As you walk the streets in nothing but your dressing gown, so the gravestones of the local church kiss your pale neck as if you were someone worth loving. The blades of grass kiss your toes. They nibble the little piggy on your right foot like the mouth of a lover who wanted you for the same reason you never wanted them. There are lines around your eyes. They remind me of the inscriptions of the dead that crumble all around. So many people. So many lives. We are dead before our time, but that doesn’t mean the reasons that make us be are any less worth fighting for. The bell is cracked. From below, it looks like an acorn. From above, a giant nipple—a nipple giving milk to the world and all those in need of nourishment. I am in need of such nourishment. This sadness that ails me has opened my eyes like the night, and yet I’m drowned all the same. Like these graves, the days lead me to a place by the river. Through the blades of grass, I masturbate in the hope that God will strike me down, but all he does is turn up the heat so that you remove your dressing gown, because God is a voyeur, and he wants to see everything. The telephone lines above the street lift the curls of your hair. There are twigs, and there are stones. The stones resemble those in your gall bladder. Tiny ones. As tiny as the blots of ink that swim before your eyes. Those eyes, how they resemble the blurred images from the early universe from which we were birthed. You can find them online or in old library books thumbed by myriad losers the same as you and I. All our lives we’ve been kept apart, and yet in those first stars, we once danced until we fell to the ground, drunk on cheap gin and the sound of each other’s giddy cries.

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