the thing of it was, it had been standing. right there, right in front of everyone, standing and completely unabashed about it. like an erection on a monkey. a completely buck naked monkey with testicles the size of two walnuts put together and a raging hard-on ready for some savage primate action. that’s how it was, that’s how far out there it was with everyone looking at it. and it seemed to get even bigger the more it noticed people noticing it. talk about ego tripping, like a fat man bursting his cheeks into a wet balloon, that sick wet whoosh sound and the balloon filling up. it was filling up like that standing right there and i swear i was on my tippy toes trying to get out of there. it was becoming ridiculous. between these two metaphors of the fat man and a horny monkey, it was literally all i could stand and i had to find a chair to sit down. to sit down and, i have to admit, admire it for what it was and what it was becoming. i’d let it fill the room until someone burst my bubble, but i had plenty of time before that happened. plenty of time at all.

she orders herself a martini, shaken but not stirred. the barman says, that’s very bond of you. she smiles, well i’m not very fond of you at all.

her girlfriend saddles up to mister tall dark & handsome and even though he talks to her, he also makes it a point to flash his wedding ring. she’s not blind but she hasn’t spotted her next target yet either. their gay friend is just miserable, no one showing up even on the edge of his scope, this party was so utterly straight. not one lamb amongst these butchers, he mutters to himself fingering the straw of his pina colada.

they were at a wedding or some sort of fund raiser, she finally drunk enough to forget which was which. her friend had moved on to a balding man of forty three but only because he reminded her of a high school sweetheart whose hair was longer and thicker than hers. instead she cautiously placed her maritini on a nearby table, on someone’s half eaten dinner plate actually, and made a bee line for the ladies room. their gay friend interfered, cutting across her path and scooped her into some nonsense jig that could’ve been the conga but done with bag pipes.

this is the man for you, he whispers, spinning and tilting her hips into the right direction. she thought she saw whom their gay friend meant, but there were dozens of men, collared shirts with loose neckties, untucked and sweaty armpits in her field of vision that he could’ve been anyone but none struck her as worth noting, worth stopping the increasingly desperate urge to find the ladies room. she caught a glimpse of her friend now chatting up the barman, all youthful reminders now having been laid aside.

be right back, she tells her gay friend and resumes the necessary trajectory for urinary expulsion. she makes it and finds girls her age and younger dabbling in eye shadow and lip stick while two come out of a stall pinching their nostrils and blinking their eyes. if only it was that easy, she says to herself, going into the very same stall to piss it all away.

i smoke nights like this into clustered movements of kittens mewling for an extra inch. she says, you’re thinking of her, aren’t you? i reply, i think of everyone underneath mounds of dirt and hiding from lamp posts deeply rooted in cracked cement and the passage of time. he says, even this has its limits, even you must realize what you are doing to yourself, and i laugh myself into another bottle whose neck i crack along the curb to climb inside of. my mother brandishes her caring like a sword that has no handle carving us both deeply as she plunges into talking me out of shutting windows from the stifling heat. i drive around streets that have lost all meaning save for their lack of arrival and seductive penchant for departure. my father had sat me on his knee to wipe a lick of hair from my forehead and i wonder whose hand i was ever more afraid of considering how brutal mine has become.

a breeze licks my limbs like warm water, i am boundless and endless, all roads begin from my sternum and find no home. my heart beats at the irregular intervals of your breath, haggard and tentative. i wipe sweat off your brow that clings to me like spit from a parched mouth. who would have thought i would still be here, raining whispers of shattered glass across your lips.

gristle stuck between my tooth and gum, a digging that brings about all sorts of damage to rattlesnakes on the mend. you were the dream i could not let go off, a haunting of whispers and tears and seared flesh that tasted bitter at first followed by a sweet aftertaste. i drank wine for water, a thirst i could never quench but only be thwarted by suspicions and the lack of glamor. we had two stories to tell, and neither had a plot worth mentioning, only the sites of graves too muddy to fill and i was entrenched. there are no real words for this, only imaginary ones for winged beasts and furry men without hearts, but it was very real your nails raked over my cheeks gouging my eyes for pearls and my mouth for forgiveness. i had promised you would never be forsaken, but here we were straddling camels on opposite sides of a desert rife with chasms, sun burnt and lacking.

he says, you’re a contradiction in terms, you’re happy and sad, passionate and sterile, terminally ill yet fitfully alive
i said, this is where madness makes its home