Only Speak Exclamation Marks

To Bruiser: Goodnight, berry. The bicycles glow in the dark.
Bruiser: Are you going to sleep? At least the bicycles diminish the shadows.
To Bruiser: Yes, they are friends I thought.

Bruiser unbuttoned her shorts in the campus center and pulled them down in front of the wide open window. She showed me the newest explosion of colour and pain on her flesh- a pockmarked purple, red gashes and light lemonlime. Gayby took a picture of it, she said. His assignment was something vulnerable. I also found the purple imprint of a tight fist around my ankle, she said. Your ankle? Mine. I am in this room and I am seeing lots of things. Gayby, you can touch me with your picture-making, if you need me, if you need another model of vulnerable and bruised. I am here and I am purple with wanting.

I will use my drink like mace, you will be held down by the wind and the world which moves up sometimes and its acid will pour into your eyes and I can’t find my arms.

Sunboy puts up with too much crazy. I can feel the colour of his robe in my mouth but it is nowhere near my lips. The bicycles are glowing in the dark, I said, I did not know they could do that. Some do, Sunboy said, these ones don’t. My room is full of orange lights, I am in love with neon lights and I am in love with dusk and I love the love-children of these things and I love touching things with this synesthesia. I have listened to this song sixty-nine times tonight, as of now, as of hours ago, when I first started listening to this song. You said, shall I sleep in your bed to take care of you? I said, no, I know I will forget you, and I will think my bed is filled with strangers and their discontents and my heart will burst out of my chest, and maybe the blood vessels in my eyes will escape in their own yearning, and I will cry with blood on my cheeks because I can’t escape it all, I can’t escape it even though I am never like this. Do not leave me because of this, you can, it is allowed, somewhere it is written down that mania is okay but only if you are more beautiful because of it. Mania that makes my eyes almond-shaped and my skin smooth like water, and see through, and if you are able to dip your hands into me like a full bath or a rushing spring, that means something that I cannot take hold of in my fingers, although even when they are not dancing over a keyboard, each and every one of them knows that they are still in love- with each other- and with the brightness of everything around me.

Bruiser says, When I look at the white walls, I am seeing things.

I only speak exclamation marks. Do not look at the white walls, Bruiser. I know you see those faces take shape under the paint. They take shape and then they move forward and come out and they will be hanging in the air next to your face, and you will feel their rubbery lips move down your skin, and when we walk through the dark later, there is no way you will not be able to connect this shivery feeling to the spiders you can feel underneath your shirt, the ones you know are there, Bruiser, but you say they aren’t, but when I mimic them with my fingers, you shiver the way that I am shivering and say, stay on the phone, stay on the phone with me, I will be here in the light, you can make it home. I hid behind a wall from the scarecrows that stumbled drunkenly down the path. They moved their heads towards the noise as I ducked down, twisting all my limbs and my ankle with the handprint aching, and I did not see any faces.

Where are you, butterfly ears, butterfly flowers, feathers, earlobes, imagining wrapping your silk around my skin, I will look up into your eyes and see they are speaking but the sunshine makes distracting shadows and I’m lost on the trail to Narnia like late tonight, when Bruiser and I clung to each other when we saw the post come alive and flap its arms full of papers in the still night. The lampposts are alive, they are coming together and fucking in the forest. Their light pulses with each thrust and we have to watch out walking around, that we do not become blind and pregnant with the scrap of black metal on flesh, the children of lightbulbs, snuffboxes, ivory cigarette holders, and the sun, which sheds tears underneath the mountains when the moonchild rises up and raises its shaggy arms into the sky to choke down stars. You you you, girl, the one that dresses up all ethereal, you know who you are, and you know I have been waiting to see your poetry written down, as calm and as passionate and as everything as I know humans can be. What am I saying? I cannot force anything out of your mouth except flowers. I am not professing anything, except that I want Sunboy to come back into my arms and my lips will find him even if we are deep in a forest and I have been blinded by some apocalyptic explosion of colour- where all colour divorces from things and just sits around in air- and I cannot put my hands on anything because I have no hands- and I cannot walk because the nerves that cross in the back of my head have disconnected and are sparking like loose ends of wires pulled and run over and over and over. Even then, my lips would find him. Anything that stands in my way, I will kill. Sunboy believes me.

When Bruiser was in Wonderland, and I was sitting still at the computer, slumped over in the caves full of broken hearts, with her words in my fingers and my fingers on the keys and the keys opening into the caverns of other people’s chests, I wrote down everything that streamed out of her eyes. This should be your last fiction piece, everyone told me when they found the words lying around on the carpet, but each vowel dug through the floor and seeped into the earth underneath. But we laughed because they were never mine to begin with.