Symbols, and exotic details, cooking in the folds of her squidgy, vanilla flesh. If I drink enough wine, she turns into her mother. If I put the right amount of stones into my pocket and walk the length of the creek, at some point, I’ll find myself in a river, and down down down, I’ll sink so that the snatching reeds welcome me as one of their own. If only I was born with a vagina—with an inner mystery and not some floppy cock that’s good for nothing other than reminding me I’m just another man. Cheapness is a weakness I could do without, for an obsession with flesh is no more than the waving of a white flag admitting that I’m as dead as the turds I squat out each morning on the cusp of yet another existential crisis. When I piss, by the creek that leads to the river, I visualise her wading into the murky waters of nature’s womb. What I see of her body is enough. Just a glimpse is all I need. Not because of the visual poetry the glimpse conjures, but because of where the glimpse leads. To more symbols, and the legs of hairy spiders disappearing into those murky wombs. Sisyphus’s rockhard cock which bends to the left, and a photograph of John Merrick’s beautiful mother who died without ever seeing the film. Cheap Chilian wine with no flavour but plenty of edge purchased from a gas station on the end of my street. Only it’s not my street, not in this life. It was in another, but those times have moved behind me like the cracking tail of a mischievous fox leaping from a trashcan clutching a rotten chicken between its teeth. Creaking snap bone wood. Norwegian firs. King cigarette. Brown eyes dancing upon thin ice. The blades engrave the frozen water with her name, and her smile stretches from one side of life to the other. The leaves kicked up by the wind are soggy, but by the time she’s finished with them, they’re as dry as bone, or the pages of a book left to burn beneath an orange sun in a field someplace in Auvers-sur-Oise. Perhaps Van Gogh left it there, drunk on the heady scent of nature, and tormented by the images of the women that breastfed him their sorrow every time he closed his eyes.

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