down in me

Why do you love me if I taste like wrought-iron bars through droplets of rain? My kiss of bronze cast in late morning sun shade coats your tongue in gold leaf. I’m woolly sheep hobbling along the fence, determined to get my fluffy white coat caught on the wire. I think about cotton, soft but slightly abrasive if you squash it too tightly and rub it back and forth across your spine.

I think of merging this paragraph with another cotton story (maybe you’ll see that one later) so I can make a longer, story, an über-story, a story with more endurance and determination than I could ever hope to wish for. But it doesn’t go together, I say, it doesn’t go. It doesn’t matter, I reply, it doesn’t really matter to anyone at all. But it does sort of matter, to me in an obsessive-compulsive kind of limit-enforcing sort of way. So instead I’m commenting on myself and the process in my head while I speak to Mr Notepad as I often do in my solitary cell. I realise this doesn’t go with that either, but I’m practicing, right now, just practicing feeling for my boundaries. Yes, they’re there and there and a bit over here, too. They spring back like foam from my fingertip. Everything’s okay, then, everyone’s accounted for, we can continue with the tale.

Why do you love me if I taste of your mother’s sour milk and your father’s sour sperm? My kiss of strawberry jam sticky lips turns mouldy on your chin. A mouldy goatee, I exclaim! A mould goatee. What about that, huh? This is curious and wonder-making and alarming in a grossly sweet way.

Why do you love me if I reek of cigarettes and sometime lush drug-addicted homeless prostitutes and carelessness and wine? Why do you kiss me with your pure child aching mouth of innocent lust for a salty glaze cupcake turned full-on stomachache treat? I will devour the melty gooey chocolate and smack my lips and lick my brown fingertips clean to the bone. My gruesome (yet adorable) table manners will make you wish you’d never asked me out to dinner.

In the end I’m almost overwhelmed with the need to remove the second paragraph so the first, third and fourth can stand united as one and free from bloated self-talk, as maybe they were meant to all along. No, no, I say, that’s just crazy talk, I say, mad loony googoofliploopy cuckoo clock stuff. I feel you’d expect that, you’d expect that from me because I’m neat, so neat and quiet. Who’s right? Me? Or me?