Titbits

For the hors d’oeuvre, the punisher sprinkles Indian spice into my bulging eyes. She binds the embers with gauze to staunch the running mascara. I scream my inner god into a frenzy. She has me tethered like a goat on this dentist’s contraption. A muzzle holds my jaws shut fast. Thick leather straps hold my arms and legs spread-eagle Unmentionables dangle between. My much advertised scream is in reality a muffled whimper; I almost swallow the dirty undies lodged in my throat.

The plat de résistance consists of me wiggling like a fish as she dangles her ivory globes in my face. I resist her hold for the whole of 5 seconds it takes me to cave in. She ‘detoothes’ me without batting an eye, expertly handling the forceps and relieving me of teeth, both rotted and whole.

She eats a wilted banana for dessert. I watch her hungrily. Dark-painted lips and dark-painted finger-nails graze my skin. Her French curls and her sequin and feather apparel does a number on me. The vortex in place of my heart swallows up all feeling. Before long, even the hunger abates and I simply watch her. Unaffected.

Until she turns to leave.

I scream!

Bad idea.

The Passage of Time

The silence was paper thin, razor sharp chipped in places with a retrospective dance of tongues. A well-used silence, it was an infantry-man’s bayonet poised for attack, stabbing into the tender flesh of a young love newly blossomed now withered to flapping dewlaps of unrealised dreams. Now crushing into the oncoming traffic of bottled up rage, the silence took a moment to compose itself. A deep breath was sunk into the chambers of aborted fights, and then the silence let loose a barrage of words. They knocked him clean off the mezzanine floor to a level below.

“GET OUT!” she screamed!

“I am sorry! “ You whined at a decibel shy of what her ears can pick up from the floor into her writhing frothing mind that had all checks thrown to the side.

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE!” She bellowed into the splitting seams of your patched up wits, those deserters soon a distant memory at the back of your mind.

“PLEASE!” She rasped as an afterthought that shredded your confidence to tattered apologies, stumbling drunk out of your chalky husk of a mouth. No amount of prodding would Necromance this dead horse back to life. You picked up the disembowelled entrails of the love you once shared. You shoved them back into your skeletal heart with hurried care. The neighbours might snatch those bits and pieces and sew themselves into the folds of her heart.

The silence screeched to a halt as she stormed out from your life, the destruction in her wake held echoes of words left unsaid now lacking, a morbid void wider growing in the barrage of sound. The ticking and the tocking of your wrist watch, an assault of a thousand foot soldiers, now marching in line to the shooting fields, bayonets raised over grim faces and brought down with a roar of young men new to war soon disillusioned their bravado now wavering. 

Thick warm blood soon spattered and spilled, draining out of chambers of your battered heart. In the last moments of the rest of your life, you lay in the muddy fields of miscommunication and reflected upon the deep well of sadness in which you drowned gulping down the words you never had a chance to say to her. All the while the ever present silence looked on, a witness to a murderous crime, observing the passage of time, with a cold unflinching heart of stone. The silence watched dispassionately the last moments you gasped, the bobbing of your throat like flotsam out into the sea, chugged this way and that with the twitching of your limbs. Smoke in your eyes, you prepared for the final jump but still images of her lingered like silvery clouds across the open sky that were slowly drifting, drifting, drifting…

Shooting Blanks

I met you in the cold sour orange fruit juice of my contemplation. You were that sugary unstirred bottom of my ineptitude. I forgot that spoons were made for a reason and spoons were also cuddles, that spoons were warm fuzzy creatures that would grow cold when not minded like reptiles bemoaning the once ever present sunshine. You were that orange sunshine and I forgot to clear the dark cloud that is me, I forgot to stir the juices of our relationship and then it was all over with you at the bottom of the cup and I already ingested in my own permeating dark thoughts. I painted that grimace on your face with every passing day I ignored the bubbling happiness spreading inside of you and before long I had poisoned you against the woman who simply wanted me to bask in the sunshine of her love.

It is my fault that I made you bitter, my fault that I made you stay too long without my caresses that the orange in you had turned to bile. You had meant to open your quirky mouth to crack a joke at my forlorn face but instead you opened your mouth and spat out dismembered limbs of your jumbled thoughts, careening between happy and sad, should I go, should I stay, your delicate hands folding and unfolding with indecision.  It is my fault I made you doubt the independent woman in you as you had to lower yourself to my level and reason with this impossible child throwing a tantrum with his oppressing silence screaming the roof off our relationship. Your eardrums swelled with all the noise and your screams joined the fray desperately trying find a point of equilibrium. Your eardrums burst in a cacophony of shattering glass and fits of jealousy much as your suspicions were all here say. This obstinate child denied you closure, with every breaking piece of our furniture, I nursed a twisted hope a piece would find my head and crush my brain to porridge and brine to decorate this place.

This place was meant to be our home away from home, as a man and his wife have to leave their parents' homes and make their own, we had carved this place from brick and stone to call it our own. We furnished our home in colour and smiles and built a backyard to hold reserves of compromise for the fights yet to be fought, we stored the excess of our love in hidden pockets in our hearts for the children yet to be born but already part of our lives. We built this all, you and I but at the end of the day, the 50 you gave outweighed my own.

I cocked my gun and shot with the zeal of youth and you embraced the seed that was never to sprout. For years we tried to till your fertile fields and for years we went back to our beautiful home, without a harvest to show for the backbreaking work of the two unfortunate lovers in a race against time. I knew the fault was my own because a man always knows these things after a while. I got myself tested behind your back and the result was not a surprise. I had been shooting at my lover with blanks but with intent to kill.

And how do I tell her? How do I tell her I failed as a man? How do I uproot the happiness she nursed in her heart without killing her? How do I kiss those lips without feeling keenly my failing as a man? How do I face my lover with nothing to give…but darkness and loss and dark cloth to cover her head? I am sorry for your loss I would say. Your children didn’t make the trip to your warm embrace, they died in my arms and there is nothing I could do to save them. Would you find it in your heart to forgive me, I am only half a man. No can do.   

May darkness swallow me!