You'll Always Be Human to Me

My boyfriend only speaks to me in tongues

Please describe the feeling of the sound of a letter as it's spoken from the lips of your beloved, describe the sound of a letter as it's being handwritten.

Can you write about what it feels like to be a letter? Tell us, what does it feel like to be the letter "q"? Or better yet, a noun, a "u"... How lucky! Thank your lucky, luscious lips and long winding tongue for the chance to experience "u." Without this mouth, there is no "u". Just imagine any other sort of hole. A lizard, for example, is unlikely to invent such a sound.

I don't feel anything unusual
when I type a thousand words into the computer...
K-I-S-S-SPACE-M-E-SPACE-P-L-E-A-S-E-ENTER-DELETE
It says everything, everything,
that there's physical input needed
to create space

Enough, flesh.
It's time to let the electricity speak for itself.
You're burned through.
Now, inhale the ash.

Can you be something worth saving?
Otherwise, my self-sacrifice has meant nothing.

that's not my skin you think you want to touch

The cold floor of a damp cellar keeps you warm at night. You're in the fetal position with your spine curved. You're coiled up around the sewer drain, and the iron grates are wet with your tears. They fall, nowhere in particular—into rocks and dehydrated soil—because the municipal wastewater system has cut this house off from the mainline.

Red painted concrete floors surround you, and the smell of mothballs and dust fill the air. There's an electricity to the static stillness, something in the air is trying to be made material. Something visible wishes to disappear.

When a man writes about amputation, it's artistic. If a woman does it, it's self-indulgent, sexually repressed, and masochistic.

Your mere existence glorifies violence.

The candlelight keeps you awake, and it casts shadowy motion pictures of rape scenes around the room. You hold your breath, exhaling slowly. You're scared you might extinguish the flame, which little by little, grows fainter and fainter, and evermore faint.

Press your thighs together
& let him cut off the rest.
Remain quiet while he binds you.
Don't flinch while he immobilizes you,
in a bed soaked with you own piss.



Can you hear the sound of sunshine? It's passing through too much.
You hear it reverberate off atmospheric diesel combustion,
and soak into the smog, the yellow gray green, manmade ozone,
that hovers on the surface, blurring reality,
don't you?
Don't you hear that relentless droning pulse?

The saw blade glints in the tungsten candlelight, and you watch a spider weave a silver web down and up through old, cracked wooden beams. Everything is finally exposed, and for once, nothing is missing. When words leave you with any sense of a feeling, that's psychological terrorism, that's genuine psychological abuse.

A red silk handkerchief, soaked in kerosene, releases big drops of pale liquid down your red, swollen throat. The silk is tied in a bow and flows out like a blossoming flower erupting from your opened mouth. Your skull is the prettily wrapped giftbox, and gifts, normally, ought not to make sounds.

You're who I want you to be and I'm who you want me to be. Your eyesight is blurry from the tears. Your eyes are burning from the household bleach that's spilled. Hold onto the gravel, the broken pieces of concrete. Hold harder, hold tighter. Use the fragments like broken glass. Squeeze until they puncture, until they pierce through your flesh.

I'm your favorite favorite,
your favorite favorite favorite.
Promise that I'm your favorite favorite,
of all the favorites that you've ever favored?
Pretend, for a little
while, while
the spell is still cast.

A trillion years couldn't uncover these secrets, but in our lifetime, we illuminated every last one.

You can come closer and let me smell the vodka, cigarettes and vomit on your breath. There's nothing stopping you from everything, except Christian morality. I never liked how you looked at me when I was standing there. Now I'm here again, and it's the final touch. Once you uncover me, we'll return to zero-point energy.

The red floors shift into deep burgundy and the room starts dimming. Surface drained of all its complexion. Everything goes mute, flickers in black and white. Reality desaturates, like its being exsanguinated; color all but extinguished. The world is nothing but a shadow, static and lifeless. There's no screaming here because there isn't anyone to hear it, no surface to vibrate, no space in which to expand. The only nearby mind is focused on translating the distance between the blade and your thigh.

postmortem clarity

When you fucked me, you weren't fucking me. You fucked the guy who took my virginity. You were fucking poverty and wealth inequality. You penetrated rotten teeth and the black market organ trade. You were having sex with the millions of words I wrote to you, and my three outstretched holes, each like bullet wounds you twisted your dick in to further spread open and deposit your poison.

It's time to stop sexualizing pornography. It's time to fuck what you symbolize, what the idea of you represents.

He's splitting you apart with the calculation of the government when it allocates welfare checks, with the mannerisms of a cop when they knowingly knock on the doors of the days-old, single household containing dead. He tears into you like a bored nurse administering euthanasia—stoic face: fixed with focus, duty, and obligation.

It's not you he dismembers, its the provocation of criminality. You are an invitation to violence, and virtuously, he denies it—he rejects you. Debilitating you is to neutralize the threat; to bend the external world to his will. Only he acts, the rest must remain dead, tranquil; unquestionably peaceful, overcome by inescapable harmony, until he decides what to resurrect.

Gradually, then abruptly, the fat of your thighs erupts: spilling fluffy, gelatinous yellow, woven in with sinewy, creamy white muscle tissue, and, finally, the metal meets bone, and the kerosene starts to taste sweet, like honey and lime, and your throat clenches, contracts and swells tighter, narrower, and comes so, so close together.

Your big, wide black pupils turn around in slow circles as they bulge, almost hang, from their drowsy, bruised sockets; eyelids blue-violet, pink-red and heavy. Your heart races, but physical panic is restrained by the suffocation on your own enlarged esophagus. You realize: What could feel better than warranted punishment? Why fight back? It's safer to fall deep into the open arms of your devoted executioner. Resigned and serene to truth and knowledge: You deserve it.

true love's death kiss

The wet, cold concrete floor feels soft, feels plush, feels velvety covered in liquid muck. You're warm inside from the dismemberment, warm inside from the poison, warm inside from asphyxiating euphoria. The blinding pain makes you hot, you're slippery and sweaty, and the room is dim, languid, smoke-filled and humid. Even time stopped moving, just for you, but really, just for him.

Vomit finally comes up, but the red silk ribbon doesn't budge. You choke, and, like a gentleman, he pours into you another glass of kerosene. You writhe in your blood covered white top, and he drags his hand across your convulsing abdomen. He lights a cigarette while you lay there, twisting and gagging.

Pink-red blood stained white top lifted up, pink-red blood stained white skirt taken off. He doesn't fuck you, he fucks your powerlessness, he fucks your sickness, and your desperation. He fucks the hydrocarbons absorbed into your bloodstream, the industrial processes that synthesized them, and the economic system that allowed the supply chain to deliver them. He fucks your vulnerability, your naivety, he fucks your belief in the possibility of something better. He fucks to feel, you're fucked to be felt. Invisible when he's not looking, naked when he takes so much as a glance. He's not fucking you, you narcissistic bitch, he's fucking his ability to, he's fucking your trust in him, he's fucking the fairy tale of true love, he's fucking death itself.

Let's hold hands
& admire what we've achieved.
We're all working very
hard on
the end of the world,
together.

It's 2005 and you're in the red basement. It's winter, there's no heat down here, and the government agent has just left. You're doing better, now that you're out of that environment. There are no piss soaked carpets here. No spitting on the living room floors, no vomit filled and left unclean for days toilet bowls. The cell phone you always hold, as a lifeline, as a savior and friend, never to be seperate from, vibrates in your hand, and its him, its him, finally, on the other end. My love, my true love, my sweetest ever love. You spend hours talking to him: faceless, nameless, bodiless. Laying on the cold red concrete floors, you moan and whimper for him, because that's all he wants, the only thing he wants to hear. Don't waste his time with your anxieties and fears, and don't let anyone else in the house know you're down here. They'll take everything, they'll take your phone, they'll take him away from you. Go into the secret sub-cellar, beneath the red basement, where the floors are still unfinished, where they once kept homemade wine and stock-piled in preparation for nuclear winter. Cum there, for him, in the dark, in the forgotten, untouched emptiness.

You've done your job, and now it's time for bed. You said "goodbye, sweet dreams, thanks for the fun" but never "I love you," never admit what you need. Instead, crawl into bed, your horizontal altar, where all your prayers are pleads and begs. For hours, you can't sleep, you just lay there implore and entreat, again, again, and again, just like every other day. Beseech the emptiness, but seriously, you're so ashamed. Stop asking, stop wanting. Shut the fuck up and cry yourself to sleep. One day, you'll be rescued, even if it's not today. Just believe and cling to the idea of someday.

I found my true love and he killed me.

Two tears, synchronously, fall from each of my bloodshot eyes, and steadily slide down the sides of my face. I flinch and twitch, like a chemical poisoning victim. Sometimes, every so often, I even seize up a little bit. My bones are broken, my muscles are torn, and my gums are bleeding. Shards of broken teeth embed themselves inside my swollen cheeks ♥, and it's so painfully stiff, I can barely move my jaw.

The red ribbon unfastens, slightly, and to keep from choking, I have to consciously swallow it, use the last reserves of focus to hold it in the center of my esophagus, and keep swallowing. Kerosene, bile and blood are all I can taste, and I whimper and hum, the only language I can speak, the only way I can plead. He pets my cheek, and wipes my tears away with his thumbs. He blows cigarette smoke in my face, and laughs, strange and flirtatiously. I try to plead a little more, beg for mercy in a low, drugged up groan. He smacks me in the face. Hard. The red silk ribbon loosens a bit more. I can cough now, finally, and thick streams of spit and bile drip from the corners of my mouth.

He's on top of me again, but this time frantically. He's pulling my hair and holding my skull so tightly it feels as though it's about to pop. He doesn't look at me while he shoves his fist in my mouth, and I'm too weak to try to bite down. With his free hand, he rummages through a toolbag and takes out a long thick power strip. I'm gagging and throwing up as he removes his fist from my face, then he sticks the power strip in, and ties the rest of the cord around my neck, my chest, and wraps it all around until my arms, too, are bound. When he's done, he takes out a greasy rag and a roll of duct tape. Calmly, patiently, fatherly, he takes the old rag and dries my filthy vomit painted face, then he wraps the tape around my hair, my cheeks, my lips, and seals me up almost completely. I feel like a mummy, like liquid in an overfilled container, constrained and squeezed without an opening from where to spill.

He's muttering to himself, but I can't make out any of the words. He sounds like an echo at the opposite end of a long tunnel. My face is turned to the left, and I watch the candle flame flicker. The light almost glitters, it looks like the stars are shining down here, keeping me company in my soon-to-be tomb.

I can hear my heart beat pounding in my ears, and it thumps away, hard and slow. Slower, and slower, until, slowly, I begin to sense nothing at all. Nothing anywhere. My face isn't there anymore. Both of my legs have been cut off, and I'm almost limbless.

There's no throat to fill, no heart to beat. There isn't an impulse left to move. I'm made of stone, eternal, devoid of electricity. I can't feel anything. The judge must have decided to pardon me. Mercifully, he liberated me from his own private prison. My flesh is still there, but the soul is missing, as he always wanted, as they always wished. Only a body: silent, docile, compliant, and fully co-operative. For him, because of him, I'm gone, finally.