82 posts from 2007

diet coke chugging motherfucker;
4-inch heels, 3-piece,
up do, bifocal glamazon
claw tip key clacking
fancy fuck yous.
hello goodbye transaction:
broom closet
administrative affair
filed away in forensics
better examined
between eight and five.

eyeliner, lipstick,
hairspray, fake tan,
extensions, cuts,
Gucci. D&G.
tuck, pull, lift, staple.

mascara, dye,
rouge, polish, gloss,
heels, corset,
implant. Prada.
extract, reanimate,
preserve, adoration

two steps away from the blaring horns of the street
clicking of heels on pavement
click of catcalls at heels.
all are perpetually 20something.

they will forget you with someone else.

strong the pull to love you
reciprocate to empty sheets and hot showers--
she owns you.
phone calls insisted upon,
unreturned
breath wasted on three word sentences
and expansive poetic declarations;
there are no pictures of us

for Sean.

My first kiss in an elevator
was wrapped in your careless arms,
lessons of adoring you
flung over the balcony of that book store
from the religion section to contemporary fiction,
When we were sexual,
you made sure I was shit-faced drunk.
but we could never go home.
we always had to hide somewhere.
In your car, wedged between an abandoned building and a mountain
we were parked against a perfectly black sky,
playing carnivore in the backseat and exchanging eye fucks.
She waited for you, patiently,
vigilant as the blessed mother
waiting outside your door for you to exchange
words that mean nothing
as they meant nothing when you had her
beneath your knees kneeling
waiting for sacred Eucharist on her lips,
on her tongue,
down her throat
She might have had that satisfaction,
And I will dump you on your face before you have the chance
to offer me penance for a price.
Maybe the girl you pick up to take care of my left overs
will feel audacious enough to clean you out
when your pick-up lines get stale
and she only uses her lips to yawn.

i kept thinking
the reason that you didn't call
me
is because you were fucking
that one girl from work
with the dimples
while I was masturbating in the shower

last night,
you hung up midring
and i didn't call back.
you said you figured I was
fucking and
you interrupted my orgasm.
i thought you changed your mind.
you said i rejected the call.

i think that, probably,
you're difficult not to fall in love with.

Having this makes me more important then, let's say, that fuck ass over there who's actually working right now. It says that my neurons fire at an unmatched pace and I know it. It's because of my superior myelin sheaths.
I know this.
Also,
I
think
that I am
dying today.

Thank you.

Maybe I'll write more of my story and pretend I'm important while I finish my tea.

    "I was born in stiletto heels," broke the silence of a late and truant Thursday afternoon. She always jump started his rousing with something uselessly profound. She made love about the same.

In the closet, there was an old shoe box where she kept her heart, a laptop that held the feathering pictures and correspondences of former lovers that were disintegrating pixel-by-pixel. Ofttimes, he would hover over the icons and read descriptions of past heart ache and the dreams that were forged and forgotten beneath the same sheets he now shared. Staring at the thumbnails of her and the others she had loved, he felt nothing. He tucked the memories at the exact angle they had rested in and lie on his bed. If he stared at the ceiling fan for long enough, it was the only thing that was still and his body vibrated until her homecoming disturbed his urban meditation.

Her name was Helen. Helen was the type of woman who would meet you in the subway, talk to you about Bukowski, and then fuck you in a bathroom over coffee without even kissing you. Some days, he would push her hair out of her face and kiss her. Looking in to those eyes, he imagined, would be akin to attempting to cut out your intestines with a piece of cardboard, being successful, and living just long enough to replace them with sunflowers.

Sometimes, he smoked. For the stigma of it. He drew his breath in and knew loneliness. He was an artist, of course, and no one understood him. His existential issues only surpassed his inability to maintain interest in anything substantial. His heart was broken every single instant on daytime television. He leaned his head back and, bitterly, exhaled. Gaseous clouds trailed images of Helen snaking into the shower while he laid in bed contemplating spiritual suicide. He pretended he didn't notice her for a few minutes then exacted her footsteps around the bed and into the bathroom where he slid on the floor sighing heavily.

"Do you imagine I could seduce myself?" he would say to her as she scrubbed the kisses of her most recent subwayfuck off her legs. She didn't have to say anything-he knew. He could hear the water being deflected off of her smooth skin. If he stopped breathing, he could hear her inhale; in those instants, little else mattered. He thought about dying while masturbating to thoughts of her consuming some other man between fifth and seventh avenue. Soon the steam filled the room and seeped onto the bed where it pulled her hair and came inside of her like all of those men in the corner of the closet had. Collapsing, she fell asleep in a bored place of uselessness. He whispered love letters to her slumbering corpse.

He left her limp body on the bed and stepped into the night for his routine post coital nicotine fix. He let the hot air fill him then lit a cigarette coughing on the remains of the lung he had been salivating on for nearly a week. He thought about selling it to the American Cancer Society for research, but only because he had never completed his paperwork to be an organ donor.

The door slid shut behind him. Walking to the kitchen, he ran his fingertips along the wall; this was more stimulating than Helen's Hyperbolean moans. She called herself his Aphrodite. He felt useless. He didn't know who Aphrodite was and he didn't care. When Helen spoke of their love, she recited cliches; "there are only so many ways you can origami-fold a heart because it is a solid muscle and lacks the flexibility of paper that can be torn or destroyed." He knew she wouldn't hurt him unless she benefited from it. [...deletion...] He doesn't care enough to leave a note; he just leaves.
[...]
The avocado is ripe and beautiful. It is surrounded by one hundred other avocados that are bruised and overripe. The rain goes off in the produce displays making her moist and attractive. Thunder booms and warning lights flicker. He, cheekily, caresses her textured skin, gives her a firm squeeze, and pulls her down the aisle to parade her in front of the cashiers, the former handlers of her flesh. He imagines himself making love to the avocado. The avocado doesn't ask him to call her his Aphrodite. He likes the avocado more than Helen. Maybe instead of consuming the avocado, the avocado could consume him. In his hand, the fruit feels tight and his palms sweat.

He lies in bed, her body resting in the curve of his protective arm, letting the poison make its own way out his lungs rather than facilitating its departure. "You never told me her name," passes her lips nearly the same grade as the poison passing from his. "You never asked," he retaliates. He exhales and shifts. She rises and seeks out her pieces from the four corners of the room that could have been hers. So this is it, she reflects on their love; this is what I've waited for. He doesn't say it as she leaves, but he doesn't have to; she knows what words can not transcribe from raw human ache served up on a splatter (originally 'platter') of sashimi formed into a decorative flower for obligation to eat, as a couple. He could not see her speed away to her own secrets from the floor next to the bed where he had been sitting, idly chain smoking, but he imagined himself speeding away, juxtapose her, never to return. Maybe he'd call her tomorrow when Helen was at work and tell her he loves her. Unmoving, there he sat. The air was cold.

The line is long and the night melts into the large bay doors of the grocery. He can feel the air getting heavy and suddenly the whole building is overwhelmingly stifling. Having never been claustrophobic before, the anxiety sets in and the lines stretch to infinity. He abandons his goods with a overly familiar cashier and walks outside. The sky is bleeding. He stands still and his toes root into the earth. A man in a vest with dark hair asks him if he is okay; he says, "I am Adam." He pulls his feet along the ground the entire walk to the apartment. Being attached to the earth, it is hard to pull  through the ground without uprooting the pavement, or himself.

[...]

Rebekah told the toaster that she did not know if she had ever loved anyone. The red, metal woman that she reflected curtly smiled, called her a whore, and told her to stop finding solace in the beds of men who love other women. The toaster lie across the room, wire wrapped around the corner, banged and bruised, but still live. Rebekah miserably wrung her hands and stared either to the future of empty or into the past of bedsheets and rushed goodbyes, she could not decide which was worse. The toaster reflected her in an uneasy state of concious bread crumbs flaking onto the floor.

She didn't trust him; how could she? He hadn't promised her anything and she expected even less than that. She was afraid that she loved him and, one day some time from now, she would be exposed for the traitor she was being to her heart by allowing herself to slink into the comfortable lee of denial. It's less complicated being alone-being someone else's fiction, she thought. This void was not a hole-it is liquid, but vacant. As the gaseous form of herself, she could forget him easily and he detested her for that.

The phone rang. He didn't say, 'hello,' but it was Helen. Her sense of urgency and importance made up for his social inefficiencies and dysfunctions as she liked to call them. He had nothing new to say to her these days so, often, he would say nothing at all to avoid wasting breath. Feigning interest in office soap opera by the rate of his breathing, he interjected with irrelevant philosophical questions and inappropriate laughter. "Banana bread" was the most hysterical thing he had heard all day, he told her. The dial tone was responding to his inquiries again. She had nothing left to say again. "What the fuck is your problem?" he asked it. He put the phone down.

[…]

How long had it been? A month? A week? An hour? An instant? He was suffocating.

[mash of unsophisticated and unorgnaized thoughts. this is why we prewrite.]