She smells like a burnt out strip-club, like if you set pasties and G-strings on fire. 

“Hey baby,” she asks me, “what’re you into?”

I look her up and down. She reminds me of the sort of thing somebody should’ve warned me about, back when I was just a young man, and more susceptible to advice. “I’m into good times and sexy songs,” I tell her. “I’m into Marvel comic-books from the nineteen-seventies, and prog-rock from Iceland. I’m into hamburgers, and hotel rooms full of naked strangers.” 

She smiles at me, and the next thing I know, I’m standing there in a room I don’t recognize, holding a bottle of booze I can’t identify. It tastes sweet though, sweet and sort of thick. Candy-flavoured blood, or blood-flavoured liquore. 

There’s a body by the bed. It appears to be naked. I think it’s breathing. She looks over at me, and it’s like being stared down by a doll. I think I flinched. I may have. I probably did.

“Yeah,” she says, and she licks her lips like its an invitation to an assault. I feel the blood running nervously into my cock. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck start to stand on end, as a shiver travels down the length of my spine.

She motions for me to join her, or maybe just stand near to her. 

I take my drink with me. For courage, or to use as a weapon. 

She studies me like I’m algebra-trig, and she’s got a fetish for advanced mathematics. I feel her strip me down, first with her hands, then with her eyes.

Then we share something. Or maybe she rips out of my skin. 

She was in my mind like a tumour. She’d found a way into my heart, just like a bullet cloaked in silver or gold. She made me think these real specific thoughts; I hummed her pulse and I understand the gradients in the colours of her hair. 

She held my hand, and she said, “I want to be the knife-point of the universe. I want to shatter atoms with the power of my mind, like a living nuclear bomb. Split an atom, or spit an atom, across the room.” Moving at speeds unrespected by modern science. 

I don’t know. If I was some sort of strange alien vampire monster, I’d eat your eyes first, because they’re the prettiest, pettiest part of you. And once you were blind, I could show you my true face? Don’cha wanna see my true face?

She was sort of attractive, with those big empty eye sockets, skull balancing magically on the tip of the spine, with only a few handfuls of rotting flesh to hold her together.

Half her bones had been replaced with shiny metal bits; broken circuit boards and stainless steel cooking utensils melted into strangely organic-looking forms.

“Honest, on I’m on it,” she insists, moving like a graceful killer on the dance-floor, moving like we were going to fuck, or have a samurai sword battle. Yeah, she reaches for me, like I’m either a lover or an opponent, or both.

I’ve tried to tell her that sexual congress isn’t something you can “win”, but she won’t hear of it. She just growls a sound that used to be my name, and sinks her teeth into the sense of ruthless abandonment that accompanies the heady rush of sensations just under the skin that always come on when she’s coming onto me like this.

I’m not naked, I’m just trying to be honest.

I’m not angry, I just like to fuck her that way.

She smiles at me, and licks up the sun. Yeah, she looks up at the sky, and she licks up the good goddamn sun like it’s just a lollypop without a stick. She licks up the sky and she’s got my stick in her eyes, clenching on me like she’s scared I might try to escape.

But that’s not really my style.  

“Come on play with my fire.” 

I wanted her to give me danger, I wanted her to give me sympathy. I wanted to her to strip off that dirty old rock and roll T-shirt, and give it to me from off her back. I wanted her naked and honest, for once in her life.

I backed myself into a corner with my paints. With my pain. Yeah, I’m still limping from her visit, but that was something else. She made me hurt to walk down stairs, but at the same time, the elevator was a bit too smooth. Sometimes a bit of pain is a nice way to remember some pleasure. 

Murder, and the perfect life, is one rainfall away. Have you ever stood in that place, and listened to the cloud growling down at the earth? 

She’s gonna sing until her voice breaks; she’s gonna smile until it breaks her.

There is moonlight in her eyes.

It doesn’t blind her; she’s taking aim at the stars. She’s gonna shoot the dawn, right through it’s golden heart. She’s gonna eat into eternity like she’s taking a bite out of a fresh, clean apple. You can hear the crunch, of her teeth going in.

Yeah, take a chunk of flesh. Take some time. Take the left-hand path, it’ll leave your right hand free for doing stuff: smoke a cigarette, wave at a friend, and when nobody’s looking, or when the right person’s watching, you’ll reach down below the belt-line, and give yourself a little adjustment. Flip the switch. Pull the lever. 

She gets away; not from me, but from consequences. 

She gets away with what the boys call: murder.

There’s moonlight in her eyes. 
And smoke on my lips.  

Nighttime: Darkness comes on strong, sticking its hand down my pants and its tongue down my throat. 

I’m throwing parties for her and she’s throwing knives at me.

There’s balloons hanging from the ceiling, balloons full of confetti and angry scorpions. They burst overhead and rain down on us like something special happening. 

She’s wearing a red-stained dress; it’s not blood. It’s Cherry-Aid.

Yeah, it looks like she killed somebody, it looks like she’s dripping with murder, but it’s really just a tasty soft-drink. She looks like a homicide scene, but she smells like sugar and artificial fruit flavouring. 

“Aren’t you ready yet, to close your eyes?” she asks me. 

Nighttime Evaporates: As dawn gives burst to a burning ball of fire, just over the horizon. 

You make me feel kinda weak inside, like your speeding car just yanked my heart outta my chest. You make me feel the wind whistling through that hole in the centre of me.

You remind me of my favourite song playing so fucking loud that we can just about hear it over the jet engines; it might as well be subliminal, but at least it’s on, and it’s making my bones fucking dance. You know that sensation, when you’re using every last bit of strength just to stay up right and move forward, but you still know that fuck those assholes anyway, you still wanna dance.

She gives me a dirty look; she’s tired of the way I try to borrow spare change and inspiration. She’s tired of hauling around all those fucking graphic novels I gave her to read. She’s sick of not just crushing me beneath the soles of the big sexy boots she clomps around town in. 

“Don’t make a comment, when you don’t even know.”
“Ah, oh, no luck.”

Yeah, I like it with the music turned up loud like that. I’m less self-conscious when I can’t hear how fucking stupid I sound.

I want to explain it, but I’m lost for words. She fucking stole the little bastards out of my mouth like she was drawing ants out with honey. Yeah, her mouth drips honey, and a dictionary’s worth of words, in little-ant-form, come trickling out my throat and over my lips and on across the room. 

Little words like little ants, seeking out sweetness.

What was I saying? I wake up sort of dazed and infatuated on the floor. 

We were one of those hyper-glam pop-music girl-bands from beyond the stars. It was the early eighties, and everybody had a flying car; everybody had a haircut that emitted nuclear radiation. We might have been a little threatened by it, if we hadn’t all been so goddamn cool.

We toured the cosmos, shaking and kicking it like disco monkeys on speed, like white punks on dope, like teenagers trying to fornicate when nobody was around. We had space-shuttles for tour-busses and changed the way people thought about how they could achieve happiness in their dull little lives.

We made a difference. We made things better. We wore skin-tight pants, and shirts that showed-off our sexy little bellies. We shook it, we kicked it, we knocked fucking loose. We knocked planets out of orbit, and stars out of alignment. 

We broke hearts and inter-galactic treaties. 

Our music was very loud, and our bodies were very attractive. 

There were other details, but the largely went unnoticed. 

She can’t tell me enough about myself. 

She grabs the gun, and kicks me out of the airplane. “I’m breaking up with you,” she says, as the plane blinks off into the distance. 

I’m falling at a million moments a mile, now. I’m tumbling down to earth, like a weighty conversation that took a brief detour to flightier, more fanciful aims. Yeah, I’m coming back to earth now. I’m like lightning, coming down from the clouds. I’m like the wrath of god, coming down from the clouds. 

I imagine that when I strike, I’ll be a bomb-blast, I’ll be a super-nova, an annihilator. 

She said she’d love me forever, but it was actually a full on three weeks. You know that breed of girl. I might do my best to never fall in love with tattooed people ever again; it rarely works out right. 

Now she’s got the gun and the plane and the parachute and the bag full of our memories. Our memories and our stolen cash, thousands of crumpled hundred dollar bills, spotted with blood and spit and other forms of liquid loving. Two people loving each other, that’s the memories that money represented. But it was just money.

I’ll have all the money in the world in a few moments. I’ll have everything in the world, rushing up into my mind. When I hit the ground, I’ll be crowned the King Of Everything, and you’ll just have to stay up there, you’ll never be able to land, you’ll never be able to come back down to earth, like I am now.

I’ve got a Front Row Seat to everything. I’m seeing it all close up.

They say you’ll die of a heart-attack before you hit bottom, but that’s only if you’re scared.

It takes a little longer to die from a broken heart, but time is something I’m just about out of now. 

Yeah, I fly down and down and down, and the world reaches up to break my heart, just like she did.

Song lyrics float through my ears. “It gets so sticky down here.”

She flies off into the sunset. She’s laughing that laugh I loved when it was her warm breath on my neck, her eyes staring like knives into mine. 

Super-intelligent animatronic birds surround me; better than the real thing, or so they say when you’ve got faith no more.

Hell, faith is better than the real thing, if you know what I mean. 

Super-intelligent animatronic birds are taking flight. They’re lighter and more energy efficient than real birds. They smell like hot metal, and they have their own agendas. No nests to keep, no young to rear. They’ve got solar panels stitched into their feathers, and eyes that can see for miles.

For miles and miles and miles I’ve been crawling my way back to you, with broken bones and broken bottles in my skin and broken promises echoing all around myself, like so many lies I had to tell myself, you understand I had to tell myself, in order to keep going, so I wouldn’t lose sight of the end I had in mind, so I wouldn’t lose faith, or face.

Super-intelligent animatronic birds fill the air around me, and they fill the air with their songs. Pop music from the late nineteen-nineties, mostly, which I don’t much mind. Though you can barely make out any individual indie songs amongst the racket of it all. 

Yeah, I said I’d kill for you, but I never washed the dishes much. I said that I’d die for you, but how many times did I vacuum, take out the trash, do the laundry. I wanted to be so tough, but you had to kill most of the mice we found squirming on the glue-traps; if I had to do it, I’d just cry and cry and cry like joggers doing aimless circles around the park, around and around and around. Things repeat. Tracks on repeat, like bird songs going on over and over and over again.

Super-intelligent animatronic birds. They’re watching my every move. 

She’s having conflicts with the police, so I loan her some dynamite and some good mix-tapes, full of the sort of rebellious crap we used to listen to back in the 90’s, when everything was a Vietnam War dream-sequence of hard rockin’ beats and gunfire from strange shrubberies. 

War, children. It’s just a shot away. Just a shot away.

She’s got her life by her teeth now, and she’s running. She’s running like Olympic athletes on drugs, like a big bad deal on the go. Try to convince yourself you can stand against her. Try to tell yourself that as she’s picking bits of you from her teeth.

Rape. Murder. It’s just a shot away. It’s just a shot away.

She puts her hands up against the day like she’s pushing on an invisible glass wall. She pushes, and the day gives way with a soft sort of shrug, like it’s happy for the release. She bends space and time like origami birds softening in the rain. 

Love, children. It’s just a kiss way. Just a kiss away.

We weren’t that close; we never will be.

I’m sorry I mistook being close-up for being close. I’m sorry that I mistook your desire to dance for a desire to dance with me. Or maybe I mean that the other way around, with you in place of me.

Oh I bet that you look cliché in the sex club; I don’t know if you’re looking for romance, I don’t know what you’re looking for. Yeah, but I bet that you look cliché in the sex club, fucking so tritely, like a child born in 1984.

Born in 1984.

I wish that you’d stop boring me.

Your name isn’t invisible, and neither is your style of life. You think you might fool the others, but I can see clearly that I can’t see clearly through you. You’re no transparent glass, you’re a haze of implicated ideals, none of them mine.

And there is no love lost here,
No Romeos or Juliettes,
Just dirty deals and backroom steals,
Washing down dreams of originality.

Oh I bet that you look cliché in the sex club; I don’t know if you’re looking for romance, I don’t know what you’re looking for. Yeah, but I bet that you look cliché in the sex club, fucking so tritely, like a child born in 1984.

♫

(Inspired by Arctic Monkey’s “Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”, and a couple of girls I may or may not have ever actually met.)

Never was a bloodstained boy. Never found such a neat solution.

We didn’t have clockwork gears where I grew up; I wore a great billowing black coat, as long and dark as my mood at eighteen years old. 

Hanging out at night, outside of churches, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to care, waiting for life to start and inertia to end. 

I never smoked cigarettes, or painted big black X’s on the backs of my hands. I painted my nails, and I drew strange sigils up the side of my face with eyeliner. I wore a sheet of long dark hair over my face like half a mask.

Yeah, but I never was a bloodstained boy. 

“Rabbit; where’d you put the keys, girl?”