Beneath a green sweater in the shade of a carousel, the nipples of her breasts resemble aged sycamores, and her tongue the fork on some biblical table seating thirteen monoliths smeared with sin and black lipstick. I’m afraid of what she means to me. I’m afraid of the sun. Throughout the years that are now scattered like candy wrappers down the sidewalk that we Brits call a pavement, the unwritten stories of my past have me nailed to that which I wish to leave behind. On the drive near the crawlspace, next to the lake that runs parallel to the park where kids do coke, a paper bag is soaked from the rain but more so from her tears. She cries in the dead of night. To the stars, and because of the stars, and how they stay the same while she fades away. Breathing in glue, she flutters her eye and tilts her head, swearing blind that the voices she hears belong to God, and not the kids doing coke who are foaming at the mouth at the sight of something they can never have. A hanging basket is a pendant. Buried in the mud. Now time out of hand. She lactates like a dog chained to post. In a thousand years, all that will be left of the dog is a fragment or two of bone—the tree, less so. The clouds above are in her belly. The clouds are like old library books. They float around like crisp packets in the waters of her womb. The library in my home town is now rubble. I witnessed it being torn down last summer, and as the bricks and mortar turned to dust, the image of a girl who once stirred my loins was at once free from her prison and yet robbed of that which had set her apart from those who had vanished years before. Together, we weep—all of us. Exiled not in the flesh, but in the mind. It’s why we crawl to the water’s edge seeking relief in that which we know will deliver us the end. These reflections, are so dirty, but through the looking glass, we shall pass, embracing each state of being, from cradle to tomb, and then back again.

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