I start to slide; I start to slide in all directions at once. Spreading myself, spreading myself too thin, spreading myself like butter on toast, spreading myself like sunshine melting into cold stone.

She looks at me like she’s a bomb going off.
Like I can see her exploding, right before my eyes.
She’s a climax, she’s a rush to get off.
She’s sparking in gasoline, and she’s speaking in tongues.
She’s babbling a tower’s worth of songs. 

I start to whisper, I start to unfurl all my secrets. I never wanted to be so unknown, I just wanted to spare you all the burden of my bullshit. I catch her by her hair, I catch her with a little note I want her to have. A note she can’t help but try to capture. 

She tries to capture my song in her lips. 

I start to slide; free. 

I wish I could get your taste out of my mouth.

I’ve been smoking and drinking for hours, days, months… And I can still taste you in there, in between my teeth. You’re under my tongue like a little tab of acid, bleeding your psychoactive substances into my veins. 

You’re a song in my head I can’t stop humming. I don’t even know what you’re about, I don’t know who plays you best, under what circumstances I’d be happy to experience you (fucked up, stoned, drunk, falling down, dancing, driving really quite quickly, having a crazed slow-motion martial arts battle, fucking, talking, laughing), and I don’t know what possessed me to allow you to possess me so intensely in the first place.

But here I am, your brand on my skin. You can smell my fat sizzling where the metal went on hot, you can almost hear the sound of the scarring taking place. 

I wish I could get your taste out of my mouth, but all I have to drink is this big cup of your blood and sexual fluids, and all I have to eat is all those words I gave to you, like “obligation” and “restraints” and “ballistic ferocity”. Big, ungainly words. 

Yeah, my mouth is full of big words, and big ideas.
And, seemingly inexorably, you. 

She realized a day too late that she only existed in my imagination. She was just letters on a page, I was pretending was a real girl. She was just a masturbational fantasy that’d grown depth and weight and gone off to rent an apartment and start dating and marrying boys I’d never approve of.

She was perfect for me: that was the first warning.
She appreciated what I did: that was the second.

I met her online. I met her in a park. I met her in a book, between a couple of pages that’d become stuck together with sweat and runny inks.

She said she wanted to be a real girl. She thought she wanted to be my lover.

She chopped off her hands and she mailed them to me as a gift. She invited me into her home and stripped naked so I take everything I wanted while her boy slept in the other room. I’ve never had a problem with that. Not since before I was a virgin.

She wants to be real.
She wants to be mine.

But she’s gotta pick.
It’s one, or the other.  

I wanted to tell you, I wanted to remind you, I wanted to make you feel something that’d make you come back. I wanted to be that cigarette you were reaching for without thinking about it. I wanted to be the buzz of caffeine deprivation that made you angry without realizing it. I wanted the lack of me to make you snappish and irritable. 

The abundance of me does it too. Just as well. I can see it, hear it.
You get like an angry old waitress who’s spent too many years on her feet. You look at me like you’ve heard it all before, and you know you’re going to have to hear it all again, and you’re fucking tired. You know I won’t tip enough. You know its still hours to go before another break. I know you’re getting tired of me, and I’m getting tired of the service.

I didn’t want to be your broken-down car on the side of the road. I wanted to be something that made you feel good, not caught up in the gears. I didn’t want to grind you down. I didn’t mean to use you so hard and thoughtlessly. 

I fill my lungs with blood and my veins with smoke. 

I struggle to shut myself up, and down. 

She breaks my heart with a word, and that word is “bullet”. 

Her word is a bullet, her voice is pure kinetic pressure, bursting through my chest and leaving me limping and bleeding with a hole through the centre of me that the world is falling through.

The world is falling through me and she’s got smoke drifting from her lips.
Her mouth’s the smoking gun.
My body’s the portrait of a suicide.

She highjacks my depressions and my emotional lows. She cuts me up like she’s trying to edit me out of her prose, like I’m a dangling participle she’s going to trim. She steals my subtexts and replaces them with submissive missives. You know the kind I’m talking about; those letters you get from me where I’d do anything you’d put in lettering, just to have you write my way.

 She smiles, and I try to smile back, but really just flicker like lightning in a bottle.

I’m not writing a novel, and I’m dedicating it to you. Instead of typing, I’m putting my hands all over your body, and instead of imagining fantastic fantasy worlds, I’m thinking about all those conversations I want to have with you.

I want to know you, to get to know you, to fuck you, to bleed all our secrets so I might use your pain and passion as ink. I’ll never tell another soul what you tell me, but that’s only because I’m so goddamn greedy and selfish. 

I don’t want space or time, I just want you. I want you filling up my consciousness and my day. I want to be blind and full of agony from your touch. I want to burn in hell because you put me there. I want to believe in you like I don’t believe in anything else. 

Maybe I just want to be destroyed by something beautiful. 

I feel like a coffee crisp. You know, like the chocolate bar? I feel like one of those, like my brain is one of those coffee-crisp chocolate bars. I feel crisp. I feel flakey. I feel like something you could snap satisfyingly between your teeth.

We get high and we get happy and we float back down to earth like leaves on an updraft, forever buffeted just a few feet above the street-level. We float like dreams or whispers or forgotten little moths hurtling blindly through snowstorms. 

I feel like I could talk to you all day, and still not forget how she feels in my arms. I feel like I need to just experience and talk and be stupid and forgetful and whatever. I feel like I’ve been saying “stuff” too much late. I feel like I feel too much. I feel I feel a lot, anyway. 

I think I’ve been healed up a little, or kicked down a flight of emotional stairs, and left to pick myself up and haul on into some unknown future, like I’m having a fucking adventure or something.

Really, I should be working on my continuity shit, but I just love getting swept up in these random declarations of self and passion and mirth, and, y’know. Like that.
Stuff like that. 

“I’ve got the urge to write, but I’ve got nothing to say.” 

She stares straight through me as I speak. I’m build out of fragile glass, and her gaze is made of hammers. Angry hammers, seeking out blood and carnage and just generally the ability to make me feel a banged up inside.

“I’m trying to form an audience, a whole world of precious individuals to ignore.”

She hears my words, and turns them into little butterflies. She pins the butterflies to a corkboard and labels them mean little words like “Frightened” and “Tepid” and “Worthless”.

“I need to be loved in my absence.”

She sees me only in my absence. She can feel that part of the room that I’m not in, she can hear the way the air the moves when I’m not around to breathe it in. 

“I’m falling apart, and reassembling as I move on.”

Fuck I want your body. I want you to show me how you kiss, how you walk around naked first thing in the morning. How you taste when you want somebody like me.

Goddamn it you look young and sticky. You make me dream of waterslides, you make me think of eating fresh fruit and laying in bed with somebody else’s diary. You look like a muggy day where you have to take six showers to get all the sweat off.

I keep thinking about all those things I wanted to say to you, all those things I didn’t want to say unless you were standing right in front of me and we were so alone that I could just look into your eyes and have at least that much of you. I’d love to fuck you like a crazed psychotic killer, which is to say, I’d start with the eyes, and keep the rest for later.

I’d love to just hold your hand, somewhere quiet, to press up close against you.
“Just like a dream | You open your mouth to scream | And you won’t make a sound.”

I feel like I’m sinking down when I’m around you. Going down. I feel the world rushing up.

The best things in the world are thee.

“If it were up to me, we’d still be in bed, being served by strangers in tight-fitting collars. If it were up to me, they’d carry us around, and wash us down with silken rags. If it were up to me, you’d be In Charge Of The Stars, and everybody would have to listen to you when you barked orders.”

She tells me silly shit like that to distract me from how she steals whenever I’m distracted, and I’m always pretty distracted. She’s always stealing from me. I’m much older than I was when we met, but she always looks a day younger. She always looks like fresh sunshine and newly crafted drops of rain. She looks like a vampire leach in the dark, devouring my blood and turning me into an empty canvas.

I wish I could be a blank template, something to be anything. 

But since I can’t, I’m glad I’m me, which is certainly better than alternatives. 

I know you’d love to see me win, to see me victorious, to see me take off this mask and cry for a little while. 

I know it’d be easier if I could just admit to thing and be obvious like everybody else.

But that’s just not who I am, is it? And what’s the point of being something other than what you’re, right?

My personal mythology is all full of cracks and explosions. Smarmy glimpses of darkness, chipper little shadows flickering under leafy trees of spring and summer. Flaky winter snow mumbling conspiracy theories about right-wing government agendas.

My personal mythology is full of things like you; you pausing by the mirror to straighten your piercings or that funky haircut that makes it so difficult for you to get a new job. My personal mythology is full of bright-eyed little creatures all so busy creating art that I can barely distract them with the idea of curling up on the couch and kissing me for a little while.

I love your art, but I love your soft touches even more.

If you wanted to melt against me,

I’d become the sun,

And boil you against my body,

And lick you off my skin.