you can be wistful all you want, but the thought gums up the gears, stops any and all traction whatsoever. whatever, he said and put his beer down and fumbled through the crowd, jostling for escape, stumbling out into a night filled with drunken women and flustered men. he did everything for you until he couldn’t do anything more, her mother said, and wiped her husband’s brow while their daughter bit her bottom lip yet again. why do you mock me, he asked, and in the dark with the bedsheet covering only the bottom part of a slender thigh his lover replied, because you love me as no other, because no man would take this kind of abuse from another man and love me so fiercely. these are the lies we tell one another between the friction and the release, to get from friction to release. it is never happenstance, only a series of moves across, an accumulation of flesh wrung free from bone.

As he screams, I tell him about the bruises his wife showed me. I rip out a good section, rub the flap of skin against his good eye. He starts to plead, he stutters, it’s a pretty ugly sound. I take the broomstick he beats his son with and jam it into his mouth until I crack his molars. He chokes and gags like an animal with blood and snot and spit. Holding him down with both hands on the stick, I lean and whisper how his secretary never enjoyed a minute of it, that she was frightened and afraid and angry and disgusted. And as he spasms while I choke him, I just cannot stop laughing and laughing and laughing.

i find him in a bar, he buys me a drink. he tells me everything that’s wrong with the world. he goes on through the night. stumbling, i take him home. he finally tells me about his wife, what a bitch she is. he tells me about his son, what an ass he is. he confides in me about his secretary, snickers about how lovely she is. he passes out on the couch, he drools into the cushion. i start on him with the paring knife, surprisingly they never wake up with that one. it’s only when i peel off his eyebrows that his eyes snap open. i gouge one out and both of his hands fly to his face, then fumble on my hand. i climb atop the couch, press my weight on him and begin on the scalp.

where has your spittle gone? she asks tightening the tourniquet across his thigh. he bites the bit, thinks of her nipple, the taste of blood.
are you breaking me again? she asks again, his eyes well up again as she breaks the skin again and her arm draws back the saw again forward again, again and again.

we had, at one time, thought better of this, better of us. we believed, or rather i did. i was quite sporty back then, renewed and filled with i don’t know how to explain it: purpose, love, passion, life? or was i free, finally free? but freedom breaks, it becomes tethered, it wraps a noose, we are free to choose, but when the choices are made, freedom is lost. in the hopes of building my way out of despair, i dug a deeper whole. he says this to me and i find it utter nonsense. he says this to me and i crack, he cracks, the mirror bends. i reach out to him and see myself reach further away. everything i told you was lies, he whispers, there is no life for you here. you are the lack, you are the despair, you are the nothingmeat, you are the nothingmeat, the nothingmeat. now go away, go. go. go into the twilight, go into the dark, the dusk of this life, the ruins you so crave. leave us in tatters, leave us shattered. make us into your own image godking, break us all.

Or rather was he the writing or I the writer, was I written or did I make myself up as he went along? Was the fabrication of this a way to get to you or push you away? Were the nights where I held you out of the storm ever real or did he stop believing? No story is ever told the same way twice. I have never been sane, I have never been the same, he was never real, you fell apart before my eyes and I did nothing. He wept and tried to gather up all these pieces and was left fractured himself. I wrote it all such a very long time ago, you have since grown tired. He cannot live there anymore but cannot leave either. She danced through the fire and I applauded from the curb. He calculated every move until I couldn’t breathe. And the music plays off key and he stumbles in and out of line of sight, in and out of headlights so dim that the road turned into autumn. the writing believes and the writing tears and the writing weeps into coarse lids crowned with eyelashed thorns.

sometimes the pain inside her is so great and numb that it bloats her out from the insides, makes her face puffy and her skin shiny and taut. i believed in her. she looks out into the world from a window at street level and all she can see is the trash everyone above her has left behind through iron gates painted over black and brown and red and hard black enamel again. it reeks even in the winter, it just piles up until all she can see is the colony of rats weeding their way through and out. even they are desperate to move but cannot leave for fear of survival: what will they eat? where will they live? hounded. but as she draws thick red gloss across her bottom lip, she promises herself that she’ll get out of here, maybe california, maybe nevada, where it’s sunny all year round. she’s had enough of this, she’s had enough of the city. it only breaks you.

she twists and turns in her sleep, sheets tie limbs down into something that passes as rest. tears for pillows, the slumber of a man beside her who breaks her constantly. children who wake in the night vomiting into his arms and the tired limbs of a mother bent over double to change the sheets. i’ve poured everything into this or i’ve poured nothing, but i am mourning for it, of it, of him and her and what they used to be. and i dream of nooses, i dream of hanging, i dream of an unmarked grave.

death like anything, warmed over. i clasp bitten nails around shoulders torn, a lover’s misstep, a wife’s bounty, and jackals that lurk between trees. there is not one promise i will not break into and ransack as my own. eyelashes that peel off before sunrise and we mock the necks of bottles broken inside the necks of lonely men. so quick, easy and disposable: this is what we’ve come to, this is what passes.