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…

Folie à deux | The Silence of Strangers

My industrious fingernails tore their way into the soggy earth in the shadow of the gnarled avocado tree a dozen paces from where I lived. It took me the better part of the chilly night, surrounded by a cricket symphony and a baritone scale of overzealous bullfrogs but I managed to do it before the break of dawn. I dismantled the seven foot podium erected in her honour five seasons now and piece by piece, I buried it so deep down, it’s now a footnote in the echelons of my love history. I picked up the alabaster bust made to her specifications with shaky hands. It was the only piece of idolatry I allowed myself because I knew it channelled her essence into my nether regions and had thawed my frozen heart so wonderfully these past years of unbearable solitude.

I buried it.

I unskinned layers upon layers of layers of intimacy like discarded Matryoshka dolls and bared our relationship to the grinning gleaming skeleton it had become. Not that there was anything of amusement for me. Without meat to support my obsession, I saw her for what she truly was and what I saw sucked my purple gums into my jawbone. Perhaps had I chanced upon this discovery sooner, I wouldn’t have made such a braying ass of myself for such an extended period of time. Such a laugh she must have had at my expense.

 Such a clown I’ve been.

I uprooted the avocado tree from its roots and had it serve in place of the grave stone. With bleeding fingernails, I scratched our names into the crusty unyielding bark as a parting gift. I drew a broken heart around our names because I finally believed what everybody already knew with startling certainty: star crossed lovers we were even though I had been too blind to see. I was too full of myself boasting how I had an eye for the beautiful late bloomers, a nose for hopeless romantics and an ear for musical heartbeats. She sang me a sad tune that built a stone bridge to my heartstrings. Her refrains were subtle tentacles I explained away as female reluctance to reveal it all. Her hooks were bastards. Only now does memory serve me in its glaring clarity. Her hooks left me bleeding left and right but I mistook the blood for tears of happiness.

No wonder she left me winded.

Now joined with the unforgiving earth I don’t even bother to say a prayer for her. She took the god of our love and raped him in front of my eyes. She took the sanctity of our whispered promises and built armies to fend off my advances. She took me out of my skin and strung me out to dry, desiccated like the month of July.

No, I do not say a prayer for her because she has all the gods she needs within her. Let her pray to herself for all I care.

I am done!