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Here's a new definition of sexy - eyes pecked out to reveal the empty sockets of a saint. A contemporary twist on sadomasochistic Christian imagery. Empty eye sockets filled with chocolate-covered cherries. What do you see? Plastic surgery, tracheotomy, orthopedic shoes on the wrong feet. I'm trying to make our bad habits sexy. I'm trying to start a new trend of hook arms. Zoom in on the hook arm and it looks like a meat hook and who do you think is hanging there? It's a massacre. It's a movie soundtrack. It's a dream soundtrack for a girl with relapsing fever. For a girl who won the costume contest. Tiara-d by scrap metal stars. Dug up from some stinking landfill. Halo-d by a murder of crows. They divebomb for tufts of stained fur to refill the empty sockets and all the other holes. Hey, I paid for these holes so I'll buy the jewelry. Do you understand we're being pulled toward the sticky center of a sickly design? I told you I was sick and I told you I was insatiable and I told you if you put your 2 cents in my slot, I'd still feel empty. My stomach acids dissolve all your offerings. There's an acid bath inside this little piggy bank. Are you banking on blowing down my house? Are you banking on blowing my mind? Are you banking on being on the receiving end of another mind-numbing blow job? I told you I might bite it off and you said you were willing to take that risk.

We take too many risks. We spend too much money on name-brand sugar and cream. You try to fill me up with well-crafted coffee and it better be a bottomless cup. The refills taste weaker and weaker. Or is that just me? Being needy. I used to enjoy the taste, but now it's just a vehicle for the caffeine. Just another broken-down vehicle that always seems to stall across the railroad tracks and when you get out to push it, you suddenly turn into a villain. Go ahead and blindfold me - it feels just like a sleeping mask. Go ahead and hog-tie me to the tracks. I like the way it makes me feel innocent like a fairy tale princess. Oblivious to the impending doom. Please divert me with your implements, your dissonance, your weird musc that sounds like a lullaby to me. I'm so tired.

So tired of my own cliched addictions. Secondhand. Co-dependent. Dependent on obsessive-compulsive rituals to get me through the day. I'm tired of walking. Let's drive. Untie me and stash me in the trunk or the passenger side. Let's drive a little longer until the perimeters bleed. Let's go get a new piercing. The piercer must be cute so I can really get into the pain. It can be a boy or it can be a girl, cuz my head's not on that straight. I'm a twisty thing. I'm a picky thing. I want the hungry, shiny crows to pick my bones clean in a sexy, sordid murder scene. I'll lie, I'll wait, I'll flail; but there will be no measured rhythm. I lost that rhythm long ago and I never could go with the flow. I never could mesh with the status quo. Someone tore me out of the fabric. Or maybe I tore myself on one of those days when I had the delusion that I was a magazine page. I could no longer pinpoint where the airbrushing ended and the real me began. I could no longer separate the fantasy from the alternate reality. My own pores are making me nauseous. My scar tissue is hideous. I'm not even sure I exist until I look in the mirror and then

I'm a horror movie character. But am I the mutilated or the mutilator? No wonder I'm obsessed with makeup techniques/special effects. No wonder I fire my words like they're pyrotechnics. No wonder I'm a kleptomaniac who steals only unwanted fragments. I've cultivated clever tricks with scissors; the selective cut & paste; the collage that hides another collage underneath. Are you tired of me yet? Are my words scratching like broken needles? Are they only scratching the surface? Get out your rusty dissecting pins - let's go deeper. Inside. I'm raw and mean and unclean. I'm sanitized. I'm just kidding cuz I know you like it dirty. Look under the nails pressed into my lids. Does this box turn you on? Do you want to pry it open? Do you want to suck on the filthy contents? Do you want to find out if it's a jewelry box or a coffin? Can you see your own face in my taxidermed eyes?

Now hang up the receiver and let me sleep. This isn't phone sex. And you aren't him. As the phone cord snakes around my neck, I think of autoerotic asphyxiation. I think, what if he was playing a neurotic game and just wrote that suicide note to be funny. I saw him once at the midnight cafe. His poetry planted dark suggestions in my mind. His poetry possessed me. His voice, his words, his delivery. Delivered me a parcel of gleaming crow feathers bound with black twine. I actually shut my mouth. I actually pretended my lips were sealed with electrical tape. I felt that sticky pressure. I felt my hair begin to stand on end. Electrostatic generator. Sexy man. Vibrating hum on the railroad tracks where we can collect the most interesting debris. Metal nuts and bolts fit for a candy dish. Exposed metal. Metal in a hot embrace around burning cake. I wanted to lick his poetry. I didn't care if it burned my tongue, mutated my taste buds. I wanted to suck down his tainted creme brulee. When I saw him next at a Sonic Youth concert, he didn't even look my way.

At the midnight cafe, I stepped behind the scene. He was sitting out back, exuding that dark energy. I was tipsy. I told him I liked poetry and his voice made me want to scuff up my knees. WON'T YOU PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME? I know it's not that easy to write convincingly about someone I hardly knew. It's not that easy to tell the truth when I'm an evil mannikin with painted-on black eyes that never cry even when I dwell on railroad tracks, car wrecks, and fully engorged ticks that cause relapsing fever. We're diseased. I just need to go to bed and get some beauty sleep. But it's not even that easy to sleep. My pillow lost its fluffiness. Are there really feathers inside? Do you want to tear it open and see? Do you want to bite another hole in me? Do you want to hook ourselves up with a pair of those custom-made fangs and pretend we're vampires? We can sleep all day and fetishize our friends' blood all night.

Then again, I can't afford to quit my day job. Even though it's draining me and I'm spinning negatively and you can't filter negativity and I will smoke you down and my lungs will turn black as crow wings. I just want to fly away. I'm just trying to 'say catch me if you can', but