She came to me like we were meeting in the midst of a disaster; she kissed me like the world was ending. 

She put her lips to mine, and I could feel the mantle of the Earth disassembling, the core of the planet giving way, exploding outwards; gravity bursts like a bubble, and we fly loose into space.

Yeah, she kisses me, and the world ends, over and over and over again.

Her tongue is in my mouth, and overhead, the stars are being torn away by some great and nameless beast; a god from ancient prototype-human days, some great lizard monster with stars for eyes, burning ceaselessly in the blackness of the sky. Some horrible insect lord that’s as hungry as our galaxy is wide; imagine some spider so big that it’s web stretches across the cosmos, trapping black holes to devour at its leisure.

She kisses me, and I care about nothing, I feel nothing. 

The world falls away.

And I taste her in my mouth.

There is moonlight in her eyes.

It doesn’t blind her; she’s taking aim at the stars. She’s gonna shoot the dawn, right through it’s golden heart. She’s gonna eat into eternity like she’s taking a bite out of a fresh, clean apple. You can hear the crunch, of her teeth going in.

Yeah, take a chunk of flesh. Take some time. Take the left-hand path, it’ll leave your right hand free for doing stuff: smoke a cigarette, wave at a friend, and when nobody’s looking, or when the right person’s watching, you’ll reach down below the belt-line, and give yourself a little adjustment. Flip the switch. Pull the lever. 

She gets away; not from me, but from consequences. 

She gets away with what the boys call: murder.

There’s moonlight in her eyes. 
And smoke on my lips.  

She loved me like a snuff film. 

She loved me like she found me wrapped in brown paper, forgotten in the corner of some dirty parking lot. A patch of cement strewn through with broken glasses and dead weeds. She took me home; I had no name written on me.

She loved me like something private and fatal. She loved me like suicide on a slow day. She loved me like she wanted to slit her own wrists and forget her own name; she just wanted me to teach her how. 

She loved me for my screaming, my struggling, and the weak way I went down. 

She loved me like something she could put a stop to.

I ask her how she’d define her ability to survive. 

I get nervous up high, on the edge, on the ledge of these great long beasts of cement that reach up into the sky like never-ending tombstones. Sky-scrapers, scraping the sky. 

I stand on the edge, and I feel a sensation take me over, a little like my heart is about to puke up my resolve and most of my legs. 

I stand on the edge, and look a billion moments down the side, at the street down below. She bites her lip and smiles and says something that I can’t make out over the roar of the wind. How am I even standing here? What part of this isn’t madness and suicide? A quick trip the exit at the bottom. The All Exit. 

Yeah, the All Exit. Where everybody gets off.

She takes me up high so we can look down at the clouds that frost the windows of the hundred and sixty-eighth floor. We drink a slow breath of cold air together.

And then we set loose our mechanical hearts.
And we fly. 

I burp the taste of banana-flavoured Doritos (“Bangin’ Banana Blast Extreme Crunch Doritos®”) into my mouth, and dispute the topic of conversation. 

“If I could travel through time, the last thing I’d want to do would be to fuck with the past. Why mess with perfection, you know?”

She acknowledges my narcissism with a sort of resigned sigh, that I take a cue to keep talking.

“I’d be all about tomorrow. I’d love to have a TV that was just tuned to next Tuesday, you know? And not even for the lottery numbers. Just to feel smug.”

There’s an idea at the edge of the table, an idea that that’s where the world comes to an end, where those hard pine boards cease to exist. You can go right up to the edge of the table, and look off of it, but beyond that? There’s nothing. Nothing worth looking at, for most all of the day.

She’s got eyes like a deep-sea squid; impervious to scrutiny, and hungrily seeking out tasty little fishies. She’s got a song in her heart, and something green caught between her teeth.

I leave it there, for this conversation, so for you, it’s there forever. 

She thinks she gets me, but she’s just got the box I came in. 

I can see myself as the fork my lover uses to stick into you; you being some tasty little treat. She’d spear you on me, and then use me to hold you up to her lips.

You’d drip down me, and into her mouth.

Some succulent sort of snack.
Something she could really work herself around, orally.

If I was a thing to be eaten off of, and you were a thing to be eaten, we could play that way on the table, for days. It wouldn’t matter if it was raining outside. Nobody would have to notice what we’d get up to. 

You seem more syrup than substance anyway. You need something to be held within, held down upon. A bowl to catch up all your drippy bits. 

You give me that look that I’m not really an eating implement, and you’re not really something to be consumed.
Nah, a knife like this is shaped for hurting, for sticking in and twisting.
And you look far too toxic, too full of good drugs and bad intentions, to ever be safely placed in somebody’s mouth. 

Half-finished adventure stories and half-satisfied lovers mar my landscape like bloody wars spotting up a civilizations backstory. I look longingly after the manuscripts I started and drifted away from, just like those lovely young things who drifted up close enough to my heart to steal a little of its warmth… and then drifted away again.

I start telling a story about a pair of lovers on the run (from an extra-dimensional invasion of bug-people taking over the minds of the government’s soldiers), but it never quite takes on three dimensions for me, it’s just people on a page. 

I start cobbling together the tale of a team of weirdoes, traveling the world and looking for asses to kick, but again, I get distracted, and forget to post the rest of the long and brutal thing. 

I think about lips I started to kiss, about bodies that pushed up close and then moved a dance away not that long thereafter. I wince, snarl, feel sad, and move on.

Yeah, right. We all move on, don’t we?

What I want: Fans, lovers, attention, solitary time to create magical stories within.

What I get: Fuckin’ humans, full of fuckin’ human bullshit. 

I took ownership of the world upon my birth, I looked out across all matter and its movement (movement being all about the creation of the illusion of time), and I thought to myself, “Yeah, this could be all mine.” 

I looked at you the same way, with the eyes of a cat about to start playing with a mouse it might never eat. I started looking at the whole world that way; you are very special to me, but everything’s very special to me. We live in a very special place; a place of my creation.

I cannot die. I’ve never lived. You’ve just constructed this large motif of moving parts to buzz about me like a carnival of insects. I observe, and shut my eyes, and when all I see is darkness, darkness is all there is.

I tried to warn you, I fucking did. I said all those key phrases, I tried to explain how I worked. 

(Words I use to describe myself: Sadistic. Misanthropic. Anti-Social. Intense.)

Okay, so I have issues with boundaries. Okay, so I have issues with being close to people, and not being close to them. Okay, so I have control issues, okay so I have perspective issues, so I have complications and issues about my complexion. Okay, so I’m still here, and you’re still somewhere too. 

You’re still somewhere just as well. 

Yeah, I wanted to show you the machinations of my little machine heart. But you misread my attempts at honesty for the sort of lavish spoken-word bullshit I never shut up about, and I don’t blame you for that.

But now here we are. Knives at throats, extraneous lovers ready to be split open like lush over-ripened fruits, fires smouldering in the dark. 

I meant to warn you, but you thought I was just being cute. Now here we are, ready to die for our various sins, all carved out of aggression and sharpened with little diamond teeth. 

I was going to say something, I even tried. 
Yet here we find ourselves, nevertheless.

I’ve got nowhere to drive to, so we strip the wheels off the beast, and just play pretend for a while. We point out the windows with our fingers, pretending to shoot down officers of the law, pretending that we’re outlaws outracing the laws. All the laws.

I’d break my neck trying to break the law of gravity with you. Trying to come up on you and never coming down. And yet I just wish you’d make me go down on you. I wish you’d force some kind of intimacy upon me. I wish I was a little more sure of myself.

She came with all sorts of forthright imagery staring me deep in the eyes. She looked me over like she could’ve had me three times before breakfast with a knife deep in the spine. She looks at me in the eyes like she’s sticking blades in my back. 

She’s a sheet of broken glass falling downwards like rain. She’s something I could look up into when I’m ready to burn away and bleed into the soil. She’s like the sun, if the sun were built out of broken shards of glass, radiating hate and deep gouging lies. 

I want to embrace her with eroticism; that’s an idea that’s heavy on my mind this morning, it’s as heavy as the gun in my hand, the weapon in my mind’s eye. Sure, for her, I’m all explosions and penetrations. For myself, I’m just a little lost in the world.

I hold tight to her darkness. I keep it close to me, I make it something I can delve into every now and again. That’s really what I require at this stage, that’s what I require to build the stage I want to perform across. She’s the platform I want to stage my play upon. All my plays unfold across her.

“It’s not her, it’s not yet.” I’m so sure of these things I tell myself, but I walk down other paths anyway. I get a look over things, I get a taste for what-might-be if I were living a different life in a different set of skins. “If it isn’t her, it isn’t here.”

I’d be her friend, I’d be something else beyond. I just don’t really know what I could be to myself. I’ve shunned my own friendship enough times to be a little jaded about what happens next. I’ve been a little too tired to walk, and kept walking anyway. 

We head down the road. We go down, and give head. We get close to strangers, and we let slippery little dark things slide out of our mouths. My tongue’s a big long leech, looking for blood to drink. She’s something soft. She’s something I could eat while I look for somebody to love. She could be something else, and something else again. I could eat like that all day.

It’s good to have a regret or two, I suspect, as it implies that you didn’t eat everything you could’ve. Of course, maybe you regret having too much; some do. 

The computer asks me questions, and then pretends to tell me things about myself. “You are more sexually driven than most straight men,” it reads out to me. Great. Next maybe it can tell me what my hair colour is, or what shirt I’m wearing.

Me, I just wish I could find a suit of skin-style clothing that would fit me a little looser than the lifestyle I’m currently squeezing myself into. 

Me, I just wish I could look or act a little more like you, a little more like the golden heart at the centre of the sun. 

“Oh sure,” I said, as we took aim and set fire to the world, “I used to be depressed all the time.”

She’s all blood-splattered-bikini-top and too much acid and not enough sleep. It makes her look like a goddess of death, some sort of spirit of change with sharp little teeth. There’s something about her that makes me think about something bad happening to somebody else, while something good happens to me.

She’s the smartest girl I know.

“I used to have false dreams and falser awakenings. I used to think I had repressed memories and weakened super-powers. I used to feel like a thin photocopy of life, a plucked chicken stripped of its organs and set in a butcher’s window.”

She drops dynamite, the explosion rocking the sewer system for several blocks around. “So,” she asks as an inferno starts up underfoot, “what changed.”

“I’d love to say it was you,” I tell her, my hands drifting through black, black smoke as I search for a direction to fire off into blindly, “but that wouldn’t be quite right. I had to fix myself before you came along.”

“And is that how you feel?” she asks me, looking me up and down with her knife. “Fixed?”

“I feel like I’m in the midst of some perfectly horrible adventure,” I say to her, breathing fire and shooting skin-altering lasers out my eyes, “like I’m the hero and villain both, and I always have been, and I always will be. I feel triumphant and buffeted about by mad forces of my own design. I feel like the master of a slippery, caustic fate; like I’ve championed a sea-monster, and now I’m riding the beast across the bay.”

I set loose a demon, firing off a half dozen times at nothing and hitting an enemy in a vital organ with every shot. 

“I feel like I’m the proud of owner of a tiger, and the tiger, it fucking loves me, it loves me all the way through. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t snap my bones and kill me slow, the second I let my guard down.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” she says, getting serious for a moment. “Am I the tiger?”

“You’re a tiger,” I tell her. “And I’ve got one too. I’ve got a wild tiger, living inside of me. But I think we’re cool. I think I can live with it, and it with me.”

“We better throw that thing some meat,” she smiles, all sexual innuendo and weapons of mass destruction. I laugh, and we set the world on fire.

We set all the worlds on fire.

She sees through me like I’m white text on transparent paper; like I’m invisible ink written on clear plastic wrap. She sees through me like I’m undeveloped film, all colour-reversed and shady from too much sun. 

I keep trying to lose my place, so I might find myself. I keep trying to lose myself in the haze of all that noise coming down, I keep trying to discover something special by looking in all the violent places. I gouge out my eyes and break my fingers and use curved bits of dull steel to pull the meat from my bones and I bleed and I bleed and I bleed like a good stuck pig, like meat, like a curse from on high. 

I bleed for you, I bleed into you, I bleed like a rainfall coming down in a dream. 

I have this voice, stuck in my head. I have my voice, stuck in my head, I have this saboteur, screaming brutal little lies in-between my ears, I have your heart to see me through, I have your taste in my mouth, I have a compulsion to know something, somebody that might go a little further than myself.

I bleed black words onto your screen. I bleed emotions into your ear. I get my caustic little disease everywhere, spread through language and languid ideas; lazy thoughts that just drift around the house like aimless cats or bullets, dragging everything out and sorting through the guts to see if there’s anything fun to find.