and when tom negotiates a deal he sees all the angles and plays it cool, plays it like a hand he’s been dealt before and he already knows its outcome. tom never comes unprepared, tom never goes in blind. he’s seen it all before, he’s looked hard and long into the mirror and he knows the man he is and could be. he’s been there, done that. just barely past thirty and he’s beaten the liquor that put his father into the ground, he’s beaten the coke that drove his friends to ruin. he’s risen above it all and he’ll keep rising, keeping plugging along until he doesn’t have to sit at any table to negotiate a deal anymore. he won’t even have to show up. he’ll have someone else do it for him. he’s almost there, but not quite yet.
Category Archives: words
project snowflake: notes: harry, he's seen
harry’s seen them go from gears and levers to circuits and touch screens and everyone he looks at is a series of controls run amok, a set of frayed wires connected to circuits running for miles bundled up in muscle and flesh with plastered teeth and blunt nails broken. he sees everyone as a series of functions that have been bent by damaged childhood and warped experience, he sees everyone on the verge of rust. and when amanda walks into the room she is just like them, he is just like them, he thinks, we are all like one another, and he’d like to believe that, he’d like to believe he’s just another broken cog in a vast machine. but then amanda suddenly smiles and she tells him there’s no one quite like her in the world, there’s nothing quite like them anywhere to be found.
blood fir
and my mouth is a blanket of fur matted with blood that leaks down the sides, over my chin, dribbling onto my fingers, sticky like the sap of a fir tree and everywhere i put my hands i can’t get rid of it, that stale taste of something having died in there and it’s rotting down my throat and i would choke on it if it didn’t have your name all over it, if i didn’t know your name but i do and i trip over a piece of scrap metal and i scrape my knee, break my arm and i would do it all over again if only to stop the clots from jamming up my lungs to steal your name from me
project snowflake: notes: harry, how she moves
and when she straddles me with her hips over my head and tells me she wants to fuck my face, my hand undoes my belt and she rubs her muff along my chin and when her clit brushes my lips i feel myself harden and go absolutely mad because i can smell her, just barely taste her and it’s good and i dart my tongue into her and her fingers grab hold of my hair tugging and with one free hand i cup her ass and bring her closer to me and i want to say her name but she says mine instead when my mouth is full of her and before i know it my hand is full of my own cum and amanda smiles in the dark reaching back for that same hand and brings it towards her lips.
this is what i imagine
this is what i imagine. i imagine him going through the motions the way the addict rustles his way out of bed and dons a tie. i imagine a man walking his dog and watching the animal go on the neighbor’s lawn and not picking it up. i imagine her slipping him vicodin in his morning coffee when she finds out. i imagine a little girl full of romantic fantasies being crushed by the first boy she falls in love with. i imagine a boy standing in front of a mirror first realizing he is a man but also utterly alone. i imagine the unspeakable loss a mother feels when they tell her son was found dead thousands of miles away. i imagine myself writing it all down and never ever keeping up with any of it.
and I wish for new things & old
and I wish for new things & old, for simultaneity and purpose, for an end to grief and despair, for the hope of daylight, for the promise of a bright and clear dawn.
project snowflake: notes: amanda, every pain
and every pain amounts to a phantom limb dangling inches from me, every pain a soreness i can’t fucking recover from. i can feel it just there at the periphery, just beyond my reach, a relief from all this, the promise of fulfillment, of being made whole. but i lie in the dark beside him and it’s a fucking miracle that i don’t skin him alive. that i don’t show him exactly how it feels to be this open and lacking, to be driven mad by the thought that there’s something vitally important missing inside of me and he just refuses to fucking see it.
new year jitters
it is a funny time of year, the older i get the more it becomes another cycle of artifice. you want to believe. you want to believe in new beginnings, in the closing of chapters, in some greater structure than the randomness of everyday life. that if you meditate, reflect, squint hard enough, you’ll see the design and you will be able to trace it, follow it, see where it all leads. no guarantee that it would bring you comfort, but at the very least, you’d be able to make sense of it all.
project snowflake: notes: ian
and when ian sees her, it’s been so long that he’s forgotten what it feels like to see her again, to be with her in all her amandaness again, that energy, that excited state that pronounced her and defined her, that announced her. he hugs her, and it all comes back to him, when he’s come home again, the solidness of her, her body pressed close to him, the smell of her hair. and even though he can never be enough for her and she can never be enough to him, just holding her now is enough to come back home.
project snowflake: notes: tom
she shows me her film and i don’t know to make of it. she did it on the computer i bought her and i think what a waste. i try to smile at first but when the actress goes to the bathroom and sticks her fingers in her mouth on her knees in front of the toilet, we can see the fingers right in there “nice and deep”, she says, “notice the rack focus?” i feel like gagging with her. i see the bile and focus instead to the emblem on the plasma screen and while a part of me wonders what they used for it, i’m distracted by the sound and turn to amanda. “what is this shit?” i ask her but she’s transfixed, in some other fucking place like usual, some place she’s told me i don’t belong. i wish i could grab hold of her and snap her out of it, just as the actress wipe the spittle with the back of her hand. i wish i could her hold her and bring her back to me, as she smiles and i hear the actress flush the toilet in this stupid fucking movie amanda has made.