“We’ll stay unborn so death can’t start the clock, and love can seep through our pores”
After One Quarter of a Revolution, Every Time I Die
She said she would pay anything just to feel my internal organs, but I want to keep myself to myself. I can see it in her eyes, they bend the light to perfect pins. My eyes pick at the pinks that drift from her mouth, becoming a shroud. Throat. Chin. Lips. Her pores pump narcotics, orange in the haze we created; blind drawn, daylight seeping. I can’t look; I can’t. I feel her, shifting, an insect crawling up my leg. Hair ridden flesh tingles.
The air whispers through windows, wheels on concrete, the stranger that hybridises with their car. Engine pulsing, the gearstick an extension of the arm. Brake. Break. They slow, stupor and churn, clunking into the other’s rhythm. Cogs catch a shudder, a grating rattle of bones comes to a stop. Smoke, the car suffers the little death.
She has my head now, a good section of its goo. Across the room I see the greys roll out my eyes, escape the cortex of my brain and become…and become…The mouth fountains raw sewage down my front. What a site! Such spite. I wipe. I have to be clean, white, and pristine within the haze, narcotic looks she doesn’t care to drop. She pinned the canopy, swooping down its orange. My eyelids are drawn yet the daylight seeps through.
She seeps through, vivid through x-ray. She takes my hand in hers; an extension of my arm. I feel an engine pulse, it won’t stop until it reaches my mouth. She lifts it up, my fingers crumpling under her breath. The orange has paralysed what was raw. Nerve endings tingle at the tips. Faster, faster. Break. Brake. The puddle of lung in me stops; my finger dangling, dripping from her mouth, my cold cuts. Splutter God damn you! She won’t. Reds dripping, viscous vicera trailing onto my flesh. My blood! Me!
The child watches from the door. Eyelids wide, unbreathing. Erect. Terrified. He sees my insides; his ribs revelling. He can’t believe, he can’t stand it, but he can watch. He gawps, clutching his stomach; he can’t stop. The blood catches his face. He scrunches his eyes, hands covering, fingers clawing. Burst. Rapids of reds, pink, and black. Gunk spraying across the carpet, soaking into cream white. The skin burns from his face, a hollow socket as he collapses to the floor.
I take my other hand. How dare she! My teeth connecting with bone. This is my body you bitch! I taste like raw black oil and veal. Orange blood garnish, rotten ice. I want to vomit. My mouth wasn’t made for this, but her teeth are no sharper. Her antibodies are attacking me. How can she smile? Letting blood trickle. Lip chin throat. A shroud working down to her breasts. I pull my hand back, but now padlocks connect us limb to limb.
I stare at the dark bondings, then close my eyes and see shadows twitch, carbolic vampires with ruby tastes. Her taste, my taste. She takes my arm back, licking the skin, tasting my protein, alkaline bacon, unshaved. Teeth growing to suck me dry. I’d be her tube of elixir, red squeezing through tubes and valves and tissue. Given the chance, she’d roll my knees into my shoulders, press down on my shoulder blades until I was empty and she had consumed every part, sparing the husk.
I shudder. She stops. The pinks in her eyes dart across each oil slicken piece of my body. She chews her lip, chews it hard, blood hard. Pinks give way to reds and mingle with mine, haemoglobin fighting for air, but I’m not clotting.
“What’s wrong?”
The Ragman arrives. He holds out his duvet, his pillows, his apologies, his linen. It’s all crusty, heavy rain on dying forest floors. He ghosts, knowing its worth. Within withering yellowed white, he stands, holding it out. Her fingers trail across it, making shreds of narcotic, revealing the enamel that hides beneath. She smiles, reflecting on veal and the black gunk starting to spill over the crusty buckler. He flinches. The sign above the door reading “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT”. He slumps, the blood tar ritual.
The beast springs to her mouth, harnessed in my ligament. It starts to scratch, arms outstretched to find what it can, to take what it needs. What it wants, it says, is what my skin conceals. I feed my insides verbose apologies in orange peel segments from my skin. I let the TV in. Throwing metal at the problem until it dies and I am erect, the salt of dead leaves trailing down my thigh. That’s what the red horns want, and it won’t stop. I need that smell, compost mixed with her sugar malaise. She feels strings of vicious pearl liquid.
It betrays me to her guerrilla warfare,
In the tiniest of deaths,
It tingles narcotic ecstasy to block my spine.
AF Cowlin 
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