aria / him

That's why I wanted to keep the lights on. Those dark-chestnut eyes, pools of molten lava. And they scared me like lava. Once we started (excuse me, once she started), I swear the temperature in the room went up 8 degrees. When I was hitchhiking, I spotted her eyes before she pulled over.  Her stare fixed me. Magnetized me. You'd think I was a fuckn zombie. None of that mattered once I started tearing off her moth-eaten teal cashmere sweater, no bra under it (if she'd only known my momentary disappointment), and yanked at her jeans like an inexperienced sophomore. All the while kissing but it wasn't kissing, not in any vernacular I had ever learned. The sheer ecstasy of a new language, ok, a new tongue. I was reckless, unsubtle, impatient. Not like me, really. So she tortured me all the more. Which pissed me off, and drove me on. No, it wasn't sportfucking, though we could hardly call it love. My payback torture was not allowing her to take off her panties. Take that. I don't smoke, but I wanted a cigarette afterward. Hilarious. For a person who doesn't sweat that much, it was like the teenage days I caddied in August: the wide expanse of my lower back a swamp.    

aria / her

I knew he wouldn't hurt me. I can tell. But I had the knife anyway, the knife he didn't know about, and still doesn't. His hands. A piano player's, not a plumber's. The long skinny fingers, the veins spidered. His soft palms. How could such delicate masterpieces brutalize? Right. Don't go there. From the second he got in the car, I knew he'd be a sensual kisser, not so much the curvature or fleshiness, more the blend of pout and promise. To be truthful, that's the reason I stopped for him. I'm good at spotting shit like that. Good eyes, better intuition. The roughness surpised me a little, not that I minded. It didn't hurt because I was ready. And I made him wait. God, I love torturing him. I made him a beggar, a hungry vulture. A pauper and a prince on a stallion. Squeezing shut my eyes in the well-lighted room, I became a tawdry cliche in a cheap novel: scouring my memory for a forgetten vocabulary, saying fuckit: stir fry lavender musk mint saliva sweat an unnamed deodorant faintly feminine unisex deaf almost deaf for a second faint-fear full fuller deep deeper more coriander Clorox bang bang over for him but not for me, no not me. 

Still. 

But I should've paid attention to those eyes.

 

you talkin' to me?

pardon me
you heard me
no, really, I didn't
I said, "to be or not to be"
that's what I thought
so you did hear me
point taken
I'll say it again
I dare you
"to be or not to be"
let's face it, that's pretty fuckn grandiose
how
c'mon
it ain't grandiose, it's basic
like "back to basics"
I've never understood what that meant
it's elemental, fundamental, mental, unsentimental
now you sound like early Dylan
nothing wrong with that
it's alright, ma
elementary, my dear Watson
he never said that
not exactly
anyway, where were we
right here
right here is where we always are
nowhere, man
now here
clever
slow down, you better slow down
break it down
when you said, "to be or not to be" were you serious
of course I was
serious as in suicidal
what, where do you get that
well, you're standing alone all serious and shit
it's a fecking play, I'm a character, on a stage
all the world's a stage
bingo
the play's the thing
how 'bout "play's the thing"
as in juggling, like the king's Fool
not that kind of juggling, more like thi
jousting
joisting
James Joyceting
ca-ching
bada-bing
to be
or
not to be
sproing
back to Square One
exactly
approximately
approximately King Hamlet
that's rich, even royal
royal manna
give that man a cigar
he she it them
that, too