I stumble through the streets, stuttering automatic-weapons-fire like I’m screaming obscenities at a crowd. I think I am screaming; my voice is tearing through my throat like I’m screaming fire. Spitting fire as I hurl little lead stones the size of death, all through the air. 

You have to take a moment, to try to savour those perfect moments.

Sirens screaming, fires blazing, the sewer system exploding beneath our feet. Everything burns if you apply enough want. You could set a whole town on fire, just for laughs. Brutal simplicity; me + you = nothing.

I take a moment to smell the air, as it catches on fire. Yeah, take a sniff of the morning air, catch a beam of the morning sun, and then just walk away, leaving streets full of broken corpses, crying to their false gods. False fucking gods. No false gods have I, mind you. I worship only the kinetic bliss of the bullet, and the sting of stab to the face.

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.  

I’m a time-bomb, waiting to get off. 

She’s got big goth circles painted around her eyes, and she’s got a porn-star’s vacant stare plastered across her face. She’s not smiling, but she’s welcoming. She’s welcoming me in, into her life, into her type of trouble. 

Have you ever dated a troubled girl? I got a phone call from the asylum one night; she said, “they’re trying electroshock on me now,” but she sounded so far away and fucked up that I couldn’t even be sure it was her.

Yeah, I’ve had lovers with shaved heads. Girls who panhandled. People who had nowhere to go, if they couldn’t go there with you. Souls that lacked direction. 

She winds me up, sets my clock, and licks my thermite connectors. I buzz in her hands like a box full of bees. 

I let her strip me naked, and slip away between her fingers. I don’t feel like something that can be caught or grasped, today. I feel sort of adrift and hungry. 

She asked me to hit her, so I did. Open palm transitioned to closed-fist. I told her to close her eyes, and I watched her tremble. 

We rode each other like we wanted to break the bed; the sun outside denied access by those thick curtains, thick like a cement wall. We bounced off the walls, like superballs, until we ached all over, fire ants in our veins, biting at our bits from within.

I was torturous, sadistic, cruel, and sometimes even creative. She cried loudly, at several points in time, and came even louder. She came like there was storm in her cunt, full of lightning and rainclouds. 

I held her down, in cold water. I washed her clean, and spit in her face. I told her what I thought of her, how much I adored her, in the worst words I knew. I used language on her like a whip, meant to make her bleed. I lashed at her with my tongue, until we both were sore. 

And I hit her. After she asked me to. Hard enough to make her see stars. Another time, to make her lip almost bleed. She swooned and adored me.

We held each other in the dark.

We didn’t fall in love, we were pushed, by loneliness and televised advertisement for alcohol. We were shoved together by our own fear of abandonment, and other issues generated through our misbegotten upbringings. 

We woke up late on Sunday morning; too late for Church, too late for Sunday Night Football. We woke up, our bodies smeared in the blood of virgins and the drugs of whores, and we fell in love like a drunk falling down the stairs. She stared into my eyes, and I XXXX’d her in her XXXXXXXX. We giggled like school kids selling drugs, and stayed up for hours on end, just drinking coffee and fucking like a pile of weasels in heat. 

I licked her up like I couldn’t put her down. She was a strange sort of recipe for Disaster Cake. Disaster Cake with Chaotic Frosting. A pie of pure pain. 

I know these girls, online. They say, “I wish I could be your muse,” and I say back to them, “just spread your legs and tell me something stupid about yourself.” The good ones smile and obey; the worser ones need a bit more convincing. In the business, we call that the Long Con.

Eventually she’s going to pull my head under water. She’s going to hold me down and watch the bubbles trickle up from my lips. 

Eventually, she’s gonna be my girl. 

I want to fall down an abandoned well.

I want to discover a magical kingdom full of horrible wonders; sharp-mouthed fairies who pull the flesh from your bones in sharp little nips, like hungry horseflies. And goblins, with crude iron knives, hidden under tables and chairs. Flowers that bloom in the moonlight and piss acidic mucous from their stems.

I want to have an adventure. I want to make somebody fall in love with me. I want to make everybody fall in love with me, and then I want to turn them on each other, like a hungry cannibal mob that just discovered the perfect solution to its problem.

I want you to know me as I am. I want you to cross miles to ask me to sleep with you. I want you give me snacks and encouragement. I want you to stay out of my way and leave me alone. I want you to read between the lines, and to just be yourself. Your horrible, brutal, ugly self. 

And I’ll just be me. Glimmering with strange perfections, full to the teeth with a sort of unwieldy charm that desecrates the spirit and makes mockery of lonely hearts. I’ll just be me, at least for a few more hours.

Then it might be time to try something new.

The circus is coming to town: rush down to the big open field to watch them setting up! See the acts before they start the show! 

Look: It’s a pack of miniature dragons! Only inches long, these little flying monsters are capable of exhaling flames that’ll light your cigarette or remove an eyebrow! 

Watch: the amazingly unbearded woman is shaving her trick otters! She’s so beautiful, with those strange little teeth, and elongated fingers. If you ask her nice, she might let you peek up under her skirt, so you can see how she got her name.

Observe: The Invisible Lovers, known only by their sounds of copulation and the wet stains they leave behind. How much would you pay to know? Probably everything you’ve got.

Check it: they’re setting up the Wonderwall! Nobody feels the way I feel about you now. You never knew it, you’ll never really get it, but it’s so fucking true, that it breaks my heart a dozen ways to see you deny it. Nobody feels the way I feel about you now. All those walked winding roads. Blinding lights. The Wonderwall is built of golden bricks, and it climbs up into the sky like a false sun. Watch it grow! You might be the one that’ll save me.

Yes, the circus has come to town, with all its tricks and shows. 

Smile bright, and take my hand. We’ll go down and see it all together. 

“Make your mama sigh,” I mutter to myself, steering my jet-pack across the city.

Deep in the dusty subways of the city, the last of the royal family is slithering, laying eggs the size of human-head that hatch into scaly flesh-eating monstrosities with hides as dark as black magic, and hearts as ugly as sin.

My aim is sure and my blade is sharp and my jet-pack is very fast. I am scared, but this fear drives me, drives me on, drives me on into darkness. 

The Queen’s got claws that can carve through cement like it was soft butter. The Queen’s hungry for human hearts and the fingers of babies. The Queen breathes cruelty and soft curses, muting the air around her and depriving it of oxygen. Yeah, it’s hard to breathe around her. Her great, bulbous eyes can see through time and space and city walls.

She knows I’m coming.

But my aim is sure, and my blade is sharp, and my jet-pack is very fast. 

I meet her in the darkness, of the abandoned city’s abandoned subway system. She screamed for vengeance in a language spoken only by the great extinct lizard who used to rule this land. She screamed for my life. She screamed that she wanted to tear me into shreds. Her eggs trembled with anticipation, still-sleeping lizard-monster-babies dreaming of destruction.

She wants to kill me. She wants to devour me. She wants to destroy me.

But my aim is sure, and my blade is sharp. And my jet-pack is very fast. 

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.  

“You’re so pretty when you’re smoking,” I tell her, watching little dark clouds swarm out from between her dark little lips.

“I’m so pretty all the goddamn time,” she says, sorta regretfully, noticing herself seemingly for the first time in the reflectively black windows of the close-down storefronts that are built up like great walls of China along either side of the street. 

Me, I’m not that pretty. I’m just pretty easy to get ahold of. I wear a long coat that gets caught in the wind, and I’ve got big ideas that get caught on my teeth, trying to get out. “Can I have a little of that?” I ask her, reaching for the bit of flame she wore on the end of her little paper stick.

“You get a little,” she warns me, all big soft eyes and womanly curvature, “you’re just going to want a little more a little later.”

“I guess I’m okay with that then,” I say, but I say it like it’s a threat, like I want her to be a little worried about me getting hooked on her. I feel like a reflection of want that’s living on its own, like a junkie actor playing a junkie rockstar in a shitty movie nobody watched anyway.

She is so pretty when she’s smoking.
And she’s fucking gorgeous when she’s on fire. 

I mean well, but I still wind up feeling like I should be apologizing to my friends about being such a crazy fucker.

I still have conversations where I suggest that I’d eliminate free-speech. I get into these moments where I start to expose myself as a Pacifist Sadist, and I suddenly worry about how the room is going to see me. Have I gotten too used to talking with perverts and sex dolls? Can I still communicate like a normal person? Could I ever?

Actually, part of it’s him | you | him. He makes me feel… stupid? Silly? Like I’m being an obnoxious little child, saying stupid things. But I’m really just trying to be a fucking poet, I’m trying to express, to be myself. 

“Just trying to be myself.”
Why do I always feel like I have to tell you I’m sorry for that?

It’s all comic book fantasy shit, violent imagery and sexual implications. I don’t know what they expect from me, if they never read what I’m writing anyway. 

Throw the map away. Say “fuck it.” Push down on the gas pedal, and start to drive. 

She starts to laugh, and she starts to start fires. She dripping gasoline from her fingertips and she’s dropping lit matches from her mouth. 

Her teeth are as red as blood, or maybe that’s a trick of the light. Maybe she’s just got a mouth full of blood, like she’s been sucking boys dry all night. Her teeth, if she’s got them, are as red as blood, but everything about her is just a trick of the light.

I’d pay good money to have her gouge my eyes out. Gouge me out and replace me with something shinier and fresher and something less plagued by doubts and anger. I’d pay good money to have her split herself in half and burn the world while she’s at it. I’d pay good money to have a nice long bad day. I’d give everything I’ve got to share it with you.

She debases me, with her music, with her sense of humour. I make plans and she pisses all over them. She shoves me, facedown, into the trunk of her car, and she takes me with her like a bad memory she can’t seem to escape. I’m something she can’t ever get over, when she’s backing over me with her car. 

She can’t back out of this. She can’t get through it. She just put combustibles on the open fire, and walks away slowly. 

I had this perfect moment all planned out.

You were going to turn to go, and I was going to take your hand. 

And I was going to snap off that bracelet I always wear; the black faux-leather one with the metal studs. 
And I was going to snap it around your wrist.

And I was going to look into your eyes and I was going to say, “I’m not giving you this to keep. I’m going you this so you can give it back to me when you get back.”

My bracelets all have different advantages, some just for me.
+3 to Will
+4 to Cool 
+1 to Warmth

But the moment went by, or maybe it just never came. I waited, but my bracelet stayed on my wrist, and you stayed, not in town. We slipped away; me onto a train, you onto a plane, and we went to our separate worlds; you went North to save your friends from the cold and the dark. I went back to work to …

Well, I’m not really sure what I do around here anymore.

If you and I and her were all adventurers, I’d be the one who stayed at home and typed up the meeting notes, while you two went out to crack heads for justice. You’d call me in at the last moment, if you needed a rest, or some sexy back-up.

The two of you could fall in love, and I could bask in it. You’d smile at me, and I’d smile back through the glare of a billion suns exploding together just inches from our faces. When the two of you kissed I feel ecstatic, rather than jealous or defeated. 

We were a team. A team or artists. A team of anarchists. A team of team-mates, team-mating. Building strange connections and beautiful displays of imagination - a thousand feet tall, and as high as our minds. I kiss the smoke as your skins kiss each other. Down at the beach, the waves devour toes like popcorn.