crucible
When I first saw you, you remember? It was on a Friday. You came up and asked me for a cigarette, even though I’d just seen you put one out? God you was beautiful. It hurt you were so pretty. My guts wrenched and I was scared that I would be all choked up and not able to say anything. Took me a long time to say what I meant but when I said it I meant it. God you’re beautiful.
Now.
Sobbing is not the same as crying. Shaking. Spit dripping with snot and I can’t concentrate because my tears are so thick in my eyes. Tears like sand, man, and I can’t stop shaking. The doors jammed and I keep running by it, pacing by it back and forth and all I can think about is that day I saw you for the first time and God you was beautiful. I finally stop and I sit down and I roll up a big fucking joint but I can’t find a god damn lighter so I toss it back in a bag and I pull out another bag and lay down that brown power and tic, scrape, shuffle, slide, FFNNNGGHHH! I suck it up my nose and into my lungs and I’m sucking my cilia for the last remnants of that brown sweetness and for a little while I can’t feel you not there.
But it’s not enough. So. Stick. Suck. Push. Drip. Pull. Ah.
Snapping fingers to no particular tune and I fuckin’ pace again and I think about that time I seen you for the first time and God you was beautiful and my hands fuckin’ shake and my eyes are endless artesian wells, and any memory will do. Anything. Evil recollections of the sound of you made when you retched trying to get yourself into that black dress that already fit, though I could barely hear it over the sound of my crying in defiance and the sound of my ignoring that it happened when you come out and give me a sour kiss like acid lips and I wonder just how much of this is real.
I want to suck your tongue, tongue your bellybutton, bite your clit, but all I can think about is that retching and the taste until you push your teeth into mine and I can’t help but love the push of your hips. The bones might come out but I’m thirsty and I drink of you and drink you until I’m drunk with your taste and you’ve salivated enough to drown out that acid taste and I forget the bile that once crawled from your throat.
My arm itches and I boot again because I can’t stop fucking crying whenever I think about the first time I met you and God you was beautiful. You know we had a dream once, on the futon, about having kids and getting married and making it big and pursuing our dreams and helping each other do that but now it’s all gone and there ain’t no fuckin’ reason for it. It was all an illusion, probably my imagination.
I quit, now, and toss the last of that brown powder in the garbage, the wax balloons catching the light just barely past the dark blue stamp and I realize it’s just the gleam of the tape holding the skag in the bag and I walk out the door, sick of pacing around it, and almost make it down the stairs before I go running back to the garbage and dig it out, even though it’s on top. I think I might have come back up here just to wait at the door again, even though I might see you sooner from the base of the stairs I think that hearing your knock might un-break my heart. I realize, now, that when something breaks you can find most of the pieces but there are those little slivers you never recover, they make it obvious that some serious shit went down and the mend will never fix the break completely. So at that point it will always be weak. So I mend, as best I can, by breaking the skin and pushing it back in. Just a little prick. Then I go to the street and I walk even though there ain’t any houses or stores or dealers or nothing and I just walk without aim because I have about as much as a .22 rifle a few hundred shots in with a bent barrel I just spin out on the crease and can’t find my mark because my target is a heart and I don’t think there’s a single ventricle left in the world that I have a shot at so I just shoot my load at anything below the heart worth hitting.
I swear to God it feels good, baby! And she asks me to say her name but I don’t know it so I just make something up but she’s so fucked up she don’t care and that’s fine by me, baby, because I’m just swinging, slinging dick like epinephrine in meth valley and I don’t care where it lands as long as it does. It may have landed near you one night, but I promise you I wasn’t thinking about you. I been thinking, and I like thinking, about that little black dress and those perfect feet.
You know, I bet there are a few of you out there that think I’m talking about you but I can assure you that I’m fuckin’ not. I can assure you that I don’t give a shit about you.
It’s not your fault. I had buried that dream long before this. It’s hers. If I only hadn’t met her then you wouldn’t remind me so much of her. If it weren’t for that place. If it weren’t for that room.
Who was I to so recklessly throw away something so beautiful?
Why is it lucidity only comes at the end?
When you see what a parody of yourself you’ve become, when all the vernacular and jargon and bravado fades and the only thing left is a sense of focus and loss.