These days I have to watch art house porn, I can’t get off unless it looks like it was shot on a budget. Not that hand cam kind of shit though, the real life of fucking market that isn’t real or lifelike, I need something that smells of misguided integrity, filmed at obscure angles in front of improbable scenery, with tattoo wielding fringe girls smiling like the Mona Lisa’s pallbearer, and all those grainy lo-fi filters that make it look like someone handed Instagram your fetishes. I guess it makes me feel better knowing the director’s wanking too.
I bite my lip so hard while we’re fucking that a drop of blood falls on her cheek. Focused on other feelings, her eyes are closed and she doesn’t notice. I can’t concentrate but she’s moaning, don’t stop, and pushing me into her. I try to wipe it off but the blood just smears under my thumb and makes me think of cartoon Indians in some dark initiation, tribal rights of passage and the drumming of her heart, a fleshy sick percussion that lays under her moaning, her breathy chant and vehement hands forcing me to be a man.
I walk in on Caleb watching this compilation tape of women licking things, ice creams and lollipops and fruit and even one girl lapping happily at her mobile phone. I assume it’s hers. In contrast to some of his other peccadillos this one seems quite tame. I wonder out loud how such a thing gets made and he tells me reverently, these are women that he used to know, not girlfriends necessarily, or even good friends, just women that he knew. Apparently it reminds him that everyone’s the same. I don’t ask him how he made them do it.
The wind is warm and dull and makes my skin feel like pipe tobacco crumbs, crumbling, bitter and maligned. These days my enthusiasm wallows like water pooling in a basin, evaporating slowly, leaving the surface scorched, barren and longingly deprived. I’m sick of planting crops of hope that wither on the vine. Rakish, pallid and untended things, with the texture of dreams and inherited ephemera. I think if I could only immerse myself, maybe my landscape would flourish and grow some verdant purpose. Would that it would rain, wash the sallow from my skin and renew the whole again.
Jonah stares into the mirror with magnetic repulsion, scowling joyfully at the reflection of his nemesis. I hate you so much, he says. The words leave a bitter ambrosial tang upon his tongue as he repeats them with a steady mantric affluence. I will kill you, he ventures and the nemesis just smiles, benign, leaving Jonah feeling defeated and resentful. He turns away, seeking solace in absence, but still he sees those eyes that read like a why and hears the voice delivered in his tone, holding disconcerting diatribes that he keeps trying to disown. Together they are alone.
Time stops while I look around the room at all the nothing. A still life tableaux. Cup with rim of coffee rind. Cigarette case with cancer council warning and Bic lighter mooring. Origami paper cranes and crumpled mistakes. Affluent layers of dust and ash. I drag my fingers across the table scraping patterns in the silt, they mean nothing but my mind refuses to admit it. I trace them out, feeling for meaning with a desperation I’m not used to. These final moments should mean something, if not for me than for somebody, but there’s nothing here to decipher.
Danny hands me the macaroni abomination and says, this is a picture of how much I love you. I take the thing and hold it in front of my face, blocking his view of my confusion. I say, thanks kiddo, and try to mean it enough for him to feel it. I have friends with kids that play the cello, cook gourmet meals, read at adult levels and see their parents psychiatrists. I have Danny who makes gluey, macaroni messes, can’t remember half of the alphabet, loves me unconditionally and makes me feel like I got the better deal.
Dean’s sugar mellowed smile bores down on me and I have to act. I start in Midsummer, slide into one of the soliloquies and make my way into Macbeth. I try not to let my Horatio die, even as I am pierced by the acerbic plastic rustle of Dean’s foraging, his thick, somnolent fingers prying the bag on his lap for fresh candied pray. I hear him chewing between sonnets, his smacking lips palpating over my punctuation. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments. Some Caliban betrays me and leaves me limping to a close amidst the winter of our discontent.
Big ups to The Rag Tree for nominating me. It’s nice to be noticed.
This is the way it goes.
Nominees should write a post that 1) links back to their nominator; 2) reveals seven things about themselves; and 3) nominates 15 more bloggers. They should also display the award’s logo on their blog.
So…
The seven things
- I don’t like to use my real voice on here because I have no conceptual faith in it.
- I’m terrified of the man that definitely isn’t waiting under my bed to cut my Achilles tendon with a straight razor.
- I have an invisible backpack full of existential guilt that I carry everywhere I go.
- Most nights I dream in third person.
- In a previous life I believed in reincarnation.
- Every so often I fail to dance.
- When I grow up I want to be a lounge singer in a shitty dive bar that nobody’s ever heard of.
The nominees (in no particular order).
- http://enjoylifeforonce.wordpress.com
- http://writingfictionblog.com
- http://rdrevilo.wordpress.com
- http://onlyfragments.com
- http://susandanielspoetry.com
- http://theplotneedsmorebourbon.wordpress.com
- http://circlesunderstreetlights.wordpress.com
- http://literaryman.com
- http://karenlawrencephotography.wordpress.com
- http://cristianmihai.net
- http://hovercraftdoggy.com
- http://kiramoorescloset.wordpress.com
- http://jasonalanwriter.wordpress.com
- http://uselessgibberish.wordpress.com
- http://flashlightcityblues.com
Thank you for your time.
I watch her etching graphite moments in her notebook with tender unawareness. Pouting heavily, she rubs at her mistakes with a forlorn fervour. She wears her sadness like a starlet’s custom cocktail dress, it fits in all the right places, revealing only intrigue and the temptations of the viewer. I want to help her, but all of my mistakes have been carved in stone and laid as markers of my past, leaving me without faculty or future. All that I could offer would be ways to shade or bury and wouldn’t fit the moment without marking out its grave.
Janey sits beside me, seeped in the scent of coconuts and honey. I dig my hands into the beach and try not to pay attention. I tell myself it’s the sunscreen not her skin. I want to lick her to be sure. Probably she doesn’t want that. I’d say her boyfriend and my girlfriend wouldn’t care much for it either. I’m the only person who wants it and it’s something I don’t do. I lay back on the sand and let the sun close my eyes. The tidal hush strokes across the pads of my feet, cooling my heels.
She’s talking to me and looking right at the diamond. I can’t, she says. I tell her she deserves nice things as much as I deserve to see her have them. Go on, I say, try it on. There are a thousand facets to her smile, all of them etched and precious, captured forever upon her finger. She asks me if I’m sure and I tell her I lost my uncertainty the day that I found her. I can see myself reflected in her pleasured crystal tears. I never knew my face had room for showing so much joy.
She says not to worry about her friends, they’re just overprotective. You guys seem nice, she says, but she really doesn’t know. I feel bad for her in that moment, in her innocence. I want to tell her she should run. When she turns away I tell Jamie that she looks like the Joker. Jamie laughs and says he’s going to fuck her anyway. Sometimes I wonder that I don’t die for being me. I think that I should spontaneously cease for being the way I am. It never happens and I want to die for that reason alone.
I like to watch her while she sleeps even though I know it’s creepy. I’m not being a creep about it though, I’m quietly in love. Sometimes I get this weird feeling like I want to taste her soul. I want to place each part of her in my mouth and savour its complexity. If I could subsume her I would, even knowing how sad it would make me, not being able to look at her any more. She would always be a part of me though and I think it would be enough to know we are together.
Karl bit the tip of his tongue off last summer during one of his seizures. There was nobody there to hold him down or help him out and he’s lucky he didn’t die. He’s been bitter ever since, on account of those being the only buds he has left to taste with. We all joke about it with him even though we know he doesn’t like it. Dylan always salts Karl’s beers if he leaves them unattended. That used to make me laugh, but Karl doesn’t smile anymore and the whole thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
A Few Short Words 