I lean into her life. I feel all dirty and imperfect. I am far from invulnerable. Far from bulletproof. 

What I am, is on fire in the rain. What I am is a quiet sort of crush. A quiet crushing, a smothering, a smouldering. Like a fire that just won’t go out. A flame that can’t manage to break free.

I dip and dive. I feel like crap and I fight like I’ve got something to lose. 

I’m stealing electricity from the city across the street, running black electrical cables cut into a power-box, into my little cardboard mansion. We’re living down by the river now, eating rats and the cancer-ridden fish that swim in the industrialized waters.

I’m a lost legend, living like this. I’m a Cardboard King, an unplugged guru of the modern age. I’m something ultimately forgettable, like all that advice you didn’t ask for.

Fuck it. Sometimes I think I break into your home at night just so I can convince you ignore me. I put my whispers in your ear, chanting over and over again, “stay away stay away I need you so fucking bad stay away from me forever.”

And on and on and on like that. 

Dear ØØØØØØØØØ

So, it’s been a while since we’ve spoken.

I know you’ve been thinking about me. I could tell. 

I saw you the other day. You were in that cafe where all those attractive blind girls work. You had that bitter, rigid look you get on your face, when you’re thinking about me. I’ve come to recognize it. 

I remember the last time we did it, down by the beach. You’d just killed a man, and I’d just gotten very, very drunk. You seduced me with a set of collector’s cards I’d wanted since I was ten years old; they were sports cards, for a fake sport called Spunklebat. Yeah, by putting those cards in just the right order, you practically paved a path from me to your bed. 

I remember the way the sea was slapping on the shore, as you romantically told me to “put it to you”. The sea had gone purple, with pollutions, year ago, and that acidic water was bleaching and burning the beach sands into strange patterns of black-on-white, like a savage checkerboard gone surrealist in the night.

You were dripping in blood. His blood. You looked so proud of yourself, so dead-set and certain that you’d done something right. I wasn’t so sure, but goddamn if you didn’t taste like starlight and chilli-cheeseburgers when you pulled me in close to kiss. Your tongue was one of those tanks, that went rolling through Tiananmen Square; unstoppable, brutal, and politically motivated. 

But now… Now I just see you, sitting alone, more often than not. I know you still have volumes of strange letters for pornography to send my way. 

I just hope it makes it in time.

I’ll always sort of love you,

-Unsigned

She kisses like a mouthful of smoke. Yeah, I can push up against her, and feel her immaterial surrounding me like a cloud. She’s not there, not here, but she’s all around me. Have you ever missed somebody, like not with your heart, but with your hands?

I got broke-down car and nowhere to drive. She’s got all my change in her pockets, jingling around by the curve of her crotch. Everything about me changes in her eyes. She exchanges that look in my eyes for something sexier at the store. Sunglasses and broken glasses, digging into the thighs. Yeah, fistfuls of broken glasses, digging into her thighs like fingertips.

Baby, I wish you’d bleed me. I feel to thick with bad ideas all caught up in my head. I need you to set the leaches on my lap, and suck out some of this all-too-much that’s caught up inside me. I need to be drained and set out to dry. 

She only sings the instrumental songs. She gets down like birds taking flight.

Watch her now, dancing, in my bed. Ten naked toes and an ass that makes you bite your lower lip and look away. 

Don’t look away. You’ll miss the best bit.

I want to pull back the curtain, and reveal something of myself.

I want to be real, just for a moment or two. Stop the posing and postulating, and just be a real person, for a few minutes. 

I feel sort of depressed, sort of sad, sort of empty inside. I feel like August is doing the same thing to me that February does; impacting on my biological chemistry by making me feel real low, inside.

I got too many people in my life, and I got too little patience, and too little to offer them all.

I’m so tired of seeing smiling faces. I’m so tired of hearing about people going down to the beach and out dancing. 

All my friends are too cheerful these days. I need to find some real depressed people to hang out with. People who don’t want to improve anything, people who just want to complain. People who want to mire in misery because it feels so comfy to just lay there and take that sort of abuse from the universe. Too lazy to come in from the rain. 

I don’t feel like I’ve connected with anybody in weeks. I feel like I just bump past shadows in the hall, listening to them having really interesting conversations amongst themselves. I can’t say I feel lonely, because I don’t. I can’t say I feel unappreciated, because that’s not true either. 

I just sorta feel like I’m somewhere down a long dark hall, and I’m pounding my head into a bloody mess against some wall. 

It’s really fucking hot, and it’s really fucking busy at work, and I’m really fucking tired. I’m tired enough that if I just stop moving for a few minutes, alone in a room, I wind up crying about nothing. I think I’m just fucking exhausted. I think I just need a break. I need to be understood. 

I don’t want to flirt. I don’t want to make small-talk. I don’t want to have conversations that feel like contests. I don’t want to have anything to prove, or anything to demolish. 

I just want to smoke pot, and look cool, and get my goddamn head together. 

I woke up on the wrong side of eternity. 

I woke up to grey, to skies that go nowhere. Outside my empty home is an empty street that goes in every direction but away; every path leads you right back here.

There’s nothing here.

There’s a body sleeping, dreaming, but she’s not really here. Her mind is somewhere else, off in the infinite recesses of imagination. She’s tethered to this simple form by a thin little breath of air. 

I feel like a little ship, abandoned and adrift. Mine is a little craft made of flickering light, afloat in a sea of shadows. You can watch me bob under the waves, taking on darkness like so many waves of water.

The darkness pulls me down. It seeps into me, into my clothes, into my pores, into my prose. It takes me over, becomes me, replaces me. It sings my songs in my voice, so sweetly, no-one would ever know or notice the difference.

She sings me to sleep, her hands knotted about my throat. 

I was a teenage vampire, and she was just another Miss Stake. 

She pierced my heart like she was driving a tiny piece of metal through the head of my cock. She tied her hair in knots around my throat, so I couldn’t breathe or escape. 

She put teeth to veins, and she gave me sweet release. Yeah, she coaxed it out of me, in shuttering gasps. Like dying, or something else. 

I was smooth and handsome. I dated beautiful girls online. I was poetic, and mentally nimble. I was full of facts and fictions, and I knew how to blend them together. 

She smiled, and swallowed me like a soft drink, like a bit of pop.

Pop.

Against her lips, and down her throat. 

Pop. 

I was too old for the movies, too young for internet radio. I found myself trapped between states, existing and digital, broadcasting desperation and hunger on every available frequency. 

She smiled, and spat me across the room like smoke. 

Cruelty was her only kindness; “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she says it over and over again, writing it across my skin with the tip of her knife. I love her, I love her, I love her need to hurt me deeper and deeper each day.

I’m so cool and so removed. I’m so into her, I’m so deep into her, its like we’re lovers, or strangers who’ve been paid to fuck in front of the cameras. Invisible cameras; the eyes of the world. 

Watching us. Watching us. Watching us fall in love.

She loves with her skin, her mouth, her growing sense of abandonment. She stands, scowling in the mist of the room, undressing like a sulky stripper. She sits, on the edge of the conversation, painting her fingernails with baby’s blood. Her last victims semen still dripping from the pauses in her phrases.

I sound her out; she sounds like bad advice. Bad advice, from a good friend.

I sound her out, test her out in my mouth, run her over my lips and tongues like she’s running me over with her car. She drives a big, fast car. Like the kind driven by dames, in old movies. It’s not very fuel-efficient, but it’s nice to look at. Smooth. Sleek. Aerodynamic.

She’s dynamic; like pop rocks and soda, making your guts bleed and burst. She’s pop rocks and drain cleaner; a caustic blend of sweet sugars and chemical combinations that burn. 

I feel sort of burned, from my time with her. Burned out, like I was used for too long. Burned up, like I was something to be consumed. 

I sound her out; her name, her voice. I try her on for size, see how she fits. She’s like a glove, a thin plastic glove applied for health reasons, or maybe I’m just doing my hair. I’m not sure what I’m doing, but I’m for sure doing her. She fits me, it’s a fitting situation, snug like a glove. Snug like a bug, in a rug.

I sound her out, her vowels and participles; I let them dangle from my lips like spit. Then I swallow her, her sounds, her voice, her gentle little suggestions of silence. Swallow her up tight. 

She shot from the hip; that’s where a lot of her feminine grace and majesty and mystery spread out from, from the hips. 

She’s noir as the ash of a cigarette. She’s as fetish as the cherry of a cigarette, pressing up against a hot, taut body. She’s as silent as fireworks, she’s as dry as drowning in a waterfall. Falling and falling and-

Wait, what were talking about again?

She hits below the belt; she’s either gonna kick my ass or suck my cock. She breaks my trigger fingers, breaks them off, and uses them for herself. She’s as succulent as a good mistake on a bad day. 

“Fuck that. Fuck you.” Hands full of metal, swimming in blood and sexual fluids. She’s carving her destiny out of living letters, she’s sending me letters and living between the lines. Yeah, she’s mailing me her memories and her meat, letting me see what she looks like between the atoms of air between her and I.

She kicks like a drum beat, and she beats like she’s getting off. 

She’s more distressing than damsel. 
She’s as much a disease of language as she is a dame.  

She had an aura of sharp-metal around her, like a shifting semi-invisible haze of barbed wire worn around every inch of her seemingly perfect-and-perfectly-delicious skin. 

Like sunlight became sharp, as it bounced off her skin.

What could she taste like? Honey on the vine? Rainwater in a wine glass? She sounds like a symphony going down on itself, a narcissistic expression of musical grace.

She pins me to the floor with the toe of her shoe. I’m the Millennium Bug under her foot; I’m a digital lie that could shake the earth to its shitty little foundations. I’m a ghost, a rumor, a bad idea, and she’s got me nailed.

Fuck, why do I write about her? Isn’t her existence enough? I feel like I’m throwing fireballs at the gates of Hell.

I feel like she wants something.
Maybe it’s just attention. 

I watch your videos and I listen to your music at the same time, so your play-track is the soundtrack to your own voice. It’s sort of sad; the song, not the art form. Nobody wants to be a total asshole, some of us just like to seem a little edgy.

I could be tired, I could be used up, I could have nothing else to say-
And how could you ever tell, when I still hobble my way back here?

I listen to you talk, and I wish I could… Well, I could understand you, if I wanted to, so maybe I wish that I could transform us both into giant glowing gods, three miles high and radioactive in our ability to love.

I wish I could make us imperfect duplicates of ourselves, a billion bodies for us each, so we could form mountainous armies and rule the world with our laziness and our inertia.

You make your plans; I make plots.
Grave-plots, where I lay down dreams to die.

Sometimes I write about things that make me uncomfortable.
Sometimes I write about you.
Can you tell the difference?

Fuckin’ just look at her go. 

That girl’s so fucking hot.
That girl’s so fucking wild.
That girl’s got a fucking tapeworm.

Yeah, she told me about it once, over cheap beers. I did the buying, she did the drinking.

“Caught it while swimming through some real murky shit water,” she confessed. She’s drinking a local beer; it’s bright yellow, like wasps. The bright buzzing warning yellow colour of wasps. 

“But see, the thing is like, it’s not a parasite. It’s a symbiote. You know? Like, it helps me, and it does a bunch of useful stuff.”

“Like what?” I had to ask.

“Well like, for one thing? I sleep like, two hours a day. And it’s a deeper, more restful sleep than a normal person could get in eight hours. And that’s just like, to start.”

She grins wildly at me, and flexes her biceps through her torn black T-shirt. “Super-strong, super-fast… And not like, tearing buildings down strong, but… You know how like, in emergencies, people can become super-strong for a few moments?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ve all heard crap like that.”

“Well, I can call that shit up, anytime I want to, thanks to the super-intelligent little worm that lives inside my belly.” She burps. “I’ve got perfect balance, my digestive system is like, I don’t know, a perfect machine from the future or something.”

“That’s pretty cool,” I said. The beer was hitting me a bit harder than her, or maybe she was just used to being louder.

“And it’s like an ipod too,” she went on. “Like, I can hear music, whenever I want. Whatever I want. It’s got recordings of everything I’ve ever heard, you know?”

That doesn’t even make sense, but I’m too far gone now. And she’s so fucking cute. That crazy head of hair, those weird bits of metal she wears in her face, those big black fucking boots that look like they could stomp my head into goo. 

She giggles, she laughs, and when the drinking’s done, she’s gone into the night like a whisper or a cat. I catch a glimpse of her, halfway up a highrise, spinning and dancing like the side of the building was her own private dancefloor. 

What I loved about her, was her hair. The way it burned. Yeah, she’d shampoo with napalm and then set herself alight when it got dark, and I’d follow her burning mane, as she shrieked on ahead of me.

 She told me that she was a ninja, and space princess, and a roller-skating queen. She told me that she was deathly allergic to sobriety and work. On full moons, she bathed in the blood of pickles, and eat half her weight in radishes. She made it an erotic act, every step along the way. It disturbed you too much to watch. It horrified you too much to look away.

 She came with a money-back guarantee, and a fistful of fake quarters. She broke down all the time, but I never tried to take her back. I fixed her up with bits of old calculators, and big fistfuls of black electrical tape. On cold nights, she cuddles up close to me, and whispers little secrets she steals from foreign heads of state. 

We were like teenagers in love, except instead of guns, we were armed with post-human potential; fast-breeding mutant abilities granted by the necessities of life and excitement. 

She looks at me like I’m blowing up inside, and I sorta feel that way. I feel like my liver’s a stick of dynamite exploding itself against the walls of my impenetrable skin. I feel like my heart could go nuclear, and all I’d do is breathe fire and smoke, and smile.

Yeah, I still remember how to smile. She they haven’t stripped that from me yet. 

I’m still well angry-enough to smile. I still know how to see the lighter side of self-destruction and any other kind of affection she offers to me.

Yeah, those girls, they love me like a suicide, like some idiot with his wrists slit, dumping all his problems into the kitchen sink. Those girls, they love me like they’d like to kill themselves, they kiss me just the same as they’d swallow drain-cleaner. They fuck me like a pile of knives left out in the rain.

We were like teenagers in love, except we were old people who’d forgotten who to do everything. 
We’d forgotten how to do everything, except fuck, and lie.

It’s all we were ever really any good at.  

I rode into her life on a dragon. Y’know what I mean? 

I came in all blustering, breathing fire and burning up knights. I came in like something great and magical and ancient, with the power to blot out the sky, and drain the oceans in a single swallow. 

It was like a motorcycle made of living metals. It was like a swarm of crimson-coloured locusts, as beautiful and bloody as a red-skied sunset. It was like entering on a storm built of hurricanes and tidal waves.

I wanted to impress her, or maybe a bit more. Maybe I wanted to shake her to her core. If she wouldn’t love me, through and through and through, maybe I could still impress her, impress myself up on her, metaphorically speaking. 

Metaphorically speaking, she’d slain my dragon in a single night, with its hide pinned to the wall as a warning to others. I barely escaped with my dignity intact, though we did keep dating for a while.

If you know what I mean.