There’s something about the heat.
The familiar sting on my skin that makes its way up,
Boiling heat that creeps through my veins and fills them up, up, up.
It heightens my senses,
It’s a breath of fresh air after almost being drowned.
The steam that clouds my vision to the point where I can’t remember a time when I didn’t live in a summer fog.
And I’ve never even liked the summer. The sun can go and **** itself for all I care.
What I like are saunas, gas lit stoves, fires, boiling water, matches, artificial heat, steaming showers, candles, body heat in a cold room.
Showers most of all, though.
So warm and wet that the mirror steams and your skin gleams.
Heat: it’s rising higher and meeting the burning tug halfway.
Redness surrounding my eyes, harsh against the plaster coloring of my cheeks.
A kind sort of fever, a comforting sort of fever.
A fullness that pools in all of the dips of my body: cascading warmth.
There’s something about the heat.

A ****** thing
When put there in the lamplight
But chosen with the utmost care
Pretend it’s just kitsch
And not some ******* you’d throw away had someone else gifted it.

You only live life once, they say.
You only have one mom, one dad, and you only have one first car.
Well, I don’t care.
You only lose your virginity once, have one firstborn, you only have one death, they say.
Well, having *** for the first time is no different from having *** for the second time
Despite both archaic views on biology
And the backwash of a society that values peaking by young adulthood.
Children are neither here nor there,
And I don’t care about death.
Youth has been romanticized to the point of fetishization.
The plethora of coming-of-age novels and films represent this.
We live in a culture obsessed with youth,
It’s connotations,
Innumerable “firsts”,
Peaking by young adulthood.
Is it simply because children and teens are more easy to market to, being a perpetually existing group?
Is it because in a culture with such drastically differing generations, youth provides a connecting wire between them?
Is it because of the amount of people who look back from their mundane lives and fall into nostalgia’s pit?
Or something else?

I wake up- the scent of fine powders, perspiration, and arrogance all laced around me, permeating.
Duck under the sheets, shield yourself from the sunlight. Come back up for a breath of air.
Mornings are repetition at its finest.
Grab a fruit on your way to the water; peel it with sharp fingers; rip and tear.
You open your eyes to a world in which you are born anew, puffy skinned and amazed.
All the colors are a slightly different shade, more attached. Pale opalescence shines before your eyes.
All sound is but a whisper now.
Sweet release from a long sleep. Tire me again tonight, joy will come with the dawn.

At the age of 10, I had a conversation with a woman.
I remember asking her what games her many children played.
Did they play as I play?
She told me they enjoyed roleplaying games, and I asked what she meant.
Dress up, she elaborated. Acting, make-believe, telling stories.
I remember telling her that I felt I had wasted my youth, my childhood, and this, as if I had forgotten I was 10.
There was a seriousness to my tone, stoic-like, and a mighty dignification must have kept that woman from chuckling.
That conversation was closer to half my life ago, and I still meet with that same unrelenting sadness every other morning and every other night.
I remember the half-dreaded birthdays that followed, the recent ones the worst.
And every year that passes merely confirms the suspicion that I’ll live with that yearn for the rest of my life regardless of what else happens.
Yearning and I. Whose to say we don’t have 10, 20, 30 more years together?
But it’s nothing to worry over in the end.
I’ve turned into a person who has high-highs and low-lows,
And I’ve found that the highs are worth going down under for every once in a while.

I’m searching for an answer.
Surrounded by monogamists I crawl and weep,
Surrounded by dogmatists I hunger.
I’m searching for a key to unlock the doors of profanity.
I don’t want to hear something about the seasons,
Or anything about ethics.
No more flowers,
Away with the aesthetic of yore.
Give me the affairs, the filth, secret lives.
Give me the runaways, the elderly, the jokesters.
Give me the casanovas and cougars.
I search this rotten boulevard and t
All night, all night, even during the day..
I’m on the search..
I’m looking for a key to unlock the doors of profanity.

To live life is to catch a nymph.
You’ll find yourself in love at one time or another,
Constantly thinking:
I do it all for my pride, my darling; my bane, my worry.
Life is an egg cooking on the sidewalk.
Life is a line of camels being ridden through Alaska. It’s a littered beach.
White clouds peeking through broken windows, that’s what your life is.
And you only appreciate it in dreams.