The Ending Tastes Just Like the Beginning


He promises me night-time napalm and arsenic-laced locum. He promises me absolution or a shudder of respite. His voice draws open my face and he promises me nothing at all. -


His voice is seductive as a gold filigree gift-box proffered in long ivory hands. I touch his hand with the edge of my fingertip. It is soft as a kid glove, clammy and not quite human. I do not flinch.


He massacres unborn children when he is dreaming.
He commits a different sort of massacre when he is waking.
Between the two is born our meetings.


For him, I lay myself out: a platitude. I stretch like an eel.

His bed is the colour of spilt blood. Sometimes we bleed instead of speaking. The room is a blanket under which we are enveloped. My head lolls back on blood-sheets, and my hair fans out like smoke. He draws a single sharp fingernail down my throat. A fingernail, a knife-point. My arterial flow meets it in an answering kiss.

Can't we just…?

My too-white toes graze the ceiling. Floorboards. My voice is a disappearing afterthought. I am shivery as a muted orgasm.

Can't we just have sex like normal people do?

His lizard tongue drags down my spine, frees it from my body. He begins to play my knobbled spine. My dislocated toes dance on the ceiling like piano keys.

Normal people don't...

His voice shimmies beneath my epidermis. His reptilian tongue drags inside my eardrum. My arterial gush quietens, quietens. The room's bloodflow slow-pulsates.

Normal people don't climax like this -

His velvet fingertips draw heavy curtains over my cerebellum. Arsenic from his tongue to mine. The room slow-shudders. Silently we bleed into one another. Sharp metal nails draw open my throat.

Like this. Like this. Like this.