He unwinds like a clockwork ninja, the stealthy edge of the blade pulling out his springs and cogs in a rush of crimson fluid. The liquid is warm, like a lover’s body. The body is cold, like an honest insult.

Night-time and winter. He wears a thick coat to hide his bullet-proof vest, and he hides his emotions inside of a small portable television-set which resides mainly in his back-pocket, where it bulges awkwardly, like a terrible secret.

All these secrets and lies. They’re delicious, like honey spiked with white sugar and crystalline cocaine.

“So what’s the point?” asks a voice, a lady’s voice, a voice that sounds like a hammer breaking sidewalks out of boredom and frustration. “So what’s the point of any of it?”

We laugh, we spin, we fall down, and later… The Vampires come for us, and suck all our goodness out through little holes in our skin. Little holes made with little knives, hidden amongst their teeth.

I don’t keep secrets. I set them free, just to see if they can fly.

God, I wish I was a spaceship, falling from the sky. I wish I had wings big enough to wrap around the world; I’d smoother the place, like a fire that needed putting out. A billion voices silenced, and thrown into the sun. And then I’d laugh about it. You know I would. Sometimes I feel like there’s just this awesome, yawning echo inside myself, and like I was put here to fill that space with cake. And I should kill all those who try to get between me and the cake. Those fuckers. Other times I feel sort of nice, and optimistic about things. Sometimes I feel like one of those liars you see on avertissements, shilling you crap you’ll never need. Or love. 

She went digging around in my mind, looking for an excuse, or maybe a weapon. Something she could use against me. 

She found an army of broken transsexuals, and she stripped them down for parts, making some monster out of fishnet-tights and girlish panties slung for an oversized cock. Undergarments dripping with in baby-oil and dark body-hair. 

I wanted her to come into my world, to stick her tongue in my mouth, to see a bit of her skin flash across my palette. I wanted her to tattoo something abstract and bloody across me, like a car accident cut into my skin. Well, maybe I just wanted her.

She smiled like she was a vampire, watching the sun go down. Then she got down on her knees, and gave me a kiss, both lips parting to show me the way. 

I fell into her, as you might, when you’re falling into things. You tumble, downwards, into the light. Her hands on your shoulders, weighing you down and down and down.

Eventually I wake up, bruised and sticky like a half-eaten peach. 

She’s somewhere across the room, partially-asleep, with the scene of the crime smudged all over her lips. 

I breathe easy, while she’s still around. 

Well shove a safety pin through my lip and kiss me all night - we’re going out like punk rock kids tonight. We’re hitting the walls like teenage kicks, right through the night!

She’s a cup of cold coffee next to a cigarette burning a hole in your favourite leather jacket, and eventually, your arm. She’s a dirty word scrawled in a public place. She’s a knife in the backpocket, hungering for a conflict or a threat. 

She’s a fucking slice of cream pie, dripping down my shirt. She’s a bad idea on a hot day. She’s on my mind like a psychic attack, like a bloody wound that might heal if you could just move on and stop making it worse.

Yeah, but everything I do just seems to make her worse.

She won’t behave.

I’m right where you found me, out in the trash. I’m sinking deeper and deeper into a dumpster of dispair, a garbage bin of grown-up failures. 

I actually dreamed last night that my novel got accepted. 
I don’t know what to do about that.

I’m looking at her ass because I got a shallow disposition and a deep way of putting it. I’m eyeballing her body because I like the way it forms up when she stands tall against the forces that be. I love her physical essence because its where her personality lives, and her personality has really nice tits.

All that I wanted was to distract her from all those lame guys.

Instead, accidentally, I set fire to her house. I set fire to her bed, to take her attention off those jerks who never treat her like she’s special. She cried, like she could crumble into ash. 

All that I wanted, was to be the centre of her world.

I wanted to be drugs for her to get high. I wanted to be formless clouds drifting by overheard, to inspire her imagination. I wanted to be the bugs that sucked her blood. I wanted to be the neighbours that were kept up by her gargling. I wanted to be the garbageman who got her used sanitary products stuck to the sole of his shoe. 

She opened up to me, and spilled her guts out on the floor. She showed me where she’d been stabbed and fucked and betrayed, and where she’d been loved. She’d been loved every once in a while, which is still a lot better than what a lot of other people get.

She sends me chat messages while the emergency crews go to work salvaging her bedroom and her memories. She asks me things like “when will something feel better than this?”

And I type her elegant lies in response. 

We broke down three miles outside of paradise, still in the bomb zone. Our convertible car could drive no further, not on three flat tires and a broken heart.

The car shuttered, and rolled to a gradual stop, along the edge of the road. The passenger’s side wheel drifted into the ditch, and we jumped out, abandoned the ship which had done us so proud for so long. 

You and me, and that little dog of ours, we nearly made it to paradise, but we didn’t get quite all the way, did we? No, instead, we found ourselves stranded under a black sky, a black sky cracked by lightning like ugly lines of breakage marring a pane of glass. 

Yeah, you were always a pain in my ass. 

Now, if you sort of imagine it, you can almost smell the sea, the surf, the safety, of where we were headed. But you can’t, not really. You can smell the rotting foliage, and the charred dirt at our feet. 

I notice you kicking a half-hollowed out stone ahead of yourself; a second before it bursts against a larger rock, the jaw drops open on it, and you realize that you were booting a human head for thirty feet down the road. You sort of giggled, and gagged. I heard you, ignored you. 

Three miles outside of paradise, as the bombs begin to fall. 

I hear you muttering something to yourself. I bet it’s something bitter, and off-putting. One of your weirdly timed jokes that never seem to make sense. Those stories that make you sound like fear self-awareness. 

Fuck it. Let them burn off my skin and fry my meat and turn my bones to ash. Let the bombs crush me with kinetics. Flay the hide from my form. Burn the ground down to the core, so nothing ever breathes around here again. Let the lava come up to take what was once rightful its domain - the surface.

Three miles outside of paradise, and the car breaks down.
We get to walking.  

Let me draw you a picture: my pencil’s broken and my pen’s out of ink, but I think I can scratch something into the sidewalk that’ll sort of resemble this dream I had the other night. 

You were in it. You were wearing armour, all over yourself, all over your heart. I tried to drive a knife through it; I think I thought you were some sort of vampire monster, come to suck all the goodness out of my life. You were in my dream, wearing armour, like a knight, on the hunt for evil. You looked strong, noble even. I was very proud of you, in a way. I still tried to kill you, to strike you down. 

I can see my stories reflected in the constellations overhead. This epic poem that is one man’s soul’s thing’s struggle to preserver. This life, bending and compromising, more and more every day, in an attempt to get me… what, exactly? What do I hope to get out of this? 

Let me stay at home. Let me send out for food. Let me lock out the sun and annoying voices. Let me take time to learn. Let me grow as a person, instead of just being something convenient to purposes. I want to find my way. My memory. I want to remember.

I remember falling to earth pieces. Falling. I remember failing, failing to notice I was growing older, but the world was staying the same goddamn age. It’s just my ass that keeps changing. Everybody else, well, they were already there, weren’t they? They always were. 

Let me draw you a picture; let me draw you in a little closer.
Let me admit something:
 

You can love me, you can, just don’t lose sight of me.

Don’t fall so in love with me that it’s the momentum you crave, and not the impact. Don’t fall so hard, so fast, until you’re sure that you can handle the heat and the cold, the wind and the rain. The storm of soupy static that stomps across the screen like a sad show about sorrowful saps. 

You can love me, just… wash your hands first.

“I think I’m in love,” I breathe in her ear, like a threat, like a stranger’s fist wrapped around a knife, standing in the open mouth of a darkened alleyway. “I think I’m in love,” I say like it’s a bomb-blast or a key-code, a password to the forbidden layer of the beast. 

You can love me, just be a little cautious, and not unkind. 

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. 

It’ll take a long time for me to forget how bad I let you hurt me.

It’ll take a long time for these bruises to heal; I’m all bloody, under the skin. My skin is a ziplock bag, trapping all my freshness inside. I’m all bloody for you, from you, just under my skin.

I remember you driving up and down my skin, my body, my flesh, like I was your favourite back road. I remember being played over and over again by you like I was your favourite mix-tape, but you only liked Side A, so you just rewound me to play the best bits over and over and over again.

Flip me over and over and over again. Make a little more room in the bed, for me, for you, for your memories and all your new friends. 

We were less like peas in a pod, and more like bunnies in the belly of a snake. 

I remember you, I remember your hands, what you made for dinner, the way you made the bed, the way you made me cry. I remember everything about you, except why you left me here like this. 

“It took being in love with you to show me just how much of a liar I could be.”

I try to laugh it off, but it cuts a little close to the bone. Her teeth remind me of tombstones; I don’t know why I just thought that. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. 

The walls of the apartment are green and red. Green from that horrible dead-frog coloured paint we bought together, to cover over the luminescent teal that’d been here before us. Red from the flames that are slowly crawling up towards the ceiling. Happy little spiders of fire, growing fatter as they rise up the walls.

“What we think we know about ourselves, becomes a trap. A trap of expectations, of requirements.” She looks at me like she’s nailing my soul to the floor. 

I’m rooted to my chair, daring her to go first.

The kitchen table is where we took our breakfasts together. One time we almost made love on it, but there’s no way it would’ve supported that sort of activity. Now we’re burning alive at it, burning up like all those crispy slices of bacon we consumed together. 

It’s hot in here. Hot and smokey. 

“But I think I’m ready for a change,” she tells me. Somewhere, the ceiling is caving in. Somewhere, some other time, some time after all this, we’re ashes, and we’re rising up from the ashes. 

Some time later in life, we’re rising up into the sun.

And it’s fucking glorious. 

N. Sometimes I sit here, in my cloud of smoke, and I look out on the closed blinds of the city, and It think to myself, “aw fuck all that nonsense anyway. I could stab those bastards a thousand times a day, I could eat their children and fuck their eyes, and they’d have forgotten my name in a fortnight. What’s the fucking point of anything, ever at all?”

I’m one of those people who likes having enemies. I think it’s sorta safe to keep something to hate. I accept that other people are ideologically arming themselves against me, and that at some point I’m going to have to give the culture a good infection of myself. I guess maybe I already am, that’s the point. The point is where you jab into their thin little arms with your hungry hypodermics. 

My point is: ah, fuck, why not? I’m feeling impure because my motivation is hunger and boredom. Is that a bad reason to want people to love you, because you’re hungry and bored and you want something to play with so you can feel like your big sharp claws aren’t going to waste just clawing at the furniture of the house when there’s nobody around and you can’t sleep late at night?

I just want beautiful things to love me; I want them to love me so they’ll be mine for the taking without my having to put any work into it. I’ll never be that beautiful, but I could fool a few slick cunts into thinking I was that clever. And maybe then, for a second, I would be. 

Fuckin’ clever.

I’d love to be clever, I’d love to slap that clever smile off your lips, I’d love to have just one moment with nothing but sweat and mumbles to keep us apart, I’d love to have some perspective on what I’m doing with myself when I’m smashing up against these, you know, invisible, intangible, indelible walls. 

I’m not what she sees when she looks at me; I’m an echo of what she really wants; I’m a subversion of her desires, made manifest.

She takes me on like I’m not her brand of cigarette, but she’ll make do if she must. Yeah, she’ll choke me down with something that looks almost like a smile. She’ll light me up just because she likes to feel something burn. She likes to feel it, as it burns. It doesn’t even have to burn for her.

But I’ll burn for her. I’ll turn myself into dry, chalky ash on her lipstick-stained fingertips. I’ll let her squeeze my soul out, like mud coming up between her toes. 

She tells me that she’s in love with me, but that’s not what I hear. I just see that look on her face, and I know what I’m getting myself into; something I can’t understand or foresee with any relevance. 

She’s just something that’s going to happen to me; and happen hard. 

I’ve no God. No heaven. Only her.

I’ve no Devil, no hell in which my eternal soul shall burn.

I’ve only her.

I’ve got no science-fiction, no flying cars, no jetpacks, no cloned armies of warrior poets, no mutant warriors fighting to be free.

I’ve got no old mythic heroes, no stars in the sky, no sunlight to fall upon me when I awaken. I’ve got no dreams, and nowhere to lay down to die.

Just her. Just her. Just her.

I’ve got no afterlife ahead of me. I’ve got no past behind me. No blood in my veins, no thoughts in my head.

No Gods. No rules. No reason.

I’ve only her. 

I need a girl. Just for a minute or two.

I need a muse. I need a little angel to wipe my cock off on. I need to be inspired, and to be left alone to do something with that inspiration. 

“This is the worst place on earth,” he tells her, his hand reaching uncomfortably for the cock that swings loosely under her thousand-dollar latex skirt. “You’ll die here.”

“Stay long enough in the best place in the world darling,” she tells him, “and you’ll die there, too.”

I need a woman, a face, a body, a place to happen, a victim. I need a heart that functions as a hotel room, somewhere I can pay to spend a bit of time, chopping up victims and masturbating to cheap, ugly pornography.

Yeah, chopping up bodies, and editing memories. Slicing up eyeballs. 
Don’t you get it yet?
I want you to know.
Slicing up eyeballs. I want you to you know.

I want a girl who’s so groovy. I don’t know about you. But I want you to know. I want a girl who’s so groovy.
And I want to
Debase her.