Don’t you hate it when people try to simplify your problems?

I’m flying now, floating below the waves. I’m not sinking, I’m just rising to the bottom of the sea. I’m soaring ever downwards and downwards. 

I’m doomed, or I’d like to think I am, and I’m gonna take you down with me, because you look like the sort who’d enjoy something like that.

So close your eyes, and jump. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Close your eyes and forget your name. Forget the sound of your voice in your mouth. Forget your need for sex and comfort and food. Forget every lie I ever whispered in your ear.

I just wanted you to pay attention to me.
I just wanted you to pay for my meal. 

I want to be devoured in deep water. I want to feel my skin shredding as a million tiny teeth tear me to pieces. I want an ocean burial. I want to be lost at sea.

Your voice is the trail of breadcrumbs leading me back to myself. All your other lovers are the stray birds, devouring up the bits and leaving me lost in the woods. All my lovers are the trees, and I cannot see the forest for them. All the blood in my veins is drowning me and drowning me and dragging me down down down.

I dream of setting you on fire.

She kisses with her lips. She breathes electricity down my throat.

I met her for coffee on the edge of town. The real edge, where there’s just a little cafe with half its foundations running off the side of a cliff. Look over the side and you’re looking off into forever.

I’m scrolling down my matches on the internet dating site while she flirts with me and waiter at the same time. She blinks and giggles like an animated gif, shaking loose pixels free in the rain.

I think I want to sleep with her, but honestly, when I wake up in these grey rainy mornings, I think I probably want to sleep with everybody in the world. Even the snorers. I just want to be comforted. I want to be consoled. I want to be told that somebody cares. That something’s going be alright. 

I want to be consoled like a video-game, my smile and charm turned into bitmapped boyishness. I wanted to be squared away. I wanted to looked upon as a love-charm, or some sort of sextoy for the superstitious.

Yeah, I get her laid, but she’s still unlucky. What happens next? We find out where she lives, and take her home. Repaint the walls while she’s straightening-up. Smile and lie when the questions start coming.

She starts coming; I finish my letter and send it off.

Your kisses fill me up with honey. I overflow, my head goes back, and the thick sticky stuff drips from my lips. I look lost in a drunken haze, or maybe rapturous. 

Her heart is shaped like a cartoon bomb; round and black and ready to go off. She loves falling in love. She loves kissing strangers.

Me, I love mirrors, and the handle of a leash. I like privacy, and being in control. I like not being noticed. I like calling shots.

I suffer from too much of a good thing. I languish from a lack of it. I try to create perfect moments with imperfect people, and I wind up reaping in winter, when the earthen floor of the fields have grown cold and hard.

Cold and hard like life.

Cold and hard like she gets when I mistreat her, or try to guilt her into seeing things my way.

Everything shutters sometimes. Buildings and bridges bend in the wind.

My heart beats like its scared of stopping. That’s how I love, like I’m scared of stopping. 

Outside, rainwater turns the world distant and grey.

She writes poetry like she’s filming homemade pornography. Or maybe it’s snuff, judging by how deeply she opened that vein. You could call her vain, just estimating by all those photos she posts.

She smiles into the camera, but rarely in person. 

She imagines: atomic death from on high. Angels armed with hunter-destroyer robot armies. Bio-enhanced biblical scholars chasing zen enlightenment with shotguns and cold hearts.

She tells me: What I really want to do is direct.
Traffic.
Into the heart of the sun.

She’s like a comedy album, the sort of thing you could drop a needle into, and run a groove through. She’s funny. Looking? She’s always looking, for trouble, or for somebody to trouble. She’s clever, like a crow stealing food off the far side of your picnic table. 

I bite into her, but she’s too much myth and illusion. I’m really just chewing on my lip, until its bloody and sore. Smoke and mirrors are pretty as scenery, but you can’t really take them to bed.

But she’s out there, somewhere. A thousand miles above the earth, floating like a satellite, out in space. 

She’s broadcasting. 

She wrote about me in her blog last night.

I could tell it was me, from the things she left out. 

She didn’t describe my bad breath, or my recent weight gain. 

She described my sexual organs as “ravenous” and “gothic in design, somehow”. She said my eyes looked like broken windows looking in on a burnt out hotel full of dead junkies and hungry hookers.

I treat her like a vampire; I worship her, and I fear her like she’s the villain in the movie. I dress like her, and I draw her shadows on my wall so I can feel like she’s watching me when I’m all alone.

I wish, I wish, I wish she’d drink my blood.
Instead of just keeping that blog.

But she won’t kill me. She won’t finish me off. She won’t satisfy me.

She just writes about me, using metaphors to mask my more obvious character traits. My sadism becomes a desire to play with balloons, and my heartless ferocity is instead a well-trained dog that sleeps at her feet.

She blogs about me, about our secret lives, together.

I blog about her, reflectively.

Hey girl, where you going, with that gun in your hand?

She was a wartime lover I took in a peaceful place. I shot her boyfriend dead, and I stomped her girlfriend into the mud. They were my enemies, and I was an army of one, soldering from one end of this earth to another.

(Can you hear them, their lamentations and cries? The little children, and the orphaned mothers. They are the kings and queens of the battlefield. They are the survivors of the fire from the sky.)

Love, baby, it could happen right now. We could fall in love. We could fall from the sky like stones from outer space, and devastate everything we touch. We could be glowing gods, meteoric, tumbling ever downwards like slow motion lightning crashes.

We could be an end to a means. We could be an ending to all meanings.

Hers was the finishing touch. She ran a fingertip up my spine and down my sense of courage. She felated my sense of self-esteem, and she whispered dirty secrets to my cock. She made me feel like a giant in a child’s clothing. She made me feel like a death-threat, written in blood and left tacked to the front door.

She made me feel like fucking.

She made me feel like a fucking mess.

She could break me. She could burn me. She could use me up, and throw me away. And I’d still find myself, crawling back out out of that gutter, and back here, to you.

I can always find myself, when I’m crawling back to you.

He was the tattooed man. She was the warrior. 

I took drugs, and watched them dance. I was a bum, a storyteller. I was a man with nowhere to go. I was a bookkeep, boring as the same dull tale told every day. 

He had a story inscribed across his skin. He had dragons and demons and waves of rich blue water, curling across his epidermal layer. 

She moved like a hummingbird, cutting down opposition with a blade four feet long and harder than steel. 

I was broken casette-tape of punk-rock anthems, all sold out and used up. I was something that used to mean something, reduced to party-slogans and televised commercials for useless shit that nobody in their right mind would ever want. 

They were a couple of, you know, people who were going to change the world. And I was just some loser, sitting on the sidelines, listening to them regaling the story with their fascinating stories of how fucking cool they were, day after day after day, like some prison sentence of awesomeness. 

Well fuck them, and fuck you too. What’d we ever do for each other, aside from lay a bunch of cancerous dinosaur eggs in-between each other’s ears? Long extinct trains of thought, rattling like a box of bones falling forever down the stairs towards that goddamn root cellar and all the monsters we buried beneath its earthen floor.

Everything about her was wrong. Which made her just right for my purposes.

Check her out: she lives in a crooked apartment building at the end of a long, crooked street. She’s in room 1313, or maybe it’s 666. One of those silly, ominous numbers you’d expect to see scrawled in the margins of some high school kid’s mathematics notebook.

She’s broken like fine China, and maybe she’s Asian, too, like common everyday China. Maybe she’s got slanted eyes, maybe she speaks a language that sounds like babbling birds in my ears, but mostly likely, all I’m interested in is the slit that sleeps under her skirt.

She’s fucking crazy. She thinks she can hear the airplanes flying silently overhead. She thinks she can hear satellites spinning in space. She thinks she’s going to be born-again, bullet-proof and laser-emitting. High Frequency Fuckery, that’s what she’s all about. 

You’re not going to talk me out of it, you’re going to dissuade me from my course of action. I’m as certain as a suicide now, one who’s already pulled the trigger, swallowed the pills, and thrown himself off the highest surface he could find.

A cliff, deep in the woods, overlooking the sea.
A building downtown, like a shiny silver icon of capitalist need.

But I fall down to Earth like a bombblast trapped in an all-too-mortal frame. That’s what they never understood about me.

Sure.

Sure, I’m falling.

But I land like lightning.
Right in the palms of your hands.

You might escape me, but you’ll never break me. 

I have a slippery sense of attention to detail. I sort of see where I’m going, but it’s like skateboarding in the rain; it’s more like surfing, really. But hey, it can’t rain all the space/time continuum, y’know what I’m implying, there? Right there? It’s a whole… It’s a whole thing. 

I’m leave a map for you to come find me. “All Jack makes work a dull boy.” When you find me, I’m going to read you your fortune cookie with a meat-cleaver and a roll of duct tape. I’m going to give you the gift of eternal life, and cookies. 

Well, maybe not cookies. Those are my cookies. You might not be able to have any. I don’t know if I brought enough to share. 

She, this girl, the one I’m writing about, she’s got a bass-line for a heart-beat. I flicker like a candle-flame, to her little pulsing rhythm, whenever she’s in the room. I’m like one of those little dancing novelty cans that springs to life when a sound activates its little motor. I love like a dancing toy with grinding little plastic gears. 

If. I. Could. I’d… I dunno. Be awesome. Wrap myself in her, in you. I’d fall away and be clever and stupid and not the usual dumb/numb channel my tube gets tuned into. 

You know what I’m talking about? Tonight?

We danced like two great lizards fucking in a mud-hole, fucking or fighting, bloody of tooth and claw, in the style of the savage. 

There was music; there’s always been music, in my mind, ever since the stroke. The broken parts of my brain tune in stray radio signals, and transform them into rhythms and beats. 

As she moved, I studied the rise and fall of her breasts, as though I were watching empires form up and fall away. I imagine the cultural implications of it all, as she jiggled thusly, all mammary glands and nipples. 

I felt like a runaway train on melted tracks; and endless phallic symbol falling into ruin. The tunnels crumble and the sky falls in. The sky cracks and goes black, like nighttime or urban culture. The sky cracks, and falls away, and does not come back.

I pull her down to my level, which just happens to be where the bed is. We get inside, slowly, cautiously, like we’re setting a bomb to go off. We’re all trigger-switches and sultry stares. Until the lights go on, and then we swap roles, and sometimes clothes and spit. We turn all crackly and sharp like bacon burning in the pan.

She puts her lips to mine, and takes a bite.

She’s like a concrete angel in a graveyard, raindrops flowing down her sheer stone face like tears. 

So I take up my hammer, and I chip away at her.

In fragmented form, she slips between my sheets; she’s crumbs under my pillow. She gets between my teeth, and into the pores of my skin. 

She’s like a concrete angel, but softer, sharper around the edges. She’s got a collection of razor-blades for wings; razor-blades she stole off of still-bleeding suicides. She stick them all up and down her back, until she can set loose and fly. Little droplets raining down as she cast out her wingspan; don’t worry, it’s never her blood.

She takes me into her bed, and she breaks against me, like the way the sea breaks on the shore. She’s as wet and wide open as the ocean. Yeah, she breaks open, just like a piñata, but she cries, just like a little squirrel. 

We stayed up all night. Smoking drugs, trying to look cool. We flexed muscles and laughed about subtle, little lies. The kinds only real friends share, in the dark, all alone. Yeah, we shared secrets between us like we had sexually transmitted infections for private jokes. Giggles up and down the length of our genitalia.

She’s like a concrete angel, the kind prayed to by skateboard kids and edgy goth who want to make love in cemeteries. 

But really, she’s just a cold hard bitch.
An’ I love her for it. 

Deep in the park, in the morning, as the is still rising and the air is still cool, I can feel something chasing me. Something almost invisible, something hateful and fast. A hunting thing, with fangs and claws and a empty space in its belly where I could be. 

I keep my head down, and I keep moving. My breath is heavy in my lungs, and thick too. My breath feels like chunks of metal rasping in my lungs. The air is like a knife, cutting down inside my throat.

Within my chest, my heart thumps like a drum, or a bomb, escalating to go off. My veins are highways of blurry motion. My brain feels like a traffic accident; bent metal with flammable chemical spilt all over. Just waiting for a spark.

Something in the half-dark of the dawn, in the cold air that turns to sticky hotness as it reaches my lips, something is moving after me. Hunting me. Tracking me. I try to push on, but I can feel it, so close behind me.

I shutter. Gravel gives way under my feet, and I wait for its breath to heat my side, for its mouth to dip down into my flesh. It’ll tear me apart. It’ll ravage me, savage me to bits and pieces on the ground. It’ll eat the best bits of me, and leave the rest of me to bleed out, alone on the ground, so early in the morning. 

The cry that leaves me will be a whisper. I’ll have no breath to shout or scream. My blood will be soaked up by the soil, and I’ll die, I’ll die, I’ll die. Alone in the woods. Torn apart by some unthinking thing that just wanted to see my skin ripped off from my bones.

I wait for the end to come. But until then, I keep moving. 

She came into my life riding a sixteen-foot long purple squid with bright green eyes. It’s name was Lyle, and she called herself, Jennifer: Queen Of FuckAll. 

At first I asked her “what’s a fuckle?”, but that just got me a dirty look and a hard backhand across the front of my face. I bounced back pretty fast though, and had a couple of drinks ordered for us before the blood had even had time to dry. 

We lived that way for a while, getting by on nothing more than nonsense and stolen candy.  We slept liked bats; naked and going “eee-eee-eee” all night long. We made so much noise the neighbours mistook it for the end of the world and started tearing wallpaper off their walls to make room for the rapture. 

Fuck, I didn’t mean to make trouble for anybody; I was just hoping we could crumble a little together, like two cookies dunked in a single mug of milk. I just thought maybe if we were both gonna fall apart a little, maybe we could fall together. 

Or just near each other.

My heart is a little wind-up bomb.

Your fingers are all on the triggers.

You squeeze me and my little eyes bulge out

Like I were a cartoon goat.

You wind me up and set me loose,

Down at the playground in the sand by the swingsets.

I buzz and click around,

Making silly little noises.

And then when I look up,

And I see you’re gone,

I go to explode-

But instead I just rundown,

And my fuse fizzles out,

And my triggers fall quiet.

And there is no earth-shattering kaboom,

In the cavity of my chest,

Where my heart usually lives. 

I woke up with nails in my head and blood on my pillow. I woke up feeling frustrated and old and out of shape. If I was meant to be a cube, I am now a sphere. If I was meant to be strong and solid, I am now weak and frayed. 

I feel like a fictional character, waiting to be believed in. An ancient god, long forgotten, or maybe the background character in a big dramatic piece. Yeah, that’s me in the crowd scene. That’s me, set against the horizon. That’s me, one of the stars you see, when the shuttle rockets by on its way to space.

I want somebody to kiss these blood tears away. I want a sandwich and a vacation. I need a new suit, a new dress-shirt, and a place to sit, where I can get my head together.

I want to stop being so self-obsessed, and be obsessed with somebody cool for a while. Somebody worthwhile and distracting. I want to crawl back under my rock, and wait for its weight to crush me into the earth.

I wake up some mornings, and I just feel dirty and scared and useless. There’s no sex in me, no violence. Just a tired sense of abandonment. 

Like a heavy chain, I drag myself down, under the waves.
To think about things.