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I am Jack’s Perverted Desire.
There is blood burning a trail down his lips but I’ve never wanted to kiss him as badly as I do right now. Primitively, every thought in my mind is shut out in favour of that one, single desire; that, and the fact there was no rule against sublimation but I think it probably wouldn’t slide, anyway. Or maybe it would. Isn’t that the entire point of—
“Lose your focus for one second and you’re as good as Valley Dogs.” His (and, really, there is only one Him. And I am not talking about God.) His dogma in a space monkey’s voice. Loved enough to be castrated. Worried about enough to be the subject matter of the Self Care Epidemic, pitied enough to earn slate or granite headstones with a dove or a poem or maybe nothing at all. “It’s only when you’ve reached oblivion that you have free will.”
The kiss of bone right through fat pads and tissues and muscle right back to bone. One, two, three, four knuckles whip my head halfway off of my neck, they force my eyes wide and my teeth to splice through my inner cheek like tearing through the ass of a cog. Our dental records are different than a lion’s for a reason; but the 8.5 centimetre difference is no matter when enamel and dentin are up against the fleshy mucosa membrane.
I am Jack’s Threatened Bile Duct.
How many litres was it, before you blow chunks? Blood that matches his lips pools behind my gums and nothing can stop it from spreading. It’s weird that even with all of this, all I can think about is kissing him. Calm as Hindu cows.
I want to tell him that spewing bile all over the concrete was better than just chanting a scripture but I can’t find the words. Instead, my hands find his body, bare from the waist up, and I grab his hair like I am trying to show him the heavens. It’s merciful, how I take him by the roots and not his fraying split ends. As I send his red lips flying against my knee I remember that mercy isn’t exactly trademarked in a place like this.
The impact hurts him much more than it hurts me, the cartilage of his nose folding like a prion against my kneecap. His face was built like an adonis, true Greek God style with the massive bone in the center that caves in on itself against an immovable object.
And I used to be such a nice person.
When you’re hit in the nose it feels like blood is gushing out of your eyeballs. It’s not blood and the shock is so strong you can’t even feel the pain but you're crying because that’s how it is when you are kneed in the nose. He chokes on the tears and the blood gushing down the back of his nose and into his throat, painting his pretty lips red, redder than before. I wonder if it is batshit insane to be thinking about tonguing the seam of his lips in a moment like this.
When he falls to the concrete his body is a wet slap of meat. I think about straddling his torso and holding his wrists and taking his blood as my own. I wonder if punching him unconscious will give me the same satisfaction as searing a wet kiss against the curve of his broken nose. A hymn, an apology; song, chorus, ending. Men go to the gym because magazine tabloids show them what real men should look like and I go to Fight Club to fuel an addiction. It’s the Capitalist’s dream, to add lighter fluid to the oil and throw a match to it. Don't stop until everyone follows suit and the whole world is burning but nobody remembers what it was like when the forests weren’t on fire, anyway.
We can’t look past our own bodies.
We need more.
Every Capitalist’s wet dream, slave space monkeys beating each other into the ground so that the system doesn’t have to.
“The third rule of fight club is if someone taps out or goes limp, the fight is done.” There’s just short of eleven copies racing through my mind and I guess I’m daring him to give up. To stroke my ego and tell me he’d want this just as bad as I want him. I tell myself. “This is not love. This is ownership.”
I don’t tell him I wish the dog tags swinging against his collarbones were pulled taut. He'd be too delirious to answer anyway. Sometimes when he looked at that kid with the blond eyebrows and the blond hair and the blonde fucking life I wanted to pull those dog tags and choke the life out of him but really I wanted to kiss the blood off of his lips.
I am Jack’s Overt Narcissism.
From the ground, his blood stains the blonde hair at his temples red. He is writhing like an earthworm and if he was foaming at the mouth, maybe I’d feel pity. Would I not want to kiss him anymore if he had rabies? Or epilepsy? Or was overdosing on prescription painkillers the hospitals got him hooked on? I don’t know. People tended to love you more when your name was on a headstone.
I am Jack’s Overdue Rabies Vaccine. Oh, stop it.
Beneath me, looking up at me with cheeks so big they rimmed his half-open eyes, he never tapped out. He stares up at me with his tongue hanging past his lower lip like a dog, drooling and bleeding all over the place. It’s a look I can’t handle but the space monkeys are no better, forming a cultists ring surrounding us with heads held high in their versions of prostration, because we are God here. For the two or five or seven or fourty-four seconds between when your fight starts and your fight ends, it’s St. Patty’s Day and everyones eyeing you like you’ve got a stick of gold up your ass.
He raises his arm to wave me closer and it is my pride that grabs his wrist (not in the way I had wanted to), twisting his arm back in his shoulder socket like unscrewing a Coke bottle.
“That’s more like it!” He screams up at me as if our roles were reversed, laughing against the background noise. He’s mocking me with his swollen eyes and his fat squirrel cheeks and his bloody lips. Mocking me with the high ring of his manic laughter as his arm dislocates with a pop so clear I can hear it over the cacophonous yelling monkeys. Ligaments bruise and push out of his skin and his arm falls dead when it leaves my grasp, swelling like a balloon at the shoulder. He falls forward with a smack, chest down and back up, the posterior shoulder dislocation unforgiving against the harsh swinging light on the ceiling. He moans out loud, moans, thumping his own cracked teeth against the concrete. “Fuck!”
“Does it hurt?” I prod, jeering up at him with the light a halo against my brown hair and blood staining my teeth. It’s a stupid question that has a redundant answer but maybe I want to hear him say it out loud. Him and his perfect lips, how about you tell me how it is I make you feel. My adoration for him claws at my brain: perfect, strong, confident, pretty leader of all and loyal to none. I wanted him to want me as badly as I wanted him. “Tap out and the fight is over.”
I am Jack’s Inherent Need For Approval. I am Jack’s Search For God.
He smiles up at me with the teeth I did facing the cornflower blue tie, coughing and choking as tremors wrack up his spine like waves on the shore. His fist beats down against the floor in defeat but he doesn’t look like the loser. The room is eerily silent save for his mumbo-jumbled fits of laughter and choked heaves. Somehow, in that distinct way of his, it feels as if I’ve lost.
I am Jack’s Blinding Rage.
He rolls to his back easily underneath my hands, his shoulder pops back into place mercilessly with the force of him slamming back into the ground. Each one of my fingers wrap around the meat of his wrists and I push them back to frame his head. I block the light with my fat head but I’ve never been able to see him more clearly than right now. The bugging grape of his cheeks, blue and pooling with blood so deep it was black.
“Two more, I’m almost there.” He says and spits a tooth across the room but I don’t think he’s ever looked more beautiful. “So she isn’t crazy. The rattle. It’s really real!”
He laughs in my face. I see Marla’s shadow, the fuking witch butt-wipe tourist. She’s always stealing the things I care about. I see Angel Face, his ugly-pretty blue eyes and blond hair, he’s in the shadows too. He laughs in my face and I can’t see his lips because they are curled back so far into his smile.
All I can do is sneer and grab his wrists tighter, my knuckles white as ghosts with the pressure. I feel his bone marrow shift beneath the weight of my grip. “Don’t talk about her.”
An award winning smile. A gold medal grin. “Talk about who?”
I can’t get mad at that and I’m lucid because that isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that he wasn’t in shock from the pain and that everyone in here loved him and he didn’t love me back.
“Do you love them?” The shadows disperse like dust when I finally bring them up. The angel and the witch. Like pollen taken in the wind to impregnate every random flower, they’re gone and it’s just me and him on the floor and the blood in between.
“They’re gone.” He says, looking past my shoulder as if I wasn’t even there. When I crane my neck, every last space monkey was gone. “Don’t go to where those corpses go. I am all you need.”
I want to leave his wrists to grab at my own hair. I already know I wouldn’t be anything without him! What I need to know is—
I silence his words and his laugh by pressing my face so close to his that every time I inhale, it’s his breath in my mouth. We taste the same, the metallic tang of blood staining our teeth so red it’s like tar. We’re kissing, with lips and teeth and tongue, and it hits me harder than any punch to the cheek or knee to the nose.
“Tyler.” He says and his voice vibrates on my lips. “Tyler, you have to wake up, now.”
I want him to shut the fuck up. I kiss him harder and the jagged edge of his chipped tooth sinks into my lower lip. I gasp in pain and pull away and he breaks out of my grasp to pinch my chin in his hand. “When we fall asleep, are we still the same people?”
I tell him, I don’t understand you.
He grins, wild. “Slide.”
I am Jack’s 7 A.M Wake Up Call.
I wake up to the sound of my morning alarm, and there’s a blood stain in the shape of a kiss on the cotton threadbare pillowcase. It’s time to go to work, again.