I like you best when you're wrecked and gorgeous.

When your eyes are bright with excitement and half-lidded from drink.
When you're writing hot checks with all the words you'd never say otherwise.

I like you best when your cheeks are flushed and your bottom lip looks like I've just bitten it.

When the words that fall from it are fantastical and outlandish.
When you ask me things like "Will you be my post-apocalypse bride?!" and tell me with slurred and hurried speech that I have the best taste in music.

I like you best when it looks like touching your skin would burn the prints from my fingers.

When you introduce me to the people you call family with liquid pride and wildly exaggerated tales of my heroic deeds.
When I'm not just a nod of your shaggy locks and a tilt of your glass.

These are the times when I can forget the awful nagging voice in my head,
the one that says "Never, never, never"
Because everything about you is tinged with "It could happen any moment now."

Who said that love was fire?
I know that love is ash.
It is the thing which remains
When the fire is spent,
The holy essence of experience.

Look in the mirror. Let us both look.
Here is my naked body.
Apparently you like it,
I have no reason to.
Who bound us, me and my body?
Why must I die
together with it?
I have the right to know where the borderline  
between us is drawn.
Where am I, I, I myself.

Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?  
In the hollow of the ***? In a toe?
Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.
Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right  
to see myself. Don’t laugh.
That’s macabre, you say.

It’s not me who made
my body.
I wear the used rags of my family,  
an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair  
after my grandmother, the nose
glued together from a few dead noses.  
What do I have in common with all that?  
What do I have in common with you, who like  
my knee, what is my knee to me?

Surely
I would have chosen a different model.

I will leave both of you here,
my knee and you.
Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body  
to play with.
And I will go.
There is no place for me here,
in this blind darkness waiting for
corruption.
I will run out, I will race
away from myself.
I will look for myself  
running
like crazy
till my last breath.

One must hurry
before death comes. For by then  
like a dog ****** by its chain
I will have to return
into this stridently suffering body.  
To go through the last
most strident ceremony of the body.

Defeated by the body,
slowly annihilated because of the body

I will become kidney failure
or the gangrene of the large intestine.  
And I will expire in shame.

And the universe will expire with me,  
reduced as it is
to a kidney failure
and the gangrene of the large intestine.