaming of christian flesh to dine on. My heart, carved out of wood, beats for her in deadened little spurts of kinetic violence. 

She’s such a post-apocalyptic lover. She makes me think of building reduced to ruins, of ash falling from the sky. She makes me think of a sky turned black and torn about with angry bolts of lightning; fire in the dark clouds.

…………………

Our relationship is this dust that was a city. You slept through the exchange of war, you woke up and everything was just gone. You woke up and I was a glowing skeleton in the corner, all stacked up neatly and bleeding radiation in the dark.

You woke up and I was gone. 

A world of rotting corpses burned to slush; snow made of the remnants of soft skin, floating on the wind, lifted high into the upper atmosphere, and brought back down to earth as a rain of soft cells.

You were so close, but those others, they were even closer to you, and they squeezed me out of the room. I probably should’ve held on a bit tighter, but I decided to just let you go. 

She leans in close, and I whisper her a secret. It starts with “I love” and it ends with “you”, but the bit in the middle is a little something like, “everything in this universe more than”.

She puts back her head like she’s about to drink down a sky full of stars. Her hair reaches down her head and her neck and threatens to tickle her back, like my fingertips might if were to make love in one of those positions where I could put my hands along her spine. 

She smells like sex and solar radiation. She looks like she should be flying through sky with all her skin on cosmic fire. She looks like a goddess with darkly glowing eyes, and an appetite for all of humankind. She looks like she could fuck the whole room twice, and still come up hungry for something more.