The Bottom and the Top

(found in a journal from Alaska - July or August 2009 - under the title "Kissing the Apocalypse)


I hold my breath, waiting for a convenient rise in her speech, taking her pitch high enough to mask the sound of my exhale. I know it will come out jerky, tight, and frustratingly loud, so I wait for an opportune moment. Meanwhile, she asks me a question and I am far too out of breath to respond. My answer, too, is jerky, but also unsubstantiated. I wasn't engaged in her speech because I was too focused on getting enough oxygen into my lungs. I only vaguely know what she's talking about and my eventual answer reflects that. It's crass and thoughtless. I'm losing the battle. Each missed opportunity to shine like this lowers me lower and lower in her esteem. This is probably the last time we will spend time together. She will never call me again and if I call her, she'll either muster an excuse, or make time down the road, make a date that will either never come, or will come with less than no enthusiasm or encouragement. It becomes a lost cause. An uphill battle turned to the storming of a fortified castle with my bare hands. I must forget about her. If I try the next date, I will walk in defenseless to a stony face that offers no benefits of the doubt. I will be more nervous and more determined, make more mistakes, say more turgid and cliche things, fail to think of questions to ask her or fail to pick up on her hints about her heart. The game is up. I have lost.

I stare into her green eyes, rapt, and I'm yelling reverberations through my own head, slipping out rasped and skewed like through Bob Dylan's clinched jaw. The epitome of cool. She hangs on my words even as I'm not very clear on what they are. The substance is of no substance. It's the inspiration that's coming out, not the designs - by product - waste materials. Nothing to be held or collected and years down the road when she reminds me of those beautiful poems I once mumbled in an apocalyptic haze to her with little recognition of her presence, I will have no idea what she's talking about. Those words that were like meteors cracking fireholes in the ice of her self-conscious demeanor and were everything, the cataclysmic shift, to me will only be vague memories of having know someone by that name and at the moment of having loved her so deeply, not as a person with a history and a soul, but as an arbitrary figurehead, a representative of an entire culture of aching heads and hearts, gaping to be caressed with the right perspective and the flyest demeanor. It is her moment of preparation that draws these words that I don't care about out of me, and has little to nothing to do with me as a human being. All I do is yell and the sound is as Om, the totality of everything melting and massaging my nervous system. But to her, each word is the dogma and exactly what she needed to hear at the time.

Phase two - by the end, there can only be one of two thoughts in her head: I want to fuck him or I want to kill him. Cut his head ragged off and watch the plants drink up his blood, blooming with relief in the face of his void.