Zero

Man Overboard!

To seduce you, confuse you, almost deceive you; leave you stranded in the current. The moment you come below, your iceberg cracks, the light at the end of the tunnel is no freight train. I can feel the sheen of your iceberg, everything’s cool, I’m in place, in the moment. It’ll be here and now. I can shout that it’ll be me who comes out on top. I change my position, kneeling as I remove your clothes, sliding the fabric from your skin, as it gently resists and clings. Vertical vertigo, tension on the wall as I find your petite breast, beautiful and firm in its convictions. And I recognize your navel, its perpendicular consistency. I reach the peak when I can no longer breathe and all begins to collapse. The curves, the movement, the trembling, the liquid bursts. Then, after the roar, all is silence. You go slack and I fall to pieces.

One

Gray

The ocean was gray. A truly black and arrogant sky, preparing to rage down on us. Its reflection looming over a restless sea, its discharge brewing. A cloudburst aiming lead at us as we meekly raise our hands. In the end, we have to flee the beach, get home and lower the blinds.

Two

Really Screwed

Of all the concessions to inertia in your life, the worst is cleaning your work shoes. It makes no sense, except to have momentarily brilliant footwear. We should distrust all kinds of dry-cleaning. It’s the worst of the lies we’ve been force-fed. To make our beds, only to systematically unmake them every night is stupid, although there is something soothing about sliding into freshly stretched sheets. As you wait for them to warm up, time seems to pass at a different speed. Shining your shoes with black shoe polish reeking of petroleum, every two or three nights, adds nothing, it only self-perpetuates. You could do it every twelve hours, but then you would cross some line that separates professional responsibility from mental disorder. If obsession and compulsion, hand in hand, come to visit you, you might seem to be a total genius, a meticulous serial killer, or the best tool for whoever can find a use for you. To shine what will inevitably get dirty again as it drags over the ground only demonstrates that we have been convinced by some malicious sleight of hand that we can somehow reject our condition as plantigrades, web-footed creatures, as inhabitants of a planet that covers us with dust. When you accept such a truth, they’ve really got you screwed.

Three

Anvil

I don’t know why, but sometimes, when I kiss you, you taste like metal. It happens all of a sudden. You have it hidden in your mouth. I suck on your lips, trying to extract the pulp. They’re massive and alive. Swollen and clumsy as they wander over my face. My mouth, your base camp. We nip at each other’s lips and sometimes tongues. We bite gingerly, searching. When we find the other, with a little bit of flesh between the teeth, we try to devour. We spend long stretches of time in this way, trading saliva back and forth, negotiating. All of a sudden your upper lip has a stainless steel taste, like paper clips and batteries. It drives me crazy all over again. It’s strong and sharp, like nails. I look for it everywhere in your mouth and on your lower lip, which has a red aftertaste. Poisoned, I search everywhere my tongue can reach. You release nine thousand pins, perforating my veins. Yet I search for the metal all through your body, your neck, and I come back to your mouth. Your eyes are closed. It’s always like this. You don’t realize you’ve swallowed an anvil. You don’t care. The taste spreads through your body, lost for a while in your throat, until another day, when I simply kiss you and the concentrated juice of knives and safety pins sprays into my mouth all over again. All those rusty pins, striking me in the bull’s eye, second after second, sinking my heart.