Not vodka but pop. Neither cigarettes nor cigars, but rolled up post-it notes soggy after being chewed by soft, childish lips. Not the lips of the kids I went to school with, though. They’re all old now—old like forgotten oranges in a Christmas stocking—one that’s been tucked away for several months in a basement belonging to some guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Arthur Leigh Allen. On a chin that belonged to a child now a woman, smeared love drips like runny eggs—the kind that drips from slices of buttered toast. Egg soldiers, they call them. Her pubic hair reminds me of octopuses. Don’t like octopuses. Don’t like the ocean. Too big. Too unseen. In dreams, it sucks me in and drowns me in an abyss of murkiness. Those hairs surrounding her labia pierce and pop the crown of my cock causing me to wince, but it’s okay because the pain reminds me that I’m somehow still real after years of thinking that I’m not. On the corner of the street, the branches of the trees remind me of the flesh of her thighs. Had a dream about the eradication of the orgasm. It was mildly interesting. It was followed by the sounds of footsteps leading to a gravestone hidden behind a tree in the corner of a cemetery. They made me tingle, those footsteps did, even though I knew they were leading me to my end. Bare chest. Collapsed lungs. In a field in St Albans near where my grandparents once lived, there are bluebottles swaying in the gentle morning breeze. I haven’t seen nor felt them in years, but I know they’re still out there. The same as my memories, they exist without proof of their existence. There’s a field, and then a door. The door leads to a small clearing. There are sticks surrounding a stream. A woman. A girl. Tiny veins as tiny as the scales on the fishes that nibble her toes. These fingers of mine are my own worst enemy. They write too many wrong words, and they spread the pages of dogeared books tainted with viruses too numerous to mention. They’re the kind you find in surgeries. Corner shops. Village halls. Market stalls where people shed their skins while asking for money so that you have the privilege of reading what they no longer wish to read themselves.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US