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you'll just catch my disease. My dis-ease. My addiction to ordering tight tees online so I can flaunt my tits before they sag. Before you gag on me. I'm a tight tease and you don't have time to penetrate me. Come here go away. I already know what you'll say. You'll try to untie my red hood and examine the threads. You'll try to make me shed my inhibitions. Listen, do you seriously think you're the first boy who's tried to tell me his dick was a lollipop? Sure, I'll suck it, but it's no Mystery Flavor. I already know what it tastes like. It tastes like nail polish remover. I'm wearing pink nails in your fairy tale. But if I'm in a fairy tale, I'm fake. If I'm in a nightmare, I'm asleep. If I'm a blow-up doll, it's all about sex.

I'm a false cover pasted on the crudest sex manual around. So pick your favorite paragraph; it doesn't really matter to me. I can read the page and play the role. I can sigh and moan when you lick my pussy like I'm a little girl. I can dominate you with my visual imagery. I can spritz on more vanilla and offer an olfactory contrast to this fuckfest. I can even lie on your dirty sheets and pretend I'm dead. Whatever. More stained sheets of paper, more mean poems, another Dum Dum sucker, whatever. More plastic handcuffs, more careless spit, another silver tool that doesn't really get the job done. Go ahead and shave me. Go ahead and pluck my eyebrows until your fingers numb around what you're trying to grasp. Maybe this is just another version of the same recurring dream in which my teeth are loose loose loose. Another variation on the same sickly theme. It's happened so many times, it's not even a nightmare anymore. I'm just casually posed in front of the mirror, pluckingmy eyebrows, then plucking out my teeth like they're splinters or something. I don't even have to sterilize the needle. I don't even have to get out the alcohol. I'm already numb. I don't even have to put the needle on the record to find out how this song ends. I open my mouth to sing along and instead of my teeth, it's a mouthful of rusty hooks. My mouth some contortionist's dream. My mouth controlled by some mean master of marionettes who bit down hard on the live bait and now is pulling my strings.

My stained teeth with their bloody roots are hidden in pink cupcake papers. The papers will be artfully arranged into the metal sockets of your muffin pan. No need to grease it. No need to even turn the oven on. It's already burned much darker than golden-brown. It's unfit for public consumption. It's worse than sodden bread and chemical water. It's my extra-special dessert. What trip were you on when you thought I looked good across the table? You need a handful of diet pills and I crave a diet of sleeping pills, dissolved in sugar water. A bedtime kiss. I'll dream of his dirty fingers thrumming drastic measures on my spine; breaking into dissonant chords. Twisted cords that swell into discordant music. Fever music. Fiendish soundtrack. To what? No matter how sweetly I tell it; no matter how neatly I spread it - in the middle of the night, it gets messy. My own hair entangles my neck. Split ends gag me and I spit them out - loose hair, loose-leaf pages, loose skirt that displays black panties. What color did you think they would be? Have you been following my trail of clues? Have you been following the railroad tracks? This trail of lost cargo and threatening debris and sexy garbage has to end somewhere. Maybe this is where he choked on the wailing music. He just couldn't stand it anymore. He just couldn't keep eating cookie cut outs from a fairy tale edited to fit in an etiquette column. He already knew the beanstalks were phone poles; the gingerbread boys' eyes were dehydrated grapes. He felt his own eyes sinking. He felt deflated. He felt depleted. This isn't how the fairy tale said it would end - so the fairy tale was just another carefully constructed deception that needed to be rewritten. The fairy dust was just some cheap hallucinogen.

Once upon a time, on acid, I turned into an old woman sitting on the ramshackle porch of a crumbling house, drinking rancid orange juice from a coffee mug and cackling and screaming, STOP LOOKING AT ME! What's with all these cracks in my surface? What the hell happened to my face? I bought myself a red glass Venus de Milo lamp. A symbol of mutilation. An icon of art. A severed shape to preside over my writing desk. I thought sometimes I confuse disfigurement with transcendence; but what do I know? I know my sleeping pills are not the magic ingredient. Something's missing. Some potency is lacking. Some stupid boy should have used something stronger than aspirin with codeine when he weakly curled his fingers around a note blaming me. They pumped his stomach and his breath reeked of acid when he tried to kiss me. I pushed him away. I didn't feel a damn bit sorry for him - him and his bad breath and his unstylish sweatshirt and his juvenile charade that made the cops question me. I mean what was I supposed to say? I'm strangely drawn to psychos? I'm strangely drawn? I like artistic losers and melodramatic freaks as long as they can pull it off with a certain style, a certain level of finesse. I like them, but I suppose I should try to avoid them since they bring out the warped parts of me.

I know where you sleep, but I'll try to avoid it. I'll try to control myself. I'll sleep by myself, enmeshed in my metal-tinged dreams. I'll cultivate my own power of suggestion and it will manifest a white possum with red beads. It will haunt you. It will sink its fine teeth into you. It will taint your blood until stale stage blood flows through your brain. Your organs will begin to feel like they're embalmed already. But a little surgery can fix all that. Laser surgery will get rid of the imprints and a lobotomy can cure that chemical imbalance and then you'll be ready for your implants. Fluffy pillows, saline-stained. A surgeon's scalpel can even dissect a phantom. But here's another perspective on plastic - my Cool Whip container is still filled with dead mice!

Dead flower petals mark certain pages in my dictionary. Certain words. I heard the way he used words once or twice. Sometimes ten minutes can last forever. Preserved in the sickly sweetness of formaldehyde. Preserved newspaper clippings taped into a book of warped collage art. Shiny cover, but inside - death and words and black-winged birds and stalking cats that purr and claw and caterwaul until it spirals down. I just want to fall asleep. In a fresh bed. Outside of the crime scene outline. I'm wary of my connection to this image I've created.