There was to be a tomorrow for us to share, but we ate it yesterday: greedily and with cream. I remember your face lit by the candlelight, so hungry for rebellion -- only as we swallowed the last morsels did we realise that hunger would have its revenge, a consequence of today's emptiness. Guilt sits heavy in our stomachs as we dream of the spaceships that have not been built, the spires of Science that we cannot contemplate while dreaming of technological emancipation. I held your hand and there was an old spoon still curled within it, I kissed your mouth and our promises still curdled in it. We could have had years together to watch progress unfold, but instead we burned through our possibilities with reckless passion, and its embers now grow cold.

He felt that he did not look in mirrors enough, so he looked now. This is what he did not see: that he was on his third wife and fifth mistress. Nor did he see that both were strong -- stronger than he had kept before -- but not so strong that they could last much longer. He saw a face crashing slowly into tomorrow, but the cause of its crumpling was another. The cause was his wife: shrewish and callous, constantly turning tears into anger and grinding their shrill shards of glass into his skin to cut wrinkles. He did not see his hypocrisy, the fact that he had lain on his mistress' lap and cried the same tears last night. All because of being misunderstood, neglected, and -- this one unstated -- unable to find a still-younger woman for a new affair. After picking something from his teeth he inspected his hairline. "Not so grey."

-- 1 --


He has a need to expend his seed: it is a never-ending endeavour, the smack of wood against leather. In the hot rush to consummate his love he must burn a more energy-rich depravity -- must look for a certain seriousness, a gravity. Right now he is past the ‘******’ and the ‘hos’, “just girls,” he says, “just girls pretending to be women pretending to be *****,” and he wants to see real girls naked and ashamed and cutting themselves for money. He gets off on the very idea of people deforming themselves for his pleasure.



-- 2 --


Here he is, being driven by his car. At each corner he sees girls huddled together, sharing warmth. Their lips are locked in thin lines of glamour and they swap his salty substances without even the slightest tremor of desire. At their waists they hold daggers, levelled at each other’s bellies. All the better to cut out the cancer of pregnancy.




-- 3 --


His vices have turned to hate. So equanimous before, so confidential with his needs: now he does not just implore his occasional dates with the soft sad pressure of his bulging eyes; now he asks direct. “Dance for me,” he says, in the privacy of his own filth. “No, sexier,” he exhorts, imagining the first ****** excitations caused by an unspeakably illegal piece of *******. He blames them for having bodies that do this to him. He blames them.



-- 4 --


He blames them.

I have tried to take you, but you dance away to attend your daily prayers; I am left holding sunbeams in bear paws on empty stairs. Clasping you to me, you turn to liquid, gush between my claws: you make me feel ungainly, untoward, a beaten Beast crushing Belle under his mistimed feet. So now I force myself upon you. Eat of my *****, see the traces of snakes that you misplaced there. Beneath the tumescent ******* feel my knees, sore from following you in solemn abdication. They wear the carpet to a shiny bareness, like the moist button of my soul. Can you not see my eyes swell with dedication, do you not understand the corresponding depths of me that call to yours? It is our future sweating from my pores; mop it up, sense the salty possibilities that we can ferment together. Say yes now, as recompense for all the hurt you do to me. Silent, despairing, I have deserved it: if nothing else, give me more of your apathy. It lines my heart with such loving gravity.

She sighs as she settles into the image of star-crossed lovers, fated across a swirling galaxy. She feels the insistent pulsing of his radiation through the hardness of space -- each inch as barren as the last, as clear as glass, a medium rich for the communication of romance. Today he hit her with caring fists, after another of his imaginary lists. Boys, men, women, girls: in his mind she has had them all, attracted by her deep cleavage, by her round behind. She bites her lip to bleed again, to feel that need again, to be the absolute rock-bottom of someone else’s reckless devotion. It excites her to be so repellently attractive, she calls to him with crooked fingers and pretends that the smell of her last conquest lingers. She makes love to him by pulling his **** to her while pushing his face away with snarling fingers. He can’t hide the scratches there. In her bruises welter the endless depths of star nurseries, nebulae, and out of them new madness will be borne.

They lose their lives to small hates so easily that you wonder if they are allergic to love. Perhaps these gangsters, revelling in their roadsters, go banging in their round pools of darkness to shut out the light, light so bright that it will reveal something sick about themselves. Their hair is so slick that it shines in the headlights and warns them to step away, find the shadows, a place that is far far away from cops and gallows. I thought myself a gangster once, true, tossing teens to the ground to grab their shoes; breaking windows with heads to see bleeding prism hues. But I learned otherwise when I found you: I discovered that life is a measured destruction of time already, so I renounced my life so small in order to **** myself in minutes rather than bullets and enjoy each and every doddering slip -- each and every juddering rise and fall as we watch the future play out having already gambled it all.

The enclosed haven of the stairway bounced around the sound of laughter; laughter at the shared realisation that they had averted Hemingway's crisis of the unused baby shoes. They each held one and climbed while their faces shook free of the wrinkles from the smiles. They would never admit it to each other -- not even from the ***** of the darkest depths that they would sometimes sink to in unison -- but the true horror was not the anticipation of a non-existent child. No, it was that the flower grew so fast that they could not grasp it, and all they held was a banister in one hand and the past in the other, and they did not know who they would be nurturing tomorrow.