Asked for Answers and Got a Head Full of Heroin

Urgent heavy knocking on the door at 1am. The toilet is flooding- fully, spectacularly. The drain on the floor can’t swallow fast enough, and water rushes out into the hallway in rolls and waves. I dig my wellies out from under the laundry and books of poems, and dial for help. The dorm is suddenly full of big guys in security jackets, loud voices, keys jangling on belts, bottom lips pushed out with chewing tobacco. I missed the dinner at Manor, and Moo Cow for sleep. Woke and pit-pattered around the landfill. Ate some mozzarella with tomato relish, falafel, raisnets. Still hungry hours later, I boiled water, and ate ramen out of a cup with chopsticks. I’m shivering with fever, sitting on my bed with my heart pounding in my ears, drowning in piles of unfinished work. Watching Fawlty Towers instead of sleeping.

- Want to hear a secret? I’m stronger than you.
- That’s no secret.

The Book of Salt:

“Thin Bin, how would you define ‘love’?”
Ah, I think, a classic move from the material to the spiritual. GertrudeStein, like the collectors who have preceded her, wants to see the stretch marks on my tongue. I point to a table on which several quinces sit yellowing in a blue and white china bowl. I shake my head in their direction, and I leave the room, speechless.
…

Your hair looks clean and freshly washed, I thought. An important indicator of anyone’s overall cleanliness. You wear it parted on the left-hand side. A personal preference of mine as well. Your tie is tucked into the V of your sweater. I too prefer a sweater’s soft drape into the buttons and bulk of a vest. Your coat looks warm. I would look good in it. Your hands…your hands? But where are your gloves? Ah, hands like yours will not stay cold for very long. Your eyes, coffee and cinnamon. An infusion to wake me from sleep.

“Well, are you coming in with me, or shall we conduct our interview here in the doorway?”
Your French was flawless but with a slowness to its delivery, unctuous and ripe. I wanted to open my mouth and taste each word. “Interview,” though, slapped me in the face. The word was a sharp reminder that I was a servant who thought himself a man, that I was a fool who thought himself a king of hearts. I got up and walked with you into a stairwell paneled with sheets of sunlight, slipped one by one through the dusty window panes. I followed you up four flights of stairs, and with each step, I was a man descending into a place where I could taste my solitude, familiar and tannic.

Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate- useless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled from hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched.

Postcards to Amsterdam

“I’d rather die terrified than live forever.” Is that true? Are you real?
Waif, according to the English dictionary, still means…well, I’ll let you look it up. But it doesn’t make me like it any less that she calls me green-eyed and deserted.


Rose! Where ever have you gone. I can put signs up, I’ll staple them to trees with my teeth, but I know I won’t find your wishes hanging from these branches. You're the new Paperbag Princess.

And that shy boy, who carefully filled his pockets with strawberry condoms and blushed terribly when he caught my eye; I thought he said his name was Orchid. What shapes make you cry? Oranges. Wristwatches. Nothing else. I want the word YES and I want a beating heart tattooed in between my collarbones. Accidental ecstasy.

Megan unwrapped and opened the box of art and sweets on the fourth day.
Megan says, Now your glitter’s all wet.
She says, Sometimes I don’t think we are so doomed and tragic.
She says, Sometimes I think we might be lucky, with all the lust and love. Heartbreakers yield great power!

We wait long hours at the shuttle stop (after it roars obnoxiously past without pause) until a purple-sweatered girl says, Oh! Let’s have the party here! We have full bottles and full hearts! And boys in high suede boots tried to flag down cars. Gayby says, flash a titty, flash ‘em. He stands out in the road himself, and pulls his shirt down by the neck. A car flashes past, and Gayby returns to a disappointed curb.

For the holidaze, Sunboy and I lit up in the rain, sitting close in the meditation garden. A beautiful rainbow cigarette case full of hand-rolled, carefully. I’d packed my bag full of mint milanos and chocolate milk. We die as ourselves.

He’s mine. Do you wish I were yours? Don’t worry don’t worry don’t worry. When I kiss you, I shall never think of beige.

Sunboy fell asleep in my arms. Tumbled down beside me and when I saw his lips go soft, I knew- as do we all with all our lovers.
- I’m sorry to interrupt your work.
- Work?
- The book you were reading…
- Oh, it’s not work. I was reading e e cummings.
Yes yes yes. Sunboy, sit as you are, always, on my bed with your books of poetry and with the sunlight coming in underneath the blind that is a chorus of yeses in itself and bathes the nape of your neck in sunset.

Sara's smile matches heartbeats and wings.

Sara says, I saw a cloud yesterday that reminded me of you.
Sara says, It was tall and the very tip-top was stained purple and orange.
She says, I just thought you should know I saw you in the sky.

I worry my words become trite and dull when I fall in love. It’s all euphemisms and sunflowers. Maybe I’m better bitter and falling. Current love affair with ampersands & I would have hated this version of myself in highschool. But I don’t mind. Love? Naked picnic, lounging and chocolate kisses, drinking the rest of the red wine from the bottle.

Veins under skin. I stumbled upon yet another indie disco. My fridge is overflowing with chocolate and packets of mayonnaise stolen from the cafe. I can’t watch violence, but give me two hits and you’ll hit the floor before your eyes divide. I like raw meat and I like thunderstorms.

For my 21st birthday, I want money and a meat grinder.

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.

The Hole I Hacked in the Bottom of the Boat

Sleep. Cigarettes. Plunging into murky depths.
Fuck yes! I’ll be ship-wretched with you.

Purple Elephants

I am covered in bandages; my fingers are skinned to their veins. I’ve been torn down. I’m clumsy and I bruise like soft fruit. Sunboy, you have ruined me, being wrapped up in you makes me sick. It’s not bad sick, it’s good sick. I’m all jumbled inside, my heart is beating but it’s somewhere outside my skin; I put both hands into my chest and it’s empty and it’s full and you and I and oh- it’s too, too much. Your mouth is open, eyes are rolling back in my head and our lungs are beating furiously into each other. Spontaneous combustion. Gasps, drowning, the salt of sweat on skin. I will strip down and dive, splinters in my sides, deep down into that abandoned pool. Snap a picture. I’ll hide behind this shattered chandelier and I want to hold your hand- yes, this way, not that way- through the gaps in the glass.

My head is full of poetry, I want you hungry. I’m hungry. You make me feel seventeen, I’m clumsy and shy and sixteen, even! Your jokes shiver down my spine and I swear I’ll never stop laughing. Let’s make up languages and speak in accents, brew tea in your storybook house; I want to sit you down and cook a million gorgeous dishes on that big, black stove. Let’s run. That stage and those shelves will feel our bones yet, Sunboy.

Everything is ruined forever! Where are those purple elephants, I want them here, I want them sinking softly down on their knees and pushing their magnificence into my little striped carpet. I’m going to get down off my bed and wrap my arms around their heads, push my forehead against the heavy folds of eyelids. I’ll cry for both of us, it’s terrible and it’s true.

- What do you love?
- Orthography.

I’m seeing bicycles, lots of yellow bicycles, the room is flooded full of synesthesia. I am lost in redness that halos out around my hands. There are long, slick creatures sliding over my lampshades, but they are transparent and I can see their insides glow. Misplaced beating hearts.

- What do you see?
- Neon lights. Lips that give electric shocks.

Everything is ruined forever! I don’t mind.

Symptoms of the Sun God

Dark rising sun. No need to knock before coming. Pulling your shirt up, your chest opens; I see ripples- muscles and ribs under your smooth skin. Could I reach in? You are David, can you see it ? I said your body was a painting but I meant a sculpture- I meant it as the sighs of Michelangelo, as they must have been, as he stepped forward and ran his hands down your back, his tongue against a stone thigh, one limp hand holding the chisel, the other cupping a cheek. You have both made your home in me.



Pagan, I lie. In the shadows, Ra rises up.

Bare skin. Trees split with single cracks- an ax against stripped oak. Pools of water. With an earlobe, and four hands pulling, we can mold sinews. You dig rivers with your fingernails, come up gasping for breath from beneath waves. We wake early in the morning to escape the afternoon crowds and skinny-dip in oceans. Minutes to dip our toes in. Do you find my ankles daring?

The riverbed is scattered with golden and purple stones. I’d like to bite into your palm like a peach.