Ecstasy denied

Here’s a moment of a girls’ life

it flickers, it flickers like a skirt, caught on a black railing, rented, torn, pried apart, and released, to flap, uselessly and without form

she’s lost her purse, her lipsticks rolled behind the bus and she didn’t put on her hose just right

the seams you see, they’re supposed to line up at the back where her heel hits the smooth patent of her shoe like how the girls in WW2 did it except they used eye-brown pencils because silk was needed for parachutes, oh and who can afford the cost of the worm?

that’s the way it should have turned out, fixing her seams, walking in with a kick and a smile, wooing her audience, beguile them, beguile them and they shall fall helplessly

exercise in futility, that’s not her, she doesn’t do performance art, that’s the image of her projected by those who believe, with her lips, and her green eyes, she’s kryptonite, such a bad bet, she’s a lame horse who prefers the stable, all those shrines to her potential, before she drank too much anxious about oh, more or less, everything in the world

and drinking they say, even in France now, is not du rigor but ruled out, if you wish to avoid your one out of eight women gets breast cancer statistic, what the hell? How to survive without sipping it down? Letting fermentation do its ritual on her guts, lifting her back into the gilded frame

she wished she were a boy, boys can still drink, boys don’t wear hose, they don’t have to worry as much if their armpits stink and they won’t have another boy tell them that their breasts sag when they rise up and clasp the void

if she were a boy she’d want to be a pretty boy the kind that other boys would probably hit on, with a large top lip and gleaming hair, because pretty gets you candy and she has a sweet tooth

if she were a pretty boy she’d try out fucking a girl just to know what it felt like

to be a version of herself with other body parts

would the girl look at her with frightened eyes, hooded and suspicious like a Russian doll, daub her sides with ancient gild, would she open her legs only because she wanted what you held back, in your frayed pocket, tightly wrapped, here it is, take a mouthful, bitter taste, will we live longer in our knowledge? The apple glows in the darkness from its position alone hanging from the lower branch of knowledge.

when she wakes up in the night and holds her singed hair back, hugging porcelain throne vomiting what she’s learned time and time again just doesn’t stay down

couldn’t she purchase another way of coping?

apparently pills have their own set of demons

she learns the art of the mask and strips for the doctor who takes his swab. It’s a painless test he lies, grimacing as he breaks her bones and pries denial apart, you won’t feel a thing

and then everything turned blue and the water didn’t stop running down the sink in the wrong direction and the clocks lost their hands and rolled into glue sticking to the inside of her emptiness, where no life was, sharing its wasteland

on E she danced until the fat at the top of her clavicle, that little jiggle you get when you drink lots of milk as a child and push your little breasts together, grew and people said well … don’t you have a fine pair on you?

not really she’d think if you could see how long it takes to get this look, all the tape in the world, and they’re still not really sticking

a bit like her, unhinged at one corner, asking; peal me back see what’s underneath

her own preference was for girls with skinny chests and protruding nipples she felt they were saying fuck you to every kind of lame expectation, their knife-like hip-bones, shaving her under the sheets like the incisors on wolves, the anger glowing in their eye, a Cheshire cat with blade

but she was too soft for that hard look and wore instead the conicular implements of torture Madonna had cast off

looking back it was fucking embarrassing

when did she learn authenticity? On the way home from the hospital when it rained and the dried blood on her legs, wound down her legs like a cat’s tail and smeared the grass beneath? she saw only mouths open, trying to speak, what do they want to say?

authenticity died between her legs and grew cold in formaldehyde and the rubbing of fingers itching for a cigarette

walking the streets homeless, holing up in an office during night hours, smelling the feet of those who worked there during the day kicking their shoes off

stains on the office sofa that never came off

when he would deliver her bag of drugs and she paid him with herself because she had nothing else

how much would that equate per kilo?

quite a good bargain all things considered, it was like he said, she made him act that way by the tilt of her head

I’m only tilting my neck to get a better view of the strippers on Wardour street she’d say standing at the window, neon blinking in and out, in and out, little panties not yet showing their wear and tear, don’t worry they soon will undo their pretty dark pink bows

he told her you have the smallest waist you look like a french dancer in a Toulouse Lautrec painting

I am a french dancer she would reply and smoke a Sobranie to the gold rim to make the point

gimme a break, you don’t even like Ricard Pastis and those cigarettes are Russian

you’ve got a point there, Pernod is vile, mix me something chopped up, cut it fine, I want to hear music, open your eyes, open your fucking eyes so I can hear

I like the taste of aniseed

I hate it, it reminds me of my grandfather’s fingers and that imported saddle soap he used, when I looked into his throat he had coals burning there, they could extinguish your heart just by breathing on you

change the record / or you’ll kill the mood

he was always in the mood, even when he hated her he wanted to ransack her empty space

lucky she licked the bag clean or her price would be too high, nothing is too much for a fistful of dynamite

I wish I could live inside you, he would whisper, eyes already rolling like a horse about to be led to slaughter, to the exit sign

christ I can’t think of anything worse, she’d reply into the pillow, limbs trembling, her neck aching with his pummel

how long can it go on? can you make yourself wet when you’re faking? Or do you have to run to the bathroom and stick your fingers down your throat? Fake sudden illness to avoid an overdose of you

back in the days when her bladder was strong she could take a pounding and not need to pee afterward, they used to say, you can eat motherfucking hot curry, be given one like a sailor and still walk straight

how many sailors were bent over themselves and filled with whiskey and crab claws she wondered

but you stand up too long, with eyes on your back unpicking your defenses it gets harder

how many times can you shout, oh yeah baby just like that, just like that, you’re the best

he is hard he is inside her he feels like metal she feels like clover and the bees the bees swarm around her obscuring her open mouth the color of raspberries

that’s why she never cuts her hair you can hide so far inside if you carve out a tree and wait patiently for the thorns to do their climb

the wood cuttings of her twins mocking her sins, cooing; what a dirty little girl, you turned out well darlin

I want my moneys worth, he would say half in jest, nostrils crusted with crystal, beckoning her with dirty fingers

take the blue pill, take any pill, watch yourself swallow, there you go, to bed now child, tomorrow will be another show starting at six pm promptly and ending, never

she’d pretend she was sea anemone, anyone else, the girl outside in Soho gyrating to some euro pop song her long fake nails glittering against piercings speaking rapid Lithuanian into a pink phone

her nipples hurt where he burned them with his need to leave a mark, a tattoo artist without his equipment he improvised his layers of penetration

give me something to remember bitch or I’ll make it hurt more

she thud lifelessly above him like an unmoared boat seeking harbor, half-conscious with sorrow, afterward she lay closed off and drugged, as peaceful as an envelope that has been licked shut

and never, ever, ever did she learn to undo, the need to exclude herself from the world

so where’s her next fix? how does she stop wanting it to fill her veins with code

listening to the grind of the world outside, a room with a view boarded over and willingly comatose, two words inscribed on her tomb, ecstasy denied