Get your halloween masks on: we’re going hunting.

I’ve taped over my eyeholes so they’ll never see me coming. I’ve filed the safeties off our handguns so they’ll go off like fireworks at a moment’s notice.

This moment is your only notice: Let’s go! 

I’m masquerading as a Catholic School Girl today. You think I don’t notice you trying to look up my skirt, but what’d you think I put it on for? I’m daring you put your eyes on the thin cotton of my underpants. Maybe I’m something you can imagine. Maybe I’m something more.

More or less.

Pull on your mask and socks: we’re going out hunting for hipsters and sluts tonight. We’re gonna get Laid Men like mobsters. We’re gonna go swimming in cement shoes, hanging with lobsters. We’re gonna spell things in ALLCAPS and forget each other’s names, just in case the police corner us for questions.

I got a girlfriend or two; she blows me like smoke rings and rings me like a bell when it’s time to eat. Pussy cats prowl past our window at night, hunting for rats and other nocturnal snacks. 

You think you’d forgotten me, but I’m still right behind you. I’m catching up fast and coming on strong. 
Not overly-familiar; just friendly.

She rode into town on a gasoline-powered horse; a strange mechanical monster that bucked like a stallion and dripped molten lead from its nostrils when she ran it hard. It ate solid stone and had built-in weaponry that could level a good-sized neighbourhood in about a half-hour or so.

She rode into town like a storm settling over the area. Like dark black oppression, like a cool rain set to turn the dirt to mud, mud so deep you’ll lose yourself in it. Yeah, she rode into town alone, but she rode out with me.

She rode out of town with me clinging to the back of her, my buttocks reduced to blisters on the back-seat of her heavy metal rocket horse. I carried a hand-cannon designed to end lives in a clean and efficient fashion. I also carried a knife, which was similarly designed to end lives, but in the messiest and slowest way possible.

Together, we were a date that never ended, two lost souls shooting for one final sunset, a trail of blood-splattered lovers, crossing the country like a falling star tumbling down to earth to sleep.

I never caught her name. She never released my heart.

Do you, do you, do you still wanna drink my blood?

I know you’re out there; out late, playing with your toys. They’re such playful toys, aren’t they?

And I; I don’t really need anything new from you. I don’t need any fan mail, I don’t require love notes stuck under my door. If I really want to be loved, all I need is a mirror, or an animal to feed. If I really want to be appreciated, I can start at home, where they know all my names and call on me simply by looking in my direction. 

Are you still out there? Are you reading yourself, writing yourself, wishing I’d read or write to you? Do you want to be penpals - lovers - zombies - bestest friends forever - vampires - lesbians - gayly in love with each other? 

Do you still wanna drink my blood?

Because I… I want… I want all that, and all that more. I want you and your roommate and your mom and dad and the snacks, the leftovers at the back of the fridge, the spare change under the couch cushions. The spare karmic change left over under the cushions of the casting couch where young wannabe-starlets suck stock roles in exchange for a dream or two.

But do you still want to notice me, what I’m doing here, why I came back here for you?

Sure I came back for you. Sure I did.

Because, I, I wanna drink your soul.

I watch the sun come up, behind the blinds, like opening eyes under a blindfold. 

It’s cold in here, where I keep my heart. There’s just enough heat to light my smoke, not enough to feel warm, or safe. 

I watch the sun come up, like it took drugs earlier, and now it’s getting high. Coming up, high in the sky. Watch it reach up towards the centre of the blue.

I’m watching myself; seeing if I have an loose secrets, anything worth repeating. I’m watching myself because I’m stalking the most beautiful prey of all. Stalking, hunting, or just creeping in the bushes there of. 

I want a mouthful, a memory, a moment. I need to take it from the day; a perfect moment, stolen like a kiss. 

I’m searching for the sun, though I’m still blind to it. 

Black suit of armour. Shirted and tied down. 

Black suited, like clubs or spades. 

Corporate chic, urban camouflage, designed to let me slip between the cracks between buildings, where the crack-smokers hide with their little glass pipes twinkling against the darkness.

I have hidey holes all over the city, places downtown where I go to smoke in the middle of the day, places where I take young girls when they trail after me on my little missions.

I just need to go over here right now, and feed these birds.
This restaurant knows what I want without my having to ask for it.  
If we stand over here, I can smoke weed right out in the open and nobody’ll notice.
If you sit over here with me, I can put my hand on your leg, and lean in on you.

Yeah, I know the quiet places in the centre of the city, where you can be private in public with somebody. I take all my most special friends there, or really, anybody who’ll follow me as I wander about on my ever so precious little missions.

Building a goddamn web of mythology around myself, urban myths, my favourite kind of misrepresentation of the truth. Dark little half-lies. Things that actually happened, but did they really happen that way? Nah, I never actually survived. That’s the trick to that tale.

You’re that girl who’s the song that I’ve been playing all day on my walkman, the magnetic ribbon of the cassette getting stretched out like smooth taffy… Your signal is pulled over the metal nubs of the player, just like, I don’t know, pulling something over something else; makes me think of-

Fuck, can’t I say anything to you without it ending in another of these eternally ill-fated seduction attempts? I love the way you want me, I want you to want it, I want you to want and want and want, but I need, I need I need

I need

I need

I need

.

Sorry, the tape got stuck there for a bit. I thought you’d snap in half, but instead you made a sound like a fist fucking my ear-drum. Like you were scared I might forget you, so you went in deep and hard. 

You’re that girl I play all day, like my favourite song, or a game I can’t quite understand the rules of. I’m glad I don’t know how to play music; I just know the lyrics, so I sing along when your voice is loud, so loud in my ears that everything blots right the fuck out, right the fuck out of the sky. 

Blotting out the sky. 

Dose me with acid and wake me up early on the other side of the sun. 

She’s got a red, wet hand; I caught her by it. Yeah, I caught her, wet-handed, right in the middle of it, in the middle of herself, in the middle of the act itself. 

Baby, she’s a chupacabra; she’s mythical, and mean. She’s got short little legs, and mean little fangs, and she’s got a dirty little head full of big ideas. 

I tried her. I tried her and I liked her. I tried and I liked her, and I now I can’t get enough of her.

I give you everything I got… for a little piece of pie. 

I’m so tired, that all I can do here is write to you, and smoke. Yeah, I’m going up in smoke, I’m a river of grey flowing up and on toward the ceiling, or heaven, or whatever it reaches first. 

I’m so tired of everything except for you. I’m still not tired of you. You’re in the shower, you’re in the rain, you’re somewhere wet, and I’m here, just wanting you, so wanting you and so tired of everything else. 

I’m going fucking insane here. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see what I’d give just to have you stay with me? Not that I don’t need to be left alone to my own devices from time to time. 

She is that broken winged bird, limping off towards sunset on a steady breeze. 

She is that black bird perched outside my window. Waiting and watching. 

I gave her everything, and now all I’ve got left is a little piece of me.

“I want to love you,” I told her, “the way a man loves a woman.”

But instead I loved her more in the way that a man loves a cheap plastic doll, or perhaps eight or nine chickens. I loved her in a way that sends lesser men to jail, and compels greater men into acts of savage artistry. 

“Baby,” I said, sort of confused, “I want to hold you in my arms and kiss you until your bloody teeth are in my mouth. I want to make you feel like a little girl about to receive her first auditing. Like a cat in a candy store.”

I ravaged her with kisses all over her socks; the ones she’d discarded, and thrown across the room. She thrilled to my depictions of how we’d make love, which I acted out for her with cardboard cutouts and photocopied exerts from a history textbook about ancient troubadours. 

“Sweet thing,” I said, taking one last kick at the can, “I’m going to make you feel like a car accident happening in reverse, like a pile of broken glass forming up into a whole sheet and shooting backwards on towards the horizon. I’m going to make you love me like a big empty glass that smells faintly of spoilt milk.”

That last bit really got her attention. She stopped in the middle of composing her emailed response, and drove a nail into my heart from across the bed. A big fake press-on nail. It embedded itself weakly into me, like a lesson I just couldn’t seem to learn. 

The weight of this crush is starting to do something to me. 

The ground beneath me is caving in. The world under my feet seems to be hollow, and I can just fall and fall and fall into it.

Like I could fall into her. 

This crush is such a sensation around my neck. This crush is such a rock to the back of my head. I feel my bones splintering and bursting inside.

This crush, her hands on me, her thoughts on my mind, it’s breaking me into bits,
But I just can’t seem to
stop 

Yuppies in clean blue suits are screaming. 

“The bingo? The lotto? You know I’ll never win those.”

Fuck getting lucky; we made out own fates. We carved our destiny out of the living stone of the city, with big fucking baseball bats. 

She’s got a mouth full of metal and malice, and she’s got me in her sights.
I’ve got her in my fight or flight response; she’s got me running scared and hot.

Music goes up high and violence comes down low, like a curtain being lowered across the stage.

Her hands are tight on the bat. There’s razor blades embedded up the shaft. It’s grotesque. It’s wrong. It’s kind of funny, watching his head go flying back as she completes the arc of her swing. 

Yuppies in clean blue suits are screaming. She’s dripping with sweat and stranger’s crimson fluids. Yeah, those uptight scumball fucks are bleeding down her, and she’s laughing, and I’m-

The track skips, and the train jumps the tracks.
Follow the flames across downtown, and back us into a corner like rats. 

I have a painful crush on you.

I didn’t see it, until I saw you sitting there. Cross-legged on your bed. I didn’t see it until i saw your abdomen, as you stretched your arms up over your head. 

I have a painful crush on you. It makes me think about cars being turned into scrap metal, maybe with a body hidden in the trunk. Yeah, the metal compresses, and raspberry jam squirts out the back in a fine crimson mist. The high-pitched squeal of metal biting in on itself, as soft human meat is turned into a dirty liquid. 

I have a painful crush on you.

Crushed like the weight of the moon. Some heavy and alien, in orbit. You hang over my head like a noose; a long, slim chord, about to be draped about my neck and drawn taught.

Yeah, if I was any kind of an artist, I’d draw you, taught. 

Yeah, I got this painful crush on you.

And it’s fucking crushing me.

Read this part slowly, it’s full of little bones.

They snap underfoot, and they get caught in your throat, like,

Y’know,

Words you wanted to say, but couldn’t.

We all have a lot of crap like that, stored up inside us. We’re all liars by omission. We all store up all the best bits of ourselves for a tomorrow that never actually comes. We miss out on so much of what’s happening right now by caring so much more about what’s not really ever happening, not really ever at all.

Do you ever really happen at all?

I guess you do; I was watching you, out there on the dancefloor. Smiling at your friends and the cameraman, spilling your drinks down pretty people’s throats, and spilling yourself down the front of pretty people’s shirts. 

She happens to me like a heart ache attack. She attacks me like the lights going out.

I put on some Leonard Cohen, and in a burst of lowly-uttered tones, I am reminded as to why I keep writing about the end of the world, and a desire for softly yielding female forms. “Right, right, that’s why I write that way.”

Cold, with a desire for heat. 

Girls with smoke for skin, playing about the fringes of the ends of all things, 
Apocalyptic ruins dotting the edges of our civilization in little unstructured bursts, like wild-flowers erupting from the cracks in the sidewalk. 
Girls with starlight in their eyes, and the warm soil of graves, under their fingernails.

Deep in the dark, she sticks something into my mouth.
I thought it was a gun-barrel, but it’s the tip of her tongue.
She triggers a bad memory; blows me away.