there's no houses or accidental babies. no one pulling me through. here. only this feeling. this one way conversation madness. of wanting too much of something the opposing side of love has said it isn't interested in making any more excuses. for. my petty apologizes. and waiting. small crimes. for uninterrupted conversations about soul songs for headphones. and is that alright? yeah?
is that alright.
as the man says,
to give my gun away when it's loaded.
is that alright
with you?
i call my real father at work
can hear the clank and pangs of metal and concrete
the oil underneath all the fingernails
men's voices shouting loudly from a distance
almost clear, the smell of freshly cut wood.
i want to tell him that i can't write about these profound violations of war
and all the mad moments locked up underneath his skin
that make him drink too much beer
to satiate the dead bodies keeping him up through the night
that make him mean, sometimes.
i call my real father at work
which is something rare and slightly violating
and i sob into the skin of my right bicep
and try to pretend everything is okay
i say, i love you and i miss you.
and he acts gruff and unsure and pleased when he calls me his baby, and says he loves me and misses me, too.
Nothing ever changes. Not over centuries. Not over a few short years. Isabel could never love Osmond, but she couldn’t leave him either. Because there are certain elements which keep us bound. Invisible strings, that if cut, would expose that we are torn in half. Broken. The cleaved spot newly visible.
I am not one woman. I am a thousand daughters of a thousand mothers. I propagate perpetration – forced penetration. I am a conduit to violence and uncertainty. It is by this mouth and these hands that the long hard days continue without hope of obstruction.
just like noon day wood chippers and dry heaving asphalt for best friends
meditations in chalk
and bones
grind me through your teeth
let limbs drop numb and
discus into the metal bucket
remains severed
no microscopic specimen
hot wet blood and guts pavement
trunked
dime sliced sinews show passages of time
render voice boxes and bowels redundant
i won't ask you again
gear me
through
if aliens dressed you. addressed you. and i danced on your bouquets like graves. no, not like that. let's stop the spewing. like the bad poetry i used to write in the furnace room of the basement when i was young. and suddenly sticking my head in the furnace was a better alternative than that spot. the spot. locations of terror masked out by constant squares of linoleum. i am not like you. here. not there. nowhere it seems is anywhere different. than. anyway. so, we're the same. i hone in on you. reel you in like fishes struggling at the end of reels. to be caught. and when you are we and we sometimes catches my eye. i don't drop the pan. not even though it's hot. stop the shout. make black turn soundward. drown my ears until they disappear. I don't know. I DON'T KNOW, ANYMORE. maybe that's the point. when there isn't a point. the legs of the compass swing loose and unafraid. the dull end skimming the surface like my words in your throat when you remember me late at night like those things you meant to do but forgot. simpler maybe i'll seem unpronged, without light. and maybe you'll start.
i'm listening to too much bjork and dot allison. and reading ancient egyptian poetry about human geography. and it's all getting mixed up in my mind. when i sleep. i hear allison moaning about pomegranates and the sound of your voice and being forgiven.
the other night, i turned into an alien. and threw all the pictures of you out the window and into the parking lot. and laughed like someone had just set fire to the president. cool like. and satisfied. i screamed like a woman who knows what it feels like to have meat between her teeth. and imagined all those reproductions of you meant something. to someone. more than confetti dreams and the consequence of circumstance and damn good fucking sex.
with a little courage. in time. you might forgive me.
Fuck that. No. Don't forgive me. Seriously. Buy the cd and a box of tissues and write me a letter 9 months too late about all the reasons you think I'm a rotten excuse for a human being.
I've got to go find some birds to sing to.
Hero.
i just saw a firefly on my front porch, and i need to know; how did you find that alien to power your ring? cause, see, someone distinguished my sun. and i don't know how to get it reignited. and i'm tired of being afraid of the opposite energy. i need willpower; i don't want it to be so much yellow. anymore. this self-doubt, that is something i know you understand. and i just keep on murdering. my own private sinestro incarnate. i need you to graft yourself onto my soul. power my battery. light my way.
getting high on
laxatives
pseudoephedrine
vodka
this combination of bodily harm
and then some.
he cut himself shaving. the morning he got lost on the way to waterloo station. they met at the fish and chips shop.
the best fish and chips she'd ever had. she'd said.
but not that afternoon. she asked him to write her a love letter. and he took the rock from his mouth. to lay glinting like a dog's eye in the palm of her hand.
but how is this a love letter?
and he asked her how love feels. but didn't say anything about the solid space. the unique pattern. scape. the weight of the stone in the palm of the hand. on the tongue. the cool forgiveness. the way the shape and sense can be memorized and recalled in the mind. on the skin. the non-verbal. the fact that he'd wrenched exactly that one from the thousands of others. claimed it from the rest of the world as an exchange between. hers. his. impenetrable and theirs.
this is just a rock she said.
bored and resigned.
where did you get it? she asked.
and he said from out of the empty pocket of my mouth. where she touched her fingertips to his lips. then to the rock. and said the word rock and lips out of her mouth into the empty afternoon sunshine. she threw the rock into her purse, said goodbye, and went home. he caught the train to neasden. sat in the garden and watched the cat chase moths into dusk. made dinner and watched the television until it was time for bed. between the sheets he rolled his wrists in counterclockwise motions. twice each. and was sure that, with a little courage and time, some day she would make someone a very fine paperweight.
Jelly has a boyfriend with invisible legs. They live in a black and white house that has a red staircase with their invisible headed rooster called Quarters. Jelly fell in love with Temulent after he won a fried fish heads eating contest. She wasn't phased by the fact that he was the only participant. Sometimes, she enjoys singing him a song that she wrote. It goes: "My boy-friend -- ain't go' no legs. My boy-frieeeeend has in-vi-si-ble legs." Jelly craves adventure, and she often draws maps of places she imagines inside the front covers of the books they keep on the shelf in their office. She's afraid of the television and the color yellow and of having to spell the word restaurant. Temulent uses a white eraser to rub out the maps when Jelly is away running errands or is taking a shower. When she discovers them gone, she believes the lines became invisible like Tem's legs and the rooster's head. And she smiles big and presses her face into the blank book that ate her dreams. Pulls air into her nose hard and smells the powdered sugary scent that always reminds her of Temulent's fingertips.
"Happy New Year!!" Jelly shouts into the September air of her flat. Determined and anxious to start again.
in french he says what i can only translate enough to sound like your hair smells like silk sometimes and while we have sloppy sex on the kitchen counter i'm more interested in trying to decipher the ingredients sideways and through only one open left eye under the unflattering bright lights of the sugar free vanilla syrup bottle that appears rarely if ever used. and i know he's not greedy. so i try to concentrate. i purr. coo. press my forehead into his adam's apple. dead valves of pressure filled lost in the viscous syrup words. i can't fake my way through this one. i fill my head with clothes. knee high black heeled boots. the new skirt i bought and still haven't worn. fish net stockings. sex with you. sex with you. sex with you. until in another world i scream the contents of the counter onto the floor and we break the sugar bowl. it's enough. then. for him to go.
no idea
seriously
i've got nothing
not that that's new
it's just that i'm putting it down
typing it up
which is also nothing
not 'no nothing'
which actually means something
to someone specific
i keep trying to write
but then when i see the words on the page
all inky and boxed up
it feels like there's a bunch of cotton that's gotten stuffed between what i thought i meant to say
and what actually got written
like everything comes out muffled
it was something about movements of bodies being like a pirouette--barefooted ballerinas
[see what i mean?]
sometimes i feel like my hands are made from bricks
or that maybe, when i wasn't looking, someone zipped off my fingers and replaced them with much less usable items
like dead fish
i am the hollow sound of a cork undone. watching your virtual fish tank.
all night long.
salt me you-ward!! not for slippery the feet go on the icy asphalt. crunch. smunch. and the tetter-tap. no, no. the salt goes. and me and you go. table sit. hmm. to the tongue dance and mash. me-nash the teeth food-ward and go icky in the tummy sack. glub glub. belly me up, pretty pleaseo. and mine pearlies munch on your itty bitty chin hairs. nibble mouselike on cheese. to squee your neck and palm knot your jumper. stripe me up. bed sheets and knee socks. go go go to purr the whirr and sleep me hard cold afternoons.
Endless cups of hot strong coffee. Then luke warm. Cold. Joe. Cudjoe. Wrapping myself in Wideman's words like blankets. Like nets meant for safety. The corporeality of history and the exteriority of time. Space. Spaces. Between text and sound. Of Damien Rice's soft utterances on B-sides. About Dicks made of Wood. And the constancy of being let down. And never knowing the way home. Homewood. Everything burns. Becomes ashes. Even this flame that aches between my legs. Tugging at my frenum. That wants you there and the absence of you there at the same time. To feel it or remember it is the same thing. The mystery of remembering and forgetting in simultaneous instances of time. Some garden of eden when our minds figure out how to understand both. Like sipping at the broth left at the bottom of the bowl of Asian noodles. Sacraments found in eating the definition of the word coalesce. There are always the proffers of bad reality television. Punctuation to a night less well spent. And new boots worn all day long that still feel comfortable by the comparison of being without. Like shedding skins that you aren't yet ready to slough off. To let go of. The way the leather breaks tight against the ankle on the up steps of stairs. As if your hands grasp at gripping and remain there. Like children's fists on strings of balloons. To keep me from floating clean away.
No that isn't what I meant to say. Mean. It was something simpler.
Like. I'm tired.
Or how pounding the souls of these useless feet against the refracting asphalt of this useless city in which I hate to live rings shiny and sparkling like your cheeks do when I've pressed my shadowed eyes against your face and the result of the moments of embrace linger and catch whatever light bright pulses them into fruition.
No, it's still that I am. God. So. Fucking. Tired.
If wishes were kisses, then we'd both be floating easy in oceans of ecstasy.
On the cold dirty asphalt. The vast black expanse behind my flat where we park our cars. Beside the putrid trash bins. With chalk. I'm making an outline of your body. Your head. This heart. Those hands. Cover each curve a thousand times. Until the stick breaks into fine crumbly powder. Press so hard my fingers bleed. My eyes burn. Until the ground swells into dust. Covers us both. Like the aftermath of fireworks at night.
only afterward, i drag to my room. crawl under the sheets fully clothed. and wait for the undertow. these worst moments come when i am sick or tired or both. the speed of the world slowed, somehow, as if i’d drunk a whole bottle of cough syrup. sticky and nauseating. tonight i yearn for the apathy of sleep. for the lack of words and the constant desire to describe the unnamable. but i never really sleep. wrapping myself in sheets that smell of a man who is merely a ghost. i realize under the cover of darkness and silence and flashes of vulnerability. i am one insignificant woman.
I'm staring at the screen trying to write about sheets and curved calves and the arches of backs. But nothing's coming out. Instead I'm thinking about trains and waiting for a phone call. Instead, I'm staring at Christmas lights. And thinking about decorating your leg. When these sheets lick the curve of the calf. The arched back. I. No. It's not there. Still nothing's coming out. I want to feed you with my hands. Stare at you for a thousand hours until I forget there are things called hours and time bends and folds and delivers us []. I am this hand on the back of your hand. Your skin to skin mutation. I am the mouth of your mouth when it laughs. I want to fold you like paper birds. Wings. Wing me. Fall me out windows and doors to fly and go. To let me out. To let you in. Go. go. Help me outscream lightning.
there's that thing, she says, that thing that makes bats fly sideways and that makes train whistles blow late into the night. things that make the world seem less like swimming through a constant stream of turpentine and the memory of shark's fins against toe nails. i've spent the night with a butterfly in the stomach of a great white making daisy chains. tapping out songs on soft insides of a belly wall. this won't be the last time i outline the shape of your face with fire against the side of an abandoned building. or scream your name from the 9th street bridge. to the tune of the trains running on rails and the flash of the flame when it's hot. that thing, she says, slowly audible like the am radio station in your adolescent parent's car, something about a horse with no name, that thing. she wants to scream. above the wheels against iron and the infinite abyss. but even if she scrambled and fell. that thing. that thing. would around your ears soundless fall. to crack and strain like a voice full up on sickness. you couldn't ever see.
When I try to catch the name of you in my head. Pin you down dimensional. Only the pattern pouring sunshine through leaves onto the dark surface of the asphalt below the open windows of my cool morning room. Makes you momentary stick. Until the wind blows. And the trains run on rails. The way your laugh licks my ears like midnight tongues. Designs to make you up like bed sheets. The haunt of this house as I hunt you. Naked toes to metronome floors. To the all-day sounds of the trains running on rails. When you're gone. And I stalk waking hours for ways to name the name of you in my head. Distanced and waning. The way the trains do. All day long.
I've been writing you a letter. About skin and bones. The Ethernet. Sometimes it begins I've been to London three times since you held my hand--buried your face in my hair--and said you loved me in line before the international terminal. Sometimes it doesn't. Usually, probably, I'm writing to the wrong person. Today. Here. The sky is waiting storms. I breathe it in. Full of August flowers and destruction. The monochrome of the day makes life seem more navigable. It's been ages since I've fallen in the shower. And I no longer require you for picking up my pieces. Sometimes I wonder if all my transgressions have coalesced. Crawled into my left ear and taken residence. This dull residual ache. Like the slow crushing sound of my bed frame under the weight and pressure of bodies. Moving.
the boy's just gone. run to catch a train. gone to see a man. or two. still i'm not there. not any closer. not farther away. just away. you make me feel, he says. this love feels. like eating butterscotch pudding. with my hands.
Already the trains on rails keep running. And no manner of French films I watch or bottles of red wine I consume. Reduce the crushing folds of the sheets that tangle me up at night. Remove the strange constricting notion, now a foreign gesture, of sleeping with clothes on. The stain of my love. Red ribbons and long distance phone calls. When an affair of love is so perfect. So sweet that it becomes a dream you almost thought you might have once tried to live. Like realizing you are better than who you are. Can the everything continue? Or in order for it to remain perfect, does it have to end? Would the laws of motion suddenly catch it up? Deliver it back over to something unremarkable. Turn the perfection into a white athletic sock. Balled up and found, unmatched, behind the radiator?
even now i can hear the tones. like the cold wind blowing through my open evening window. it’s like a call to those cool spring days when t. and i spent hours sipping the last tones of our coffees and talking through the disaster of passing cars and the fiendish ways our lives moved in and through and between the madness that makes up a life. these lives. passing even now through the not so fresh air of the window. brings the tone of my discontent. these whistles in the distance only remind me what i serve to represent. the bad luck charm. the something that always proves to offer up a delay. the frustration that makes you wish you’d stayed in bed that much longer. the crack in the sidewalk that made you wish you’d never slipped out from between the sheets to meet the day—at all.
i've not slept in days.
i say. quietly. methodical rehearsed. and strange. from behind the locked bathroom door.
listen.
i whisper through tongues and grooves. where linoleum cracks at the base of my spine where i sit where i am by myself on the floor.
i don't want this to be like that time you chased me out of the house with a pen-knife.
do you hear?
i'm not ready for that sort of thing.
For this to work, I say, you're going to have to be very quiet. But nothing ever really stops. Not the voices. Not the turning of the universe. The Fibonacci sequence rolling like ancient vowels. Like palms at the bends of knees. Not leaves. And if I stood up right this minute and screamed. Wrote you that letter I've been meaning to send in blood and bones about the way life goes funny sometimes. About dying young. When I was little the whole world got pushed into one small dark room. Let me out. I'd like to leave now. These nightmare moments when I'm shaking and you're shaking me awake. No. No. Please, just be quiet. Then roll numbers and vowel sounds into songs without words. Listen. When I am eye. I am not your hybrid construction. I am not a half-life substantiated on synthetics. On medications. I am a real girl. With a name. A sexless purpose. I didn't need you before I met you. This is the dream Aye. The strong worded one who never gets the chill up her spine. Looks over her shoulder. And I don't need you now. She says. But this me hears her and closes one eye. Cocks her head like a puppy transfixed by the sun. Waits. Stop it. No. Please. I am not this girl. Stayed and linked on your chain. I do not run wildly round you like some poorly trained dog. Tricking for your affections. Bow. Wow. Still. I am just one woman. With perfect measurements and a goofy smile. Who isn't quite tall enough to be more than average. Who is too smart for her own good. Eye. Aye. I. There has been trouble. With my days.
i felt like gnashing my teeth and sobbing. like telling someone off. i mean really hurting someone else's feelings. scream at you for always being such a self-satisfying bastard. hurl damaging words until i'd lost control of time and place. until my lungs felt filled with sand and fire. too easy. not the problem. not even a problem. just something lash onto. to scoop out these bucket-fulls of bile. hollow faithless attacks. i'd rather throw lit matches on my naked legs. sear the skin to leave a mark. and pretend it didn't hurt enough to make me make sound. to cry. i'm tough enough. i could scream it. through teeth and clawing fingernails. to the walls of my room. where i sit insane quiet. fumbling with this lit fuse and the slow tick tick until i explode. at 3:30 am i crawled into the window sill. perched and watched the orangey glow hue of white storm breaking day. wrapped the duvet around my naked body. the snow tapping like fingernails at the glass. begging me. raised the glazed box open. let some of me out. let some of you in.
the large amount of phone calls i'm getting
where i say hello
then there's just a bunch of dead air
and i wait. say hello again.
then there's still just dead air
and the other person doesn't hang up
so i do
because she said she was nothing or that it might just be better to be nothing but it isn't the truth it's like the old punctuation trick like the thing i wrote awhile back about being able to hear my neighbors having sex in their shower no it isn't about sex it's about something else but i'm too tired to figure out the point to grab hold of both ends of the narrative string and push or tie them into a neat knot and leave the mess for you to figure out woman without her man is nothing like she said before me from the mouth of a man writing for a woman played by a man pretending to be a woman i saw her in cream silk pajamas i'm adding the punctuation now shoving it in maybe where it doesn't belong i don't care sometimes are you listening?
for Vaughan
into his answerphone. 4:09 p.m. in my scared little girl voice
there was a grey spider on the windowsill just now,
so i whispered that little prayer you taught me to Sun Buddha,
before i smashed it dead
i want to be an amiri baraka poem. filled with fire and intensity of vision and the power of understanding history. the exigency of the economy of words. i want to soak myself in gin and play with matches until the whole world fills with the scent of burning hair and i am rendered timeless in bones. i want to be more than a photograph or a memory or those fucking wishes you spew that make me want to scratch off my skin with butter knives. i want to be an untranslatable answer phone message and Jean Toomer's (un)broken arcs.
i'd call just to tell you that i love you, but i've forgotten how to make words find your ears.
instead, i'd say into his answerphone: i'm being attacked by gigantic spiders and throwing up every half hour, or so. reading really bad lesbian pornography. let's go get some coffees and fuck. i need your fingers in my eyes. and some groceries.
i don't remember where i live. so i walk. it feels like the wrong direction. turn. face center. run lines of familiar poetry in my head. it feels like the wrong direction. wander. wander. wander. walking dead in the city. on my desk you drink red wine in a red sweater. i want red. you're smiling at something out of the frame. something imaginary when i made you let me take your picture on my birthday. fire engine tongue disaster. i no longer require you. or the book of spanish love poetry due back at the library tomorrow. Desnatarse, atreverse, estar furioso . . .. dangerous furious cow. now i walk the seven steps it takes to move from your bed to the bathroom where the door unpredictably doesn't talk to me anymore, but i don't arrive at the edge of anything. no bowls cold tiles to fall into. like the smell of your aftershave when it gets caught in the vanilla lotion neck of me. in the middle. block. i count eye lashes and teeth. hinged body of holes. disgusted with her, i hang up on you. i don't answer myself when i call right back. trite self-indulgent answerphone whore. in going we return the outside of the inside over and over again until ass over tea cups we fall and break your great grandmother's china. at the only youth hostel in the city, i carry my seven dollar bottle of cab in a brown paper bag to the roof top. i'll have to wear these clothes again to work tomorrow. night blanket soundless. intertextual mad drunken woman. she gets so high. can't figure out how to get back down.
the wind howls like the ghosts of lonely holidays and the atrophied knees of giants. behind the glass i shake and shake like dogs at the shelter waiting for homes. inside the dark-as-dogs glass eye, i. of the memory of my larynx and of aluminum skies. soundless bridges. generators of nothing. cold howls the shake; my firecracker skin.
if i were eastern and you were blue. and oceans were the things we screamed into nightmares when we were overtired and not sleeping nights. then maybe things would feel more like cradles. rocking. and televisions wouldn't blare this room madness horrorshows. now only my temples ache. of calves pulse. full veins of blood and stained pillow cases. lust. if i were silent and you were you. cash? and things we screamed into oceans made us rock less. maybe. then;
he told her not to forget the mustard
in the cake and baking aisle of the washington street store
on an ordinary gloomy monday afternoon
he carried one packet of cigarettes and tin foil
a dry crooked stranger smile
she remembers now the way he smelled of instant coffee
and lemon meringue
how later she stuffed her fingertips into his skin
like maraschino cherries for wounds
whipped egg white laugher
while they went searching for sugar
imogen
met her new boyfriend at the super market
trouble me with your world and i might crack open like raw eggs. built. to spill. to shove you down flights of stairs until all your limbs broke and we'd rung the bell and birds we kept in boxes flew. trouble me strange and unapproachable on a not late night light this. your elbow tips still choked in the back of my throat like stalled tears.
words get stuck and they stick like keys for keyboards or fingers in locks late at night when doors shut and firecrackers break and the loud unexpected noises of life in the dark are like the only thing keeping me close to sanity in this room where i rock and rock alone waiting for no one and nosleep and the tick and tick time bomb of the way everything moves too quickly in the light to slow down to stop the fingertips the lips the eye lashes steadily licking you away from me
after you're gone, i dial the number. steel the phone. face plate against cheek bone to neck stuck. and wait. for the robot voice. to rock. and rock. into the slow static drive of the way silent lines. hum. to crack. the blaze. in the collar bone. and the moan of a not-quite-drunk tongue. until frenums burn and break voicesounds. loose marbles. to crash. the whitewash. of it all. to wail. dumb space. full of rhythm. of your--stop. in my ear. when it's caught.
> some of the letters that spell your name and initials on my
> keyboard are almost completely rubbed off
he's devouring this city as if it were thin red jellies and christmas cakes.
when all we really need is a taxi.
asia doesn't dream of true love or the bottoms of bottles. or other unlimitless uknown things she used to fear. like the unknowable edges of the ocean. or the unmeaning of words. instead, she just pads around her flat in stained slippers. and hums along to unspun made up love songs. in her crazy-could-never-say-it-quite-yet-love-soaked-head. asia dreams of boots and the best fear she's ever known and the limitlessness of the ocean. and using too many esses and f-words and too much sex whenever time presents itself.
asia can't believe you care. and wants to sink skin into headphones until she realizes that it's exactly right, that until now, she didn't know at all what it felt like be alive.
when we were both machines. i used to love you. the way your heart ticked like an alarm clock. second hand. and dime storms were kisses that didn't tear away skin.
asia dreams of paper boats. and names. stalks the zero streets with the taste of your name in her mouth. proximity creeps in the curves of her thighs. sneaks the sound and the sense to the glint of the ground under feet. where life reduces itself to logic. if then. textbook. where you swallowed the memory of the burnt tree, and she gave it away to someone who wouldn't want it just to bring it all back to even. she knows you're a big fan of equations. asia dreams of paper boats. and fire. dances like locusts to invisible castanets. in drifts. and says the name of your name on her no-name over and over again until her you and you her become named. asia dreams of snow. and fire. on paper boats. sailing.
asia dreams of foreign import bootlegs and guns. sharks' teeth and the
she know s that real people. reel. go on becoming and that life isn't
strictly about pixelations
curled
like hair styles
over lines
but the way life moves
the geography of meaning
oh now that's good
that
s something we all regret the point and shoot of our lives
to fill picture books with
that won't hold the still that we worked out 10 years later
onto sticky pages
to ruin the print
but not the memory of the fumes
that made it all
make sense inside your
revolving
infra
red
door
head
She doesn't dream of dogs. Anymore. Like old email addresses and people in pictures she might think she remembered if she could only figure out how. They don't bark or claw at the fence when she comes. Pink tongues searching her salty skin through the barrier between. She wants blood and guts. Salmon splayed in a memory on her father's sunshine sidewalk. His wrong smile and cherry covered fingertips. The acrid smell of burning turned flesh gone to fire. They nuzzle her. Comfort whimpers through wet dark noses. Instead. These days. No, Asia can't dream of dogs and the cavities where body parts should go. Misplaced emotional disasters. She curls up against the neighbor's fence with her crayola markers. Washable. Draws their forms fiercely. No photographs. No late night phone calls. Only the swell of colors in the sink when she soaks the figures away. Trials of time less well spent and lonely. Down the drain in muddy purple swirls. Not now. No. Asia dreams of tattoos and the world indelible.
Asia dreams of boots. Of black leather motorcycle calve height of metal buckles on sale for 20 dollars at the consignment store of the dull downtown where she currently lives. Too kitsch for heavy soles. Asia dreams of boots. Of her killer knee-highs fake plastic disaster with the broken zipper and the 4 gracious inches given to her legs in long jeans. Asia dreams of boots. Hard edged steel toed. The imported pair of memory. She needs them to stamp out the fires. To stop all this traffic in her head like a one way street gone wrong. She doesn't have any special powers. Not faster than or the man of anything. Instead, Asia dreams of boots.
aren't we all wide asleep running. she slips through the sheets of slippery june half past 4 in the morning like fingers swimming in long dark hair. the clink of the chains the nails against asphalt of the spoon of her childhood mother's hand in an aluminum bowl. the unhinged metal on metal that seeps between the spaces of every skeletal bone to ache. she the wall cloud raising unpredictable force like dreams. stalks crouched and preying. until she presses fingers and lips against metal. pressed flesh against fence. they howl and charge. patterns of slick saliva. of hair. breath. this exchange of lovers. devastation. the prey of she in every shattering bark. asia dreams of h-bombs and blow jobs. and the pretty play of vicious teeth wrenching skin from bone. rendering fleshy body works in blood stains on empty sidewalks. she thinks. has to be--better than this.