Black Irish Arthropod

Originally written in 2013 and read at Confessions NYC in early 2024 from the confession :

“I have yet to say how I think I’m never going to find “love,” my soulmate. Because what is a soulmate?”

art by Mabel Normand - Artist and Illustrator from New York City”

I know you poisoned my blood last night.

From the soft scrape of your sheets blotted with sweat, oils, and alveoli, I can taste your amaretto scented breaths. You’ve lived in this same childhood bedroom of your father’s brownstone your whole life, third floor under skylights and burgundy walls. “I’ll be your mirror” is still carved on the inside of your bedroom door. You’re ten years older than me, a reverie of a rockstarlet. Your walk-in closet is a lattice work of Rick Owens robes, Ann Demeulemeester dresses, lingerie, silk, and Christian Louboutin boots like dominatrix bayonets tossed over skirts under a single black Gibson Les Paul 57 with gold pickups. The mass pours out into the bedroom. It is a riptide in pause. Pieces of you, it swirls into a vortex carrying amps and a Korg polyphonic Minilogue synthesizer. At the center of the still whirlpool is a small shrine to Kali, the Mahavidya mother goddess of creation and destruction. You built the altar to her when you were fifteen years old in 1993. You light incense sticks in front of it while you are alone.

The air is more smoke than oxygen. A muted barking of the neighbor’s dog is faded and sparse against your thousand decibel dry heave as you auto-suffocate into your next hour of sleep. Sun starts to crack through the room, cutting the cloud of gnats outside your window drapes. I can almost trace the outlines of shadow puppet doves in steam chemtrails rising from Prospect Park adjacent apartment high rises. My heart murmur struggles between milliseconds of potential cardiac arrhythmias immanent from borders between sleep and waking. You slide your skin against mine in congested night terrors. The slick of lubrication, the memories of your cries and moans hours earlier are ghosts pouring from your every labored breath. I can blink open and see the clock on your nightstand. It is an artifact from your childhood coated in a film of dust next to packed overflowing ashtrays, candelabras, and vintage jewelry scattered, mismatched. Between the dried candlewax, orphaned earrings missing clasps and broken gold charms are lost forever as casted in amber. Under your nightstand are boxes full of painkillers nestled close to nipple-clamps, grad-school assignments, song lyric notebooks, your concert setlists going back another decade. It was, is, or will be a time days before I arrived, days after I will leave, days before we shared the metal cocaine straw from your purse in the Brooklyn Museum family bathroom. They haven’t let us hunt quail from your staircase, all leering under the watchful eyes of Kabuki figurines that your father brought back from one of many trips to Japan. They watch over an aether of bone, sinew, taxidermy, and the choked mew of your asthmatic cat three floors down. You pled with me before we slept, to let you have the edge of the bed, in case, “They come”. You won’t remember telling me this.

Heaven forbid I wake and feel another chest pain warped into the scoliotic curve of my spine. You pray for death in your short moments of waking, the stops in your breathing happily wedded to a warm orchid scented lust glistened wet between your pale legs which lay contorted one over the other. You smoke in your bed enough that I fear someday this whole time-capsule room will bleed into flames. My hand traces the groves of cigarette burns and entry wounds over your abdomen. Fit for an insect pin, I know your carapace has resisted countless traumatic inseminations from harpactea lovers; the break sites long since healed from infections that once gnashed against the sensitive underside of your exoskeleton. Your hair against my face is lilac, smoke, and vanilla scented. It is soft and black like an oil slick. Yours is the same scent that kisses the fingertips of my gloves, that seeps from your fishnets, and pollutes the fragments of my clothing that lay scattered across your dust smothered hard wood floor. You’re the only woman I’ve ever known with a Richard Prince nurse tattoo.

The footsteps outside your door betray the sanctity of your bedroom. Perhaps a dog, a family cat, or your aged father glide the hallway, all lined with a treasury of expensive wines, art books of European gardens, classical architecture, your father’s software manuals. You’ve psychologically crippled every living thing in your home but me. I could exit here and be overjoyed. You could exit here and never remember that you were ever here at all.

I get up and read through volumes of worn and whiskey stained books that bind in stacks of hundreds in the corner library of your bedroom. The shelves are cut with bouquets of dead roses and analog photographs. Ten years later I will still have your copy of Henry Miller’s “Plexus”. Ten years later you and I will still recommend each other books. Ten years later we will still share life stories every season change. I’ve stolen more fictions from these shelves than you could ever have lied to me during seizures of orgasm and limit experience. Numbness is my hypnagogia. Is this memory? Or a dream? Your body is reflected in every picture frame, slippery, luring – riding crop welts still visible on your skin between rope-burns. Your hips glisten in the dawn over satin sheets. I can smell you as I stand eight feet away in your library. I am careful to remember every note of your perfume. I am careful to remember how your scent tastes on the skin of your flat stomach muscles. I am careful to remember the way the ceiling molding above your Edwardian chandelier curves in shapes of black hollyhock and tulips wrapped around concentric rings.

When you wake you won’t remember cooking dinner for me at 3:30 am holding your twenty-fifth glass of vodka, after you tripped and bruised your forehead against a glass coffee table. You stood up and laughed as if nothing happened. You won’t remember our conversations together drunk after your band’s headlining show, an afters in the same dive-bar where we first met last winter. You took me back to this same bedroom that first night under snowfall. You won’t remember reading to me about lepidoptery under your bent rose colored brothel lamps as you fed me more poisons and lovingly sang to me in the dark. You won’t remember how you put out a cigarette on my chest one night while I was sleeping just to see what would happen. Ten years later I will still look for the faded mark sometimes and will draw circles around it with my fingertips. You won’t remember opening dozens of black boxes, showing me every photograph, whispering to me of all your heartbreaks, your fallen lovers that left you widowed, angels all. You won’t remember nearly dying in your sleep, quivering into orgasm from the sensation of personal asphyxiation as sleep apnea and barbiturates left deeper bruises on your neck than my hands could have ever drawn as you demanded hours ago that I squeeze tighter. I pour you a glass of water and snuff out another small controlled fire. You wont remember, you never do. I will wake here again, and somehow myself forget as I always do, how sometime in the night I glimpsed the edge of a red hourglass mark on the small of your back beneath you.