You were always deft with words.
I used to turn to clay under your knowing phrases, used to wet and shape myself around your fingers. But in this two-cigarette bar I’ve become sick of your verbal farce; what used to press me into your second-hand embrace now drives my eyes heaven-ward, finding the flickering low-lights more meaningful than the cheap baubles from your lips.
Love, you insist through gin-soaked complacency, is merely the sum of circumstance: the greatest artistic form there is. We don’t seek to understand it, for the very act of comprehension destroys the beauty of the work. We must instead lose ourselves in the maelstrom of simply being, ripening under the touch of experience like apricots underneath the sun. You say this with your head leaned in close, the coal pit passages of your eyes impenetrable as you boldly press your leg against the bare skin of my thigh.
I press back with urgency, a bite of impulsivity placing my hand under the dull sheen of the dark wood table, digging my fingers into the unforgiving flesh of your leg. Your pretentious turns of phrase no longer send a frisson of anticipation up my spine and I am bored, so bored with the ringing cacophony of your useless syllables. A wolf’s grin spreads toward the sharp cheekbones of your handsome face. I slip my hand further into the shadows of the bar and your eyes turn half-mast, but still there is nothing and I press harder.
I am a living piece of art, you breathe into the shell of my ear, a living, breathing, firm piece of earthly art that arose from the soil for mankind to come to know; the ripest fruit of Eden that ever tempted Adam. You take but a slice for yourself, the yielding white flesh of my earlobe disappearing between your hunter teeth, whilst I disconnect completely. I catch a sight of myself in the scratched bar mirror and feel laughter catch in my throat: I am a Roman bust, my features cold and hard and set, my breath still, my blood stagnant.
Retreating into the recesses of memory I find only disgust.
The clock whose hands don’t quite strike on time sidles past 2am and in the haze of the late-night, early-morning crowd I want to pluck the cigarette from your cobweb hands and brand you with its dying embers. I want to make you feel something worldly like pain; I want you to know something real and solid and true. I want you to know that you are ugly, that I am a twisted, broken, off-white porcelain vase and that I was never art, we were never art and this whole scene was an epilogue to a farce. I want to tell you that you make Joyce turn in his Zurich grave, smear charcoal over Ophelia’s drowning countenance and butcher everything you hold fast as definition.
If you drag your thumb across my lower lip again and tell me that beauty brings you to your knees, I will draw blood from your empty veins and scream.
