Eat with your eyes, shit with your hands, love with your phone. Sleep when you’re dead, die when you’re young, dream of things beyond heaven and hell. Devour your son, Horatio. Your body wants no legacy.
Returning home at night after dinner to find that you, my old familiar, have been here. You have left marks on my door and tablecloth. I make my way through the house, trembling all the while. Trilogy of similar sensation—fear, exhilaration, derealization—playing up my calf and thigh as I enter a parade of dark rooms and reach for the light.
Double date with my double life. She sits across the table, straw idling in her mayonnaise and moonlight-filled mouth, and stares with no expression as I double down on every feeling I have ever had. She pours the cherry wine and knows better than to interrupt her enemy. In the blush of oncoming night, every person in this restaurant is a predator. The wallpaper is speckled like a fish. Decorative plates—streaks of sardines in a circlet—hang from crooked nails. She is better-read, better-informed than I am, and yet still cooler of mind. The influx of information has not poisoned her as it has me. Bitterly, I make excuses. I smile weakly and rage. How dare she be hard on me, but easy on everyone else?
Delicate, pearlescent obsession, in a choker around my ankle. Insecurity like corseted diamonds, catching the red light. Runes carved on a radish that I pick up and fling against the wall. Pacing the cell, remembering the pink, orange, yellow, blue wildflowers in the photo. The horses, unrestrained. The window, above my head. Will I have the courage to place a bet on myself? Oh but, old familiar, I am afraid. If only we could speak, but then again, you never spoke. All your presence did was remind me that I feel better alone. Oh, but still I wish I had a friend who felt as good as a rhyme. I wish I could be as good to a friend as I am bad to the mountain range. If I cannot find or summon her, I’ll have to make her from shoestrings of flesh, like a magician. I’ll have to summit the peak with her limp frame on my back, through razors of cloud and then—?
Guesswork, linework, overwork. Work, then play. Playground, plaything, wordplay, foreplay. Sardines in a bucket. In a what? Bloodstream, bloodline, blood sport. Sporting wounds like a badge of honor, then honoring the bad twice as much as the good. We’re attracted to power, you see, but try again, appeal to my good nature. My what? Do the deed, then ditch the girl. Burnt brown sugar on the breeze in the pink evening. Chew on the end of a candy cigarette, not for the pleasure, but for the love of the game. Back in the restaurant, my double, surrounded by carnivores, confesses to a diagnosis of colorectal cancer. How painful to feel my envy, so much stronger than my compassion, rear its head, rejoice. Back in the house, turning the lights on in the workshop to find that the jug in the center of the kiln has turned back to clay.
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