EnzymeDevice

Lips meet so sloppily, fumbling in strobe lights, mouthing the wrong lyrics, hoping this goes right, drowning in rhythm. A prismatic world borne of artifice captures the lives of two girls in an interstice.

The squeak of PVC when you’re propelling me into the cubicle: I can’t stop tripping on this Tripp NYC; too many straps to fumble with. The shove, the grasping groping hands which scratch the gooseflesh pushing down my waistband. The deep abyss my heart’s spelunking as the shine expands. The seeping startling wetness, red as leather corsetry: I kiss you like my tongue is in your guts, a dagger twisting, spitting venom. The clanking of each chain that hits the floor: we stop and giggle, so illicit that we must be holding up a queue, they must be muttering, they must be wondering if we’re both boys with this amount of upkeep. The lipstick smeared across us both as cracking vinyl nails now scramble with the toilet roll to clean that gunk off; black like both our bruises, peeling wallpaper of skin.

My body is a neutral space, my veins a railroad map; my brain is in a vacuum, trapped in backrooms, strapped for cash with no known tap-out, only debts so high they’re blacking out the sun. I’m taxed and overrun; my brain is maxed out. My fingers twitch in fighting time, I right myself in spite of time and back out. The neutral space is liminal and sublimates me slowly on a spider’s crawl to amnesty; I pass out. The passengers which travel from my digits to my heart are numbers crunched until they’re spat out, relaxed now.

A spray of bruises stains my cheek like inverse Queen Anne’s lace, and on my journey I am roadkill. Shaking shaggy fur back from my face, I dip myself into the rippling fescue lining either side of well-worn rabbit tracks; this open air means air attacks and I will never reach my promised shelter.

Ophelia machine, you cry the pain away with waterfalls of engine oil. The curtain falls and you are slick with sweat and toil. From blackened lungs of ancient industry now rendered fertile flesh you spew into a drowning pool of dwindling subroutines in which you lie enmeshed. You cry for bitter death because no other kings are left.

I saw God in the theatre, no anaesthetic, my lungs laid upon either side of my chest like the wings of an angel. I thought back to the days I would eavesdrop on you and I heard you describing the minutes you died on the table. You said you were spotlit and fell to the ground but then groundless the void became thronging with bargaining voices. Pitch-black above and below, you resisted in vain before finding your throat scratching out that same chorus - you were now one of the beggars, alone in the night, in an infinite spidering tangle of recompense, hoarse intercessory prayers from a gaggle of murderers. Then you woke up. You felt no emotion. I opened my mouth in the theatre, raising my head to inquire why the blood was this pink and this glittery. I was your spotlight now, holding your hand back in time.

I did it. I loved myself. Have I appeased you? Has doing this teased the dewfall from your eyes; are you mawkishly maudlin and sobbing with pride? Can I grab your damn neck and just squeeze you? The therapy worked! Oh, guess who's back! I dredged the damn dirt and I picked up the slack so before you start something you’d better be warned: I've got CBT hacks that could caponise God and my psychodynamics are justly perfected. Fuck you. There’s holes in my brain! I can meditate fine and my joy knows no bounds when I escalate quarrels with you - I'm a luscious depressive. Gnaw out my spirit and cherish the ride like a marzipan fruit you can nibble on; savour my positives - rare as I quibble on - thaw out my heart as you take me inside and please know that I’m laughing. I’m pointing and laughing. You grow misty in so many ways. Woe betide.

Testify, you gentrified - unstick the needles from your eyes and grapple with the embers of your tenderness. It’s in the potion bubbling, I know it. If you’re motionless, eventually emotion sparks enough to grow a seed of hope and calcify. Surely. In time?

You’re billowing in air that scares the midges high atop the grassy mound behind the space the station used to occupy; I knew that you could fly but not like this. I wonder if you’ll duck and roll or scream or lie suspended on an updraft begging dusky skies for other paths; I knew someday you’d laugh but not like this.