The reason I write 
is to create something 
as beautiful as you 

When I’m with you 
I want to be 
the kind of man 
I wanted to be 
when I was six years old 

A perfect man, who kills. 

- Leonard Cohen

“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement.”

By Tristan Tzara

From Dada Manifesto

Jet Harris and Spoon Morrison are holed up in a truck stop in the middle of nowhere, melting down the cafe’s silverware and casting it into cheap bullets. Spoon managed to make a somehow functional gunpowder out of spoiled mayonnaise and some engine oil; the bullets squeal as the stuff ignites, and makes the air smell like boiled egg farts.

Outside, a gaggle of angry truckers, their minds half-mad from cheap speed and conservative talk radio, is closing in for the kill. They’re armed with shotguns and pitchforks; the are proud hillbilly motorists, and their strange and ancient gods of moonshine and inbreeding demand the blood of outsiders. 

“This is why I never leave the city,” Jet hisses, squeezing her trigger three times and absent-mindedly cupping her breast with her other hand. Two hundred feet away, two eyeballs and lung burst from the bullets’ impacts. 

“You said this place had great pie,” Spoon complained, filtering another packet of mayonnaise into the shells for his forty-five calibre handgun. The thing spat like his grandmother eating mashed potatoes every time he yanked on the trigger. It was horrifying. 

“Well, it was pretty good pie,” Jet said, executing another angry motorist from an impressive distance off. 

It’d been strawberry pecan pie, which sounds weird and tastes even stranger, but goddamn if they hadn’t both finished off three slices a piece before things had started to go by. 

Maybe they could’ve escaped without an incident, but there’s somethings that Jet Harris just can’t let slide, and she’s got a hair trigger.

This time however, it’d been Spoon who’d caused the trouble. He just can’t stand hearing people who complain about the ending of Lost. There’s something about it that just pushes a weird button in him, and next thing he knows it, he’s screaming something about post-modern narrative sequences while stabbing a salad fork into some scared waitresses shoulder. It’s cool though; she had it coming. She spit in three of those pie slices, and that was way before anybody had any cause for such behaviour. 

Some people though. Some people, just can’t help but fuck things up. 

“Listen, do you want this or not?” 

The room is cold, and not very clean. The building’s been abandoned, like how most of my relationships ended.

“Do you know what it is you’re asking for?”

Her voice is the crackle of metal chains on a cement floor. Is this what love is now? When I was younger, I thought maybe somebody nice would like me. Want to be around me. We’d, I don’t know, go to movies. But movies today, they’re all shit. Why would you pay for that garbage?

Her caress reminds me of the sterile rubber glove of mommy, and other repressed abuse scenarios. Her lipstick makes me think of the perfect woman, the transexual, the broken whore made out of doll parts, the divine goddess of the wet hole.

Her boots make me think about pain, and how much I’m paying for all this. Relationships are all about the costs. “I want to be reimbursed for all the bus fares I spent traveling to your part of town,” I screamed into the dead-line of our last phone call. “I wouldn’t have tipped so impressively if I hadn’t been trying to impress the pants off of you.”

Bullshit. You’ll pay. Everybody pays, in the end.

“In the end,” she says, like she’s reading my mind, or the titles of pornographic movies. “You’ll probably wind up loving me, or loving this weird version of you that only exists in your head.”

“And you get off on that, don’t you, you sick bitch,” I growl at her, trying  to take back some control.

She just makes a facial expression that makes me think of smiling and tearing red meat. 

She won’t give up; she wants me dead; goddamn this girl inside my head.

It’s cold here, perched on the edge of her consciousness, waiting to see what way her wind’s going to blow.

She’s my perfect robot lover, with lips of steel and a heart that kept perfect time; perfect time, but always just a little too late.

Yeah, it’s cold here. I can almost see my breath. I can almost see the frozen little footprints that led me here to her. My footprints marked out in ice. 

I need her heat to warm me, but it only knows how to burn. I need her heart to hold me, but it’s more of a crushing device. Yeah,her heart crushes, and crushes hard.

I’m trapped here, under the weight of her desires, waiting for her to desire me enough to pick me up, and swallow me down. I am one bitter little pill, it is true. Hard to get down. Harder to keep down.

She glances at me with those cold, cold eyes. 

Sometimes I would imagine removing the mask of the world, and revealing a new world on the other side. A better, more purposeful world, full of incredible individuals who would all work to make their world a better place. Things could improve all the time. Lies stopped being told, and stairways to the stars were constructed. Everybody could wear a jet-pack. Strange new alien worlds are discovered every day. Magic was everywhere.

Other times I would imagine peeling of one of my lower masks, the mask of the physical body, revealing my energy form within. What was it, a strange insect monster with fuzzy antennae and great vicious mandibles? A wailing beast with a million mouths and a billion arms, all railing senseless against the universe? A beautified, angelic version of myself, in perfect physical shape and mentally flawless in every way?

I tried to imagine what my soul might look like, if I was to believe I had one.

I let my mind drift.

“My goal,” I said, steering the car into on-coming traffic and really leaning down on the accelerator, “is to be the prettiest, cruelest man you’ve ever loved.”

The scream of metal and innocent lives being cut short, by metal. The car is an angry beast that lives on blood and bad dreams. The car is parting the road like Moses leading his people across the sea - it’s leading me across a red sea of bits of peoples. Blood bits of people, strewn about the front of the car.

“I want to hold your hand at movies. I want to be your boyfriend. I want you to cry at the thought of me dying. But I don’t want you to like me. I want you to be sort of indifferent to my presence, especially when we’re making love.”

The car jumps curbs and crushes children, big wide tires splitting open the little bodies of babies and dwarves. The car is out of my control, just killing and killing and killing. Automobiles pile up in burning heaps and humans spill out the windows like broken eggs.

“We’re gonna have fun,” I say to her, like it’s a threat. “We’re gonna fall deeply in love, and be something like happy,” and that part is a threat. One hand on the wheel, the other moving slowly up her thigh. 

She smiles, like maybe we really are in love.
She smiles, and reaches for the door.
She smiles, and kicks herself out to the road, at a few hundred miles an hour.
She’s practically gone before she even hits the pavement.  

I lean over and spit into the waste-basket next to the desk. A big gob of something grey like a ghost tumbles through my lips and lands on some crumpled notes with the heavy slump of an exhausted traveler. 

I suck back smoke all day, and it coats my throat, covers my lungs. A light haze of dull silver, of dirty clouds, settling down into me. A fog, a smog, a dusting of heavy, sticky black particles. 

I cough heavily, my chest juggling semi-solids, my breath sounding like the rasping of a metal file wearing down the edge of something sharp. 

It’s rough, but it feels great and looks even cooler, so who’s to say what, at the day’s end?

“I just want to-” I said, and I put my arms around her.

“I love you too,” she said.

The voices in my head screamed. They never stop screaming.
DESTROY ALL HUMANS MAKE THEM PAY TASTE THEIR BLOOD FEED ON THE FALLEN BREAK THE SKY EAT THEIR SKIN BURN THEIR EYEBALLS AND MAKE THE OTHERS WATCH DESTROY ALL HUMANS DESTROY ALL HUMANS DESTROY ALL HUMANS FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER AND KILL KILL KILL KILL ALL HUMANS HATE SO MUCH HATE ALL HATE EVERYTHING FOR EVER AND AND EVER AND EVER JUST KILL KILL KILL DESTROY ALL HUMANS I HATE THEM SO MUCH KILL THEM KILL THEM KILL THEM DESTROY ALL HUMANS. 

“I just want to…” I try to say, but I can’t seem to get the words out of my mouth.

She silences me with a kiss.

The voices scream on. 

Fuckin’ just look at her go. 

That girl’s so fucking hot.
That girl’s so fucking wild.
That girl’s got a fucking tapeworm.

Yeah, she told me about it once, over cheap beers. I did the buying, she did the drinking.

“Caught it while swimming through some real murky shit water,” she confessed. She’s drinking a local beer; it’s bright yellow, like wasps. The bright buzzing warning yellow colour of wasps. 

“But see, the thing is like, it’s not a parasite. It’s a symbiote. You know? Like, it helps me, and it does a bunch of useful stuff.”

“Like what?” I had to ask.

“Well like, for one thing? I sleep like, two hours a day. And it’s a deeper, more restful sleep than a normal person could get in eight hours. And that’s just like, to start.”

She grins wildly at me, and flexes her biceps through her torn black T-shirt. “Super-strong, super-fast… And not like, tearing buildings down strong, but… You know how like, in emergencies, people can become super-strong for a few moments?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ve all heard crap like that.”

“Well, I can call that shit up, anytime I want to, thanks to the super-intelligent little worm that lives inside my belly.” She burps. “I’ve got perfect balance, my digestive system is like, I don’t know, a perfect machine from the future or something.”

“That’s pretty cool,” I said. The beer was hitting me a bit harder than her, or maybe she was just used to being louder.

“And it’s like an ipod too,” she went on. “Like, I can hear music, whenever I want. Whatever I want. It’s got recordings of everything I’ve ever heard, you know?”

That doesn’t even make sense, but I’m too far gone now. And she’s so fucking cute. That crazy head of hair, those weird bits of metal she wears in her face, those big black fucking boots that look like they could stomp my head into goo. 

She giggles, she laughs, and when the drinking’s done, she’s gone into the night like a whisper or a cat. I catch a glimpse of her, halfway up a highrise, spinning and dancing like the side of the building was her own private dancefloor. 

I also react, respond, to you. You make me want to write, you make me feel fictional. 

“You’re repeating yourself,” she warns me. 

“If you were a drug dealer, you’d find my habitual behaviour comforting; rewarding, even,” I tell her.

“If I were a drug dealer,” she warns me, “I’d be selling you bits of myself. I’d be whoring myself out for your affections.”

“I’m addicted to you, to your love,” I tell her, reaching for my books of poetry like I’m reaching for my wallet. 

“You’re addicted to pretty girls,” she says, kissing me like a needle going in slow. “You’re addicted to attention.” 

Yeah, she kisses me slow, like chemicals coming on hard.
My brain starts to swim in it all.