You've passed out on the bathroom floor again. When you get up, little hexagonal imprints from the tiles stay emblazoned on the side of your face. It works well with the textured lines on your wrists and ankles. You walk slowly, pain in every step, a cloudy smile on your scarlet lips. Your lips are perfect. Your golden brown eyes approach perfection, but they are always bloodshot.

You rarely kiss my lips. Your lips spend more time on other parts of my body. You like it that way. You know how good it makes me feel. You know exactly when to look where your lips want to be. A tongue never was enough for you to suck. You look in the mirror at the bruises on your arms, chest, and ass. Your nipples are huge and dark purple.

You are sitting there on the toilet with the door still open. You see me watching you. You have the same look on your face you did a few hours ago when you woke up and saw me standing there by the bed, looking at the constellation of tiny pimples on your pale ass. You pulled up the blanket. Now, you reach to shut the door just when you are about to shit, but your hand freezes midair. You let it come out of you. You wait for the scent to hit me. You smile.

You get another beer. You open a new pack of cigarettes, light one, and sag down onto the hard metal folding chair, the one you were tied to for so long with that travelling expression in your eyes. You don't know how good you look like that. You don't know how much it means to me that you can deal with what I've just done to you. You've learned so many things. You've learned the gradations of my desire for you. You allow me to take advantage. You let me take you further away from what you know. But later, your own hands are pushing against me, pushing you back away from me.

You hate me when I make you feel stupid, when you feel small and unable to finish one of your meandering thoughts with a dazzling conclusion. You long to impress me with your mind. You carry this desire so close to the surface of your sensitive skin.

You need to let me help you get ready for work. You say "help" in this frail child's voice. You know it's irresistible to me. You watch me make coffee and fill the tub with hot water and bubbles. You make yourself sad by trying to tell me a story about a friend of yours and forgetting the point of it. You hate the silence that follows. You say you aren't awkward this way when you talk to anyone else. You feel that I alone make you stupid and clumsy. You don't consider that it's the liquor and the drugs and the bad diet and the lack of sleep and the old, old, pressures of your muddled memory. How can you trust anything that rises out of that mess? You don't know I don't believe your fictions. You believe all of that jumbled up garbage in your mind. I know you're going to call in sick today.

You think I'm the tale spinner, the great fabricator. You just think that I pamper you to lessen my guilt for the abuse I dole out to your increasingly fragile body. You can't feel how the alcohol is changing the size of your internal organs as you sit there thinking about the next beer, the next cigarette, the next difficult position you will have to maintain when I tie you up again. You don't know how badly you're losing, how fast it's all coming down around you. You wouldn't listen if anyone told you. You don't listen to me at all unless I'm telling you to open your body to whatever game I want to make you play. You lose all of the games we play. You're the biggest loser. You lose horribly, beautifully, extravagantly, pathetically. You're an imploding spectacle of addiction. You want me to watch when you're at your worst. That's my reward.

You can't imagine my world without you, because you never have really looked at the part of me that exists without you in it.

You can't remember if I fucked you last night. You don't remember how you spent an hour telling me how mean I am to you because you're a drunk. You smell. You want me to fuck your face. You discover that the bridge of your nose is sore and swollen. You ask me if I hit you last night. You ask me how you got the scrapes on your elbow and your thigh. You decide that you must have hurt yourself before you came over here. Something about the bathroom door or maybe it was the cab ride. You tell me the coffee I just made for you tastes watery. It's the worst you've ever had to drink. You want to know why I've hidden all the bottles of liquor. You don't believe that I poured them out. And if I did, you think I did it just to spite you. You think that I'm the same bastard you fell in love with a long time ago. You think that fucking is the only thing we can agree on, the only thing we can do successfully together. You think I need to call you a dirty cocksucking cunthole. You are sure I still need to make you choke on my dick. Make you gurgle and cough around it. Make you take it for as long as I can force it into your open mouth hole. Make you beg for it when I pull it away. Make you hold your mouth open for me until I put it back inside all the way in there. Make your every breath depend on my whim. Make it so you can't ever leave me. Carve my name into your ass flesh with that silver knife I brought back from New Mexico. Make you glad to suffer anything for me.

Sometimes, I just want to be a tourist.

You say "Daddy, I like your hard cock." You say it with that sweet child-like intonation, like you're about to open all the presents under the tree. "Keep it inside me, daddy." Desperately you say it, hoping it will make you cry and push out all of the nightmares. You always remember the nightmares. You watch them like the reruns every night after the late news. But you don't think about them while you nurse my cock in your mouth. You pull off of it to say, "Daddy," and look at my face for a little while. "I love your hard cock in my mouth, Daddy. When will you fuck me, Daddy?" You are always the orphan except for those few hours a week we merge and make our flesh and blood into family. And it never lasts.

The radiator is making breathing sounds. There are bowls of M and M peanuts, old and dusty, cracking open like rotten and abandoned bird's eggs. And candy corn, partly melted from the heat. This is your offering to the gods who no longer listen. They are not insulted. They are deaf and diabetic. I see the bright marks on your body. The ones I made with a long willow switch.

You don't know what I punish you for. You have never really known. You stay in the dark. The high steep angles of the ceiling make erratic shapes, accentuating the claustrophobia here. You seem so small in this room. You think ugly things are beautiful as long as they have become traditional.

One drop of poison in a glass of wine turns it all to poison. You are that drop in my world. But I can't stop drinking you. You make me colder. You are that drop. Absolute zero. Serotonin dovetail. Hollow like bamboo. Nothing ever comes out of you, but the smells.

You make me sick the way you pop up just as I learn to cope with the empty bed, the quietness. You don't ever think of me as someone who could need you. Your laughter is always full of nostalgic phlegm for those first weeks of newness. And when it was new, your laughter was full of longing for him, the one I'm a stand-in for in this movie. You don't like long shots or foreshadowing. You are the queen of jump cuts, fade ins and outs, and the soft focus. You revel in imagined responses, tragic fictions. Whatever serves to make you bad and me worse. You don't understand the good thing. You don't get it. The good thing is never the good thing to you. The good thing is just as bad as the bad thing. White is as black as black.

In a world full of sharp things, you are always falling from the sky and never landing in my arms.

 

©2003 Rob Stephenson - Contributor's Bio