The Science of Sobriety

I talk about the weather, sometimes. I’m just like everyone else. It’s getting warmer. It will get better soon. The weather, or some other thing.

A lot of times, we turn the things we don’t understand into words, and these words make us think we understand ourselves. We say I love you because it flows off the tongue every time we see each other. It’s much easier than saying:

Sometimes I want to take photos of you when you get out of the bath and then hang them up in every pizza place in the city with forged signatures, so it looks like all you do is eat pizza naked, and it also looks like you are famous. Because of this, I choose to stay with you, even though the sex is mediocre, and when I try to make suggestions so the sex will be better, you call me a freak. 

The way that soap smells on your skin makes up for the time that you photocopied an unfinished story I wrote and workshopped it in your fiction class pretending that you wrote it, and then said that since I sent it to you in an email attachment asking for feedback, you had every right to steal the story, which was also an allegory for coming out of the closet as a bisexual.

The way your ribcage feels against mine makes me inexplicably happy.  I think it’s half weird and half endearing that the thought of cheese alone disgusts you, yet you love mac & cheese, as if it’s made of something different, and even eat that gross Velveeta stuff. Your skin is so soft, I get chills.

***

Now that I’m sober, I feel like an astronaut, hovering above the world of my brain. There is no gravitational pull, it seems. No signs of life on this planet. I fear that if my feet touch the ground, my oxygen supply will be cut and my skin will turn blue and then I will die. And so I hover; I am hovering. The stratosphere feels like a blanket.

***

I’ve been reading more, at a rate of one book every two days. My reading habits are as indicative of Attention Deficit Disorder as anything else I do. Several books in several genres, chapter by chapter in spurts.

I like living inside of chapters, and reading certain paragraphs until they are memorized in brain tissue. Then I give the books to other people, usually people I like a lot, and most of the time they are returned. I like this passage of paper through hands, so I don’t have a library card or a Kindle.  I rationalize that my book habit doesn’t cost nearly as much as 6 glasses of whiskey a night, or cocaine, or even a shoe fetish. The days have more hours in them now. I’ve been making my own coffee.

***

Insomnia is a very boring and usual problem to have. Boring, because it forces you to experience life in a dragging, blended kind of way, and usual, because every time you tell someone that you’re an insomniac, they will tell you that – lo and behold -- they are an insomniac too, and you will believe them until you have sex with them, after which you won’t be able to say “I slept with them,” and will instead have to be vulgar and say “we fucked,” because you didn’t sleep at all and they did all night, not quite snoring as much as breathing in a muffled kind of comfortable way.

***

 Most of the time, when people say that someone lives in “a fantasy world,” they mean that person is delusional about a specific thing. They don’t mean that the person actually inhabits a separate world in their brain, with different cars and roads and people, or maybe none of those things at all.

I live in a fantasy world a lot of the time, and I’m not delusional about a specific thing. Every person in my fantasy world has an illogical desire to stalk me, or to talk favorably about me behind my back. It’s strange that they should spend their entire lives doing this, but it’s all anyone seems to think of doing in my fantasy world and they don’t know enough to mind. 

In the real world, a friend of mine is writing a novel. It’s fiction, but I’m a character in it. A real person doing fake things. My friend gave me the manuscript of the first few chapters to write on with a red pen. Some of the dialogue wasn’t very good. Some of the conversations sounded like this:

Character 1: You are so great because you are like this.

Character 2: But you are so great because you aren’t like this.

Character 1: Don’t be sad.

Character 2: Don’t be sad either.

I wrote the above dialogue in the margin with a blue pen. I hoped that the pen was acceptable, since the friend had specifically stated the word “red.” I wrote, “ please, stop doing this.” What I didn’t tell my friend is that the bad dialogue in the novel sounded like the way people talk in my fantasy world.

***

I recently had an interview at a grad school and the director asked me why I wanted to write. I said I didn’t want to write. I just write, and I don’t have much of a choice in the matter. I couldn’t stop writing any better than I could try to stop eating (I didn’t mention that I try to stop eating at least once every day and always fail miserably), so I might as well try to get better at it, or at least do something interesting with it, because what else is there to do?

Surprisingly, I got into the grad school.

***

Most people are uncomfortable with most things. It’s a fact, I just don’t know how to cite it. I am no exception, even though I am comfortable with things a lot of people are uncomfortable with, like attending organized orgies, and watching humans get dissected in the name of science. Every time my cell phone rings, my lungs collapse and butterflies smack against the walls of my stomach so hard that they must be on a suicide mission.

A lot of times, when you are talking to someone, you can say “It’s ok,” and it won’t seem irrelevant.

***

I want to buy a dress just for you. Even if we just twiddle our thumbs when we meet. I created the dress and put it on in my mind. It is black with white polka dots and has no sleeves. It is tight around my breasts and hugs my ribcage, but the skirt part of it is full and poofy. It makes me think of dancing while tossing my hair back and laughing.

When I wear the dress in my mind, I also wear pearl earrings, red stilettos, red lipstick and black fishnets. These things are for me, but the dress is only for you. If things go well, we will have the kind of conversation where both lips and eyes are talking at once. If things go well, you will take off the dress and I will tell you that I wore it just for you as I stand before you, naked.

***

My first workshop class in undergrad was for poetry. On the first day, the professor went up the aisles and had us each explain our “poetic process.” I said that I never once sat down with intention to write a poem (“now I will write a poem!”). I didn’t know how to do that, I said, so hopefully I wouldn’t fail the class as a result.

I said I had no control of when a poem would form so I just try to keep a notebook with me at all times, or at least a pen so that I can scribble lines on my wrist or a napkin or the inside cover of a novel or those recyclable sleeves that keep coffee warm.

I said that sometimes I’d just write a line, but usually the whole poem at once, and I didn’t know how to edit, and it kind of drove me crazy because these poems had no regard for my schedule and sometimes became a nuisance, popping up at inopportune moments, like seconds before an orgasm.

“So, basically, you are crazy,” the professor said, and I immediately liked him in a strong way. He later told me that Bukowski wasn’t a poet and that my poems made him want to smoke cigarettes.

Halfway through the semester, I was engaged with a ring and everything, and he told me I shouldn’t get married, and not just because I was too young. I only ached for him in retrospect. I didn’t acknowledge much aching while I was engaged. But you can’t regret things that would have been wrong to do. Or you can, but it doesn’t make them right. 

Jellybean Jar Brain

No, you probably don’t

If my lips spoke 

my brain, I'd say

I just want to shut up and reach

across the seat

while we’re watching a movie.

I’d say

Let’s cut the bullshit.

Then I'd slice

triangular holes in your throat

and maybe your ribcage too
for good measure

while the credits rolled with cheerful hip hop.

I’d say

It doesn’t matter if it actually happens

or if it’s metaphor.

Then I’d say
You know what I mean?

You know what I mean.

Don’t you?

When we were engaged, I had never tried

an avocado.

It almost seems crazy

now.

I love 

avocados.

It also seems crazy

that we were engaged

and that I straightened my hair

and didn’t read

books, only magazines

with multiple choice quizzes

that determine what kind of jungle animal

is representative of your sex appeal

but never really work

because your answers never match the answers in the bubbles

and you have to guess what your answer would be closest to

in a hypothetical situation.

I guess it’s hard to reconcile

certain phases of my life.

I mean,

the avocado

is practically its own food group.

Snow in my coffee.

 

I’m a coffee addict but I don’t know the lingo

and this is the first time I’ve entered

this intimate closet

 café.

I walked by without noticing

until the snow came.

I ask for one shot

of espresso in my cup and he tells me

that is “red eye”

or “a shot in the dark,”

and both of those terms make sense to me.

It’s my day off, midweek,

I explain when he asks about my

pajamas tucked into boots that aren’t really fit

for snowstorms.

His eyes are light blue, and I don’t mind that I am

eyeliner-smeared and disheveled.

I tell him it feels like the snow will never end

and sometimes I think I am part of the blanket,

falling

endlessly

to concrete.

I don’t mention I’m always shooting

in the dark, casting dreams like kites in an electrical storm

 across city-sized snowglobes

lit by streetlamps

or that maybe “pretentious”

just means having pretense for some towering thing

 you can’t yet see

 through the snow.

 

 It’s so dreary out.

There’s no other word for it.

Or other words don’t fit

this lack

of momentum

in streets that are white and wet

and stuck there

against their will, and how

does everyone do it

every

goddamn

day?

Strip off blankets

and face windows,

wash away sleep with water and trudge

 through traffic like ants with newspapers

agendas

hearts beating in prisons

emails in palms that say “cancer” and “Friday night” and “bank statement” in the same font

and expectations

so momentarily catastrophic;

the order

for that coffee you were waiting in line for,

stuck in the desert of your mouth like sandpaper.

The letter said, “Where are you?”

I was not thinking about the letter on my way home from work. The 7 train was not running and I had to take a shuttle bus to the N. I was actively trying not to remember last night’s long, white corridors with bright yellow doors, and his studio apartment that had no blankets or paintings on the walls or bookshelves. I tried not to remember hailing a cab and thinking, “he could have killed me. Or I could have killed him,” and that it wasn’t a homicidal thought or a fearful thought; it was just a thought. An observation. I preferred to remember falling asleep in my own blankets, cradling my phone against my face.

 I was reading a collection of erotica by Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats me Up and the N Train took a long time to come. It became easier and easier to focus on the words, and not the yellow doors, even though the plot of the story and my memories were embracing and breaking, then embracing again, wrapping around each other like a spiral staircase.

A woman bumped into me with a trashbag she was dragging across the platform, jolting my concentration. She looked about my age, or a few years younger. At least she would have, if things were different. She had broken front teeth and the kind of dreadlocks that form accidentally and haphazardly when you don’t wash your hair for a long time. Her eyes flared with challenge when they caught my own, and I turned abruptly back to my book. She was halfway across the platform, but I smelled her. I smelled her coming closer.

I tried to read the words and I also tried not to move. She was directly in front of me and I could see her figure in my peripheral vision, staring at the artwork on the cover of my book: a redhead in black latex, dangling handcuffs. She sized me up in circles, ducking up and down, trying to force me into eye contact. The smell seeped in through my nostrils and filled my lungs. I held onto something mentally, some strength in my empty stomach. My sense of smell is intense; it’s my weakness. I get nauseous when someone enters my office wearing too much cologne. This was not cologne.

It felt like an hour but it was probably a minute. Two minutes, or maybe three. A voice came from behind us. “Are you alright?” An officer in uniform. I wasn’t sure which one of us he was speaking to. She scrambled towards the stairs, looking back frenetically, like an anxious hamster. The officer didn’t follow her, and I didn’t feel grateful that he interrupted her stare down. The train pulled in.

I thought about the times that police officers made me feel safe, and also about the times that I feared them, mostly for stupid reasons, like driving with stupid things in my purse. I thought about a baggy purple shirt with black stripes that I wore in high school to hide how skinny I was getting, and the officers staring at me sympathetically when they stormed in. I remember the angry fear in my mother’s eyes as she passed me on her way to speak to the officers in the basement and that I could hear everything she was saying about my brother.

He can be very manic but he’s not dangerous.

I don’t think he has the capacity to lie.

I remember the officer’s warm hand on my shoulder in the kitchen, and his deep brown eyes reading me. He was my D.A.R.E. instructor in elementary school, five years prior. I liked that he trusted my side of the story. I liked that much more than the sympathy, which made my stomach turn in static circles. I don’t think he has the capacity to lie. She has the capacity to lie.

The train rattled to a stop at 49th Street and a middle aged woman in a peacoat sat across from me. She was wearing pearl earrings and her hair was polished in a bun, but I noticed crumbs on her upper lip, and immediately decided she was crazy. She began to read a newspaper upside down, smiling at it intently. Her pockets were filled with peanut shells, and she emptied them onto the floor in handfuls. The couple sitting next to her got up and stood by the door, holding onto the handrails and whispering to each other.

I used to worry that I’d go crazy, but I don’t worry about that anymore.

My Soul is a Butterfly. *

It was one of those years when I was always broke. When my feet felt out of sync with the world, or at least the midday traffic. When I thought that every 6 train and alarm clock and bus blocking a pedestrian walkway had a personal vendetta against my heart.

At lunchtime, the smoothie stand filled to the brim with suits, a four-walled closet of briefcases and Blackberries, forced smiles and frustrated sighs and checked and re-checked watches, cologne and condescension and protein powder. The regular customers put tips in my jar. I recommended the smoothie with peanut butter and bananas, or the one with blueberries and raspberries. I smiled at everyone, especially the jerks. I wanted to stamp my smile onto their jerk hearts. I wanted to break out of my skin.

It was one of those years when I overused the word "love" in my poems. When I hibernated under blankets of smoke and turned off my phone and only saw the skyline from bedroom windows. When I lost my vocal chords. When I poured myself into someone else, until I was empty.

In the late afternoon, I was alone in the closet and became a smoothie artist. I wrote short stories on napkins and mixed bananas and coconut and soy milk. I told the cleaning guy from Mexico dirty jokes in Spanglish. I gave him the leftover smoothie in the blender. He told me there were not pretty girls like me in his country and I said he probably had not seen every girl in his country, or my country for that matter, and that it was a wildly unfair compliment. He bought me a rose once and it made me feel sad. I gave the rose to my boyfriend.

It was one of those years when it was too much and not enough at once. When I was cold all the time, even standing over fire. When I wanted to sleep through winter and wake up in fresh fields far away.

The only regular customer after the lunch rush and before the dinner rush was the gray haired crazy. He carried a compressed stench about him, like the smell of 40 million garbage trucks and 40 million sewage plants packed inside the body of a single human. Sometimes, his smell was so strong that I had to escape to the bathroom to vomit.  I don't know how it's possible to smell that badly. The gray haired crazy liked to yell at me. I always did something wrong. There was no "stuff on the stuff." There was too much "stuff on the stuff." I was a "stupid whore."  The crazy never ordered smoothies, only food, so one day I made him one for free to see what would happen, the one with the bananas and the peanut butter, the kind that makes you feel like you're ten years old. I held my breath while I brought it to his table. He stopped yelling at me that day, but he didn't stop smelling. Then the next week, he started yelling at me again. I guess he didn't remember.

It was one of those years where I was always hungry or claustrophobic or pretending not to be scared. When my voice quivered in front of an audience of outlines as I read poems about sunsets and murderers and revolutions that start with oatmeal cookies.

In the late afternoon silence, I saw a figure approaching through the window, and thought it must be the gray haired crazy. Instead, it was a man with a turban that had a purple jewel in the center and very serious eyes.  He never stopped looking at me as he walked inside, right up to the smoothie counter. He took my hand and I should have been scared but I inexplicably trusted him.

It was one of those years when I wanted to trust everyone so badly, even when I didn't.

He looked in my eyes and said that I would always love more than I would be loved, but that it would never make me sad.

He said that I would someday struggle less than I am, and someday be successful, but not in a straight line. There would be ups and downs and lefts and rights.

He said that I hold my own happiness in my soul.

He said that my soul is a butterfly.

*I hope you don't mind the re-post. I'm on a short hiatus.

Keep the change, you filthy animal.

Because I have the grad-school-interview jitters.
And because I occasionally, occasionally write things that aren't about sex.

Alone, Together

My brother, Ferris Bueller and me

“I’m living alone!” Gabe chanted, stomping up the stairs to his bedroom.

My mother, assuming her eight-year-old son was having another temper tantrum, rushed to “restrain” Gabe, which meant embracing him in a bear hug until he stopped flailing around.

“He’s cool, mom,” I called after her. “He’s just quoting Kevin McCallister.”

“Who?” she yelled back, releasing Gabe from her paws.

“From Home Alone.”

“Oh. I guess we should stop letting him watch those. He has enough tantrums without reenacting the ones he sees in movies.”

“You can’t take away Macaulay Culkin, mom. No way. It’d be like stealing a piece of his soul.”

I was 12, and cocky enough to think I knew better than my parents, yet shy and silent at school. I wrote angry poetry in my bedroom, dreading my mother’s inevitable wail of “din-ner!” when I’d be forced to sit at the table for “at least thirty minutes—a very short amount of time to spend with your family, who loves you.”

I began to associate dinner with chaos. Gabe broke into hysterics when I sneezed--a sound that inexplicably annoyed him, and resulted in a series of moans that went “stop do-in-to-bricky! Stop do-in-to-bricky!” I’d watch my father attempt to calm his nonsense sounds. But I had allergies. I sneezed a lot. Sometimes we all gave up and just ate our potatoes while he screamed.

 ***

My home life made no sense, so I stopped trying to make sense of it. When I wasn’t locked in my room blasting In Utero, I explored the dense woods behind our condo, dreaming up stories about the Native Americans who lived in our town--and named it Mahopac, before it became a suburban wasteland. Sometimes I’d walk all the way through the woods, up to the wealthier streets with five car driveways, trying to picture the Ringwald-esque girls who presumably inhabited them.


Gabe was an escapist too, but he didn’t like any of those things (he tried to emulate me by buying a Kurt Cobain shirt at Hot Topic, but I never once heard him play the albums I bought him.) He was more likely to stare at the ceiling for hours than play outdoors, and the awkward, uncoordinated way his body moved made it impossible anyway. What Gabe did love was tall buildings. He spent hours arranging metal statues to form the New York City skyline, and the Chicago skyline, and the Philadelphia skyline. He would recite facts about the infrastructure of the Chrysler Building to strangers at McDonald’s. I didn’t get it.


The one thing we agreed on was movies, or at least John Hughes movies. He stared at the ceiling vacantly when I tried to get him hooked on The Lion King, but we must have watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off upwards of 50 times. It was the cure to our separate states of isolation, and one of the only reasons we hung out together.


Bueller made us both laugh, though mine was an uncontrollable cackle and Gabe’s was structured and seemingly forced—a computer imitation of a human having fun. I loved quoting Hughes movies at the dinner table (or the dessert table—scooping heaping bowls of ice cream and yelling “Guys! I’m eating junk and watching rubbish! You better come out and stop me!”). I grew to love his robotic giggle, which signified a secret between us that my parent’s didn’t understand. Secrets that real brothers and sisters were supposed to share (when they weren’t threatening to feed each other to their pet tarantulas).

***

It would be years before Gabe was officially diagnosed with Autism. I felt alone in the house, breathing just one bedroom away from him, while my parent’s busied themselves with psychiatrists appointments, alternative school applications and cognitive tests--any attempt to figure out what was wrong with their son. But Gabe felt alone too. More alone than I could understand. Stuck inside his head, unable to look people in the eyes while speaking, trying to make friends at school but ending up a spectacle. Movies and music were my salvation from isolation. They were his too. It wasn’t like we had nothing in common.

***

Last Christmas, I collapsed on my parent’s living room floor in tears, in the place where our tree should have been. “You don’t live here,” my mom said “and Gabe doesn’t care if there’s a tree. I didn’t know you’d be this upset.”

But it was more than the tradition of the tree—a tradition that was strange to follow in the first place, considering we’re Atheist Jews. After a year of cooking ramen in Bushwick, I had hoped to return to a perfect house with a Chevy Chase father stringing Christmas lights. Our empty, tree-less living room shattered this illusion of simplicity. I couldn’t return to a childhood that I never had to begin with.


Gabe stared at my sadness, with no visible emotion in his eyes. Then he knelt down on the floor next to me, and tried to wipe the tears away. Later in the night, he put on Home Alone 2.


It used to be a common belief that autistic children do not have feelings, and it is therefore impossible to hurt them. To me, this is absurd. Of course they have feelings. They just can’t express them in a socially acceptable way. And they can certainly get hurt and feel rejected.


Gabe and I were both misfits. I didn’t fit in the suburbs, or at school. Gabe didn’t fit in the world. He had no way of expressing his feelings or showing what he was made of. Kevin MacCallister didn’t fit in his family, but he was smart enough to humiliate the bad guys. In the end, he showed everyone what was truly inside of him. We lived our dreams through him.

***

John Hughes truly understood Gabe and I, even though we were so different. He understood young people. His films legitimized our pain when the adults around us were downplaying it. They gave us hope that one day we would get a nice, plain cheese pizza just for ourselves and outsmart the people trying to telling us what to do. He made it more than OK to be a geek; he made it cool. He made us laugh and realize what we had in common. He brought my brother and me closer together.

Closer to God.

You don’t creep into my dreams like other men do. You appear like a phantom on an ordinary night and wrap words around my eyes like a blindfold. You overtake me.

I'm lying in some relative state of peace, worrying about bills or Freud, or some piece of my personal history that becomes irrelevant when your words appear on my screen, beckoning me out of bed.

I am unraveled by the thought of you. Naked at my core and suddenly hollow, waiting for you to defile me.

I recently told you that I am done with definitions. Dominant, innocent, bisexual, whatever. As you put it, we are only sexual. We breathe this way. It drives our good and our bad, our every silent scream. Every vibration is sensual.

I tell you that sometimes, I am the master of everything. The director. Sometimes I'm the voyeur. I can follow an energy, or guide it. I am not one person in the darkness.

With you, I am animal. I am only sex and craving. I scratch my nails down your back and stab them into myself all at once. I feel like a prisoner in your church. Like you take pleasure in corrupting me, fucking me everywhere. In my words and at my core. My reins are gone. My routine is gone. You make me feel like a student of your body. Of sickness.

I tell you I can't see you tonight. I am resting for work, recovering from ailments. You torment me. You tell me you hope that my every thought is tainted by your cock and that I taste you inside my mind.

I try to sleep and drink coffee and write and you are fucking me into a wired oblivion of brain waves.

I hate you. Really, I do. But I know that I also harrow your thoughts. There is comfort in that as you tear at the seams of my mind.

I think of you knowing me younger, purer, not sure what I wanted from my body. The image that lures you in and haunts you. The image you wish to darken while you fuck me. But that’s not what holds you here, or what makes you beg. Instead, I hold you at the tip of my tongue with the poison I hadn't discovered back then, that I only thought about in the silence, when I imagined you in the dark.

I like to think of you watching me then. Ashamed of wanting something so small and pure. Or is it that you saw the darkness? That you wanted to enter it, pervade it, sink into it so deep that neither of us would ever return to the torment of daylight?

I’ll never know. But I know I hold you now and I’m waiting to see you again. I dream you will kidnap me. That we suck the humanness from each other and be beasts and flesh.

Subway Soliloquies

Poetry & Pornography


Life's too short to argue about waves
of feminism or to blowdry
your hair or use Match.com.

That's what I think, anyway.
I think, sometimes.

Just pack your knife
and I'll bring my paintbrush.

We'll panhandle for piece of mind, sometime.

Neo-pseudo-post-post-whatever-ism.
Context-free is fine.

I made myself come seven times yesterday.
I'd say that's pretty spectacular.

I'd say a lot of things if you gave me the time.
I'm not even counting multiple orgasms.

I'd like to see the blood pumping
in your mind.

Misconnect Me


I sawed you on the 6 train.

You were busy pushing buttons and saving text
messages because we had
no service.

You were holding a root beer in between
your legs, and on your lap there was Raw Youth
by Dostoevsky, and I wondered what you were doing at 6 a.m. on a Sunday
and if you were still awake
from last night. You looked fresh, I don't know,

there was a flower in your hair.

Visitors and Microphone Static.

My fantasies have context. Reality breathes through them; real people made of static signals. I am happiest here, and that makes me wonder if I am lonely and have simply not realized.

I sense a loneliness in my habits, in the way I swallow the world. But as a whole, I do not feel lonely. There is a chaotic balance blended at the tips of my fingers.

My visitor is only in town for the night, and something in me wants to suck him dry and send him back into the world, humbled and new. I bring him to the reading, even though I know the cowboy will be there. It starts late, and I drink fast, introducing pieces of people and watching them form each other's stories in the dim light.

I feel like a fluttering moth.

The friends I know through writing are a different kind of friends entirely. They are people whose veins I know intimately. I have memorized the echoes of their voices. But I don't know where the echoes have traveled. The map is blank; there is no exposition. There is beauty in the blindness of trust among us.

I am drunk when I take the microphone and the words come out in whispers. The room is more silent and I hear its pulse. It creeps under my skin and I feel connected to the throbbing in an almost sexual way. The air corrupts my skin in whispers, and I am touched everywhere.

The edge of the cowboy's voice is sharp and deep, but his words are vulnerable. I like to tell stories, but he likes to tell secrets. There is a need in his words, like he's expelling them from his body. Releasing his weaknesses into the atmosphere. I am drawn to his darkness and our eyes lock with ferocity, even as I wrap my hand around my visitor's wrist and dig my nails into his skin.

I think of my visitor's suitcases stacked by my bedroom door when I look in the cowboy's eyes on stage. I wonder if he would come home with us, and if I would hurt him by asking, or hurt my visitor. Something has been brewing in my body, a fearlessness. My intellect can't tell if the union between the three of us is real or imagined, but my body knows it entirely, the same way it knows that evening is shifting to night outside the window.

 I want to feel the cowboy's vulnerability in my hands and eyes, and I think he understands this, somehow. I sense that he craves it.

My visitor's hands run down my back as the cowboy leaves the stage and he's drinking faster, like an unspoken understanding, or so I imagine. My dreams and reality are blending in the dark, and I feel powerless to stop them. I am in control without control. I surrender myself to the night.

Webs.

My lips are packaged and sealed keystrokes. Tongued whispers down electric wires. My hands think in static impulses, sent by fingers that belong to strangers. A body byproduct of Generation-Whatever-Letter. Attention Deficit Disorder with outlets plugged into sockets, eardrums and eyes.

 I lost track of the words.

My sleepless brain is a web endlessly cast, reaching to kiss a million lips. The words are instant release pills that jolt through skin, shivering with sound. Give me pain. Break me. Build me up. I am listening.

I find myself everywhere, unedited and naked, aching for the crashing of brainwaves. Fuck me. I beg. I belong to you now. Fuck me up. Make me. Electric.