The By-blow of Good Intention
Now she wants to get in. The woman who keeps fucking up my dreams. Cloth coat buttoned up to her aging chin and a thick scree of make-up forever threatening to slide off her face and reveal… what? She’s half-zombie, half-vampire, an undead machine of unthinking consumption. Even as I lock her out: imaginary bolts […]
The Honourable Mishap
Here comes a candle to light you to bed. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. “Oranges and Lemons” Traditional English Nursery Rhyme There was before and there was after. I remember the chill silk of the quilt beneath my naked skin, crisply urging me to arch my back. My small, perfect breasts, […]
Just This And No More
I dreamed. Of him, lying fully suited upon a faded chintz bedspread in a nameless, placeless hotel, and I, curled beside him in a nightdress, my knees tucked up, feet covered by its hem. “This is the way the world ends.” he said, my hand tucked into his. The curtains were open to the rising […]
Uncivil
He arrives home worse for wear. Battered and sheepish, a triumphant smile threatening to break through the mask of contrition. “You’re such a guy,” I say, trying to look disgusted. “I know.” He chuckles. “We’re all just big dumb animals.” The cut on his cheek tears me in two. Right on the bone, the skin […]
Get on the Couch and Spread ‘Em
This morning, it was just there. There climbing up the back garden wall. I don’t think it was there yesterday. I’m damn sure it wasn’t there last week. It arrived while I wasn’t looking. I’d dropped my vigilance and there it was, in all its obvious, obscene phallic glory. Don’t give me the ‘it’s just […]
Magic Lantern
Getting to know him was a pleasure. People often say that and they mean it as a politeness. So I’ll rephrase. Getting to know him was my pleasure, as is my continued knowing of him. It is my perversion. Admittedly, I have a few others. The reasons he manufactures to hurt me matter. He’s got […]
Future Perfect
The blessing of a lover who never arrives is that you may wait forever in that state of delicious agony, anticipating a moment that will always float before you in splendid future perfect. You will not meet with disappointment or be faced with impossible choices. There will be no life-changing precipice to leap over. You […]
Ad Nauseum
You show me yet another clip of some hapless losers fucking and pass it off as transgressive. It’s about as transgressive as dogs mating. Less so. This endless repetition of some stylized version of what every adult in the world knows how to do without even being taught. I’m with the censors. Ban it all: […]
Once By Fire
Once I loved a man who loved canes. This was not the first thing I knew about him, or the second, or the third. For many months, he masqueraded like a lover of other things: of serial compositions, old Penguin book covers, Bauhaus furniture and Belgian white beer. He showed me what he thought I […]
Eating Invisible Pasts: For Eliot and Baudelaire
I stroke my cock to the jagged rhythm of the syllables, their meaning smeared to indecipherable loss. I luxuriate in the stagnant waters of a nostalgia for something that never was. Its bitterness turned with age to cloying aphrodisiac, its depths to languid quicksand. The paralyzing elixir of love. Fixed in the contemplation of a […]