mesh and lace

04 March, 2004 11:56 p.m.

Suddenly, I wanted to feel your tongue on me, damp and heavy with scotch and cigarettes. You know how I feel about smoking and you know how I feel about drunken sex. This is the incipience of desire, addiction; delicate fingers groping for my breasts and the bathroom light. My image of myself is fragmented, taken from a mirror allowed to crack and rust. My image of you is the one you won't let me capture, not the self-conscious Poseidon launching his spear but the black inkstain marked against positive space--the blue blue sky.

I want to sink my lips into unforgiving flesh and leave my prints against your glass.

This is the side of myself I don't let you see, the girl who shoved her fingers into ash and came to the surface smelling like her father. I'm not the one who cries and I don't bite my lips until they bleed. And I'll only hold your hand if you kiss me on empty subway cars at two in the morning, and even then I'll keep you at arms length, arms length.

It's a pun, and puns aren't funny, but neither are my stretch marks or your scars, demons we hide behind diaphanous prose on nights marked by tomato soup skies, when we are unable to comprehend our own nudity. Once, you were danger, and I'm dancing with it, only you don't dance and I don't do drugs. I'm talking about danger, about sex and death, and this is the Chicago I don't address anymore.

And that's why you don't need to chainsmoke when we meet, baby.

previous next

twice sixteen - 14 January, 2016
Hey--what's going on? - 11 April, 2008
I wasn't cool - 30 July, 2004
something you wouldn't believe if you saw it. - 11 May, 2004
Going to 17th and U - 27 April, 2004