Raindrops sizzle and steam into smoky plumes, dazzling into auroras over brilliant glowing skin so fever-hot and rising cloud-prismatic from friction's blast furnace. Blades cast into the hyacinth beds, saber on zweihander, katana against throwing bolts, metal through the dandelion tubers and stuck in deep fertile tree stock, your hand jabs my belly and we plummet to the dew-drenched grass-and-mud — roll, now, pick up, and I slide my foot through the loose striatae of ankle-thick seaweed strands of moss where there should be the corpse-feeding roots of wildflowers and wreck myself atop you, chest on chest, scars kissing scars. You buck and knee me in the femoral artery and the cartilage there cracks like a city under siege. I collapse away from you and gasp, wipe my eyes with skin cobbled by rain, stagger upright and back away. Anticipating and dizzying and gauntlets — iron-studded leather, slick with rain and streaked with rivulets of rust, — held before my face, ready.
The cherry blossoms whirl, drifting, falling.
You stand across from me, one foot planted at the steel-bark of the tree, other before you, your robes hanging down, grey and loose like city fog, strips that tangle ankles and flap in the wind but never with you. You are born in the future, you present thing, and I only see the ghost of your afterimage, a flash photo taken into the past. You dance forward, light as wind's breath over the stardew meadow on this loading dock crushed by the might of our steps and the magfields — you haul me to standing and in a single movement from the time when you breathed mist into the cold sea-brine breeze to now you sock me in the jaw. Flecks of slick moss and petals slick the brass coating your knuckles, graze my cheek and your fingernails tear my ear and I can't feel my limbs through the radio-static washout of smog of my limbs and mind, that disorientation that forces a conscious exertion so one may continue to breathe and remember where the ground belongs. I curl and fall against you, waterbird I am diving down, then twist, shove you down halfway to the ground as you contort and bring me beneath you again — push, we slide apart but your hand is in my shirt and I am yanked, fabric ripping, I am a nation's flag during an uprising, a revolution, a tyranny turned something beautiful and red as spilt blood on flagstones. Cut my foot on the caltrops I had tossed, buried beneath heaps of cherry petals and daggers of grass splitting the pink-white seawaves, slip and grab your ankle as you bring your weight down to crush.
Gnaw, gnaw. You are iron in my mouth and you do not scream, fish and metal and hot tangy blood, lava or boiling acid or caustic gas, is it my mouth that's torn? Gnash my teeth, rolling eyes numb and blind in my skull, in the pits of the sockets. Grapple you, hold you tight, you kick and buck, flushed skin against mine and towards the gnarled roots of the tree I go — you throw me away.
I chase. Galloping, wolf-legged, you’re on the ground too — kick you, stomp you, don't let go. Rain makes you slick, mud weighs me down, crusts, a vicious gauze pinned against an upturned collar. Now your chest snaps, strikes over roots, over earth. Linen folds wilt against my wrists, leaching liquified ammonia and lime that pricks, shoots down with my gaze, fixed on the gum sole heels of your combat boots, strands of shoelace guards and oiled grommets cinching together halves of leather and canvas ankle-high gaiters affixed with clasps pried free from the housing of old brooches. Dyed-glass gemstones pulverize, stretch almost like molasses candy, iridescent outlines of cherubs and gryphon haunches tracing down with freckles, cantilever cables from the half-bashed cupola that was the stem of your nose. Your shoulders thrash, fingers trying to make a break for my elbow, wedged between your hip bone and the clovers like a lead pipe switchbacking around plaster, unraveling girders caving in, flesh, ribbing, silver nitrate furrowing themselves into the inner folds like postcards to the backsides of photographs, enclaves of cobalt and quicksilver beneath the whirling snowstorm of sakura.
Not enough. Never enough. Blows weren’t meant to be exchanged, swapped in a vacuum chamber full of stilted jigs and half spars. I want to tear, part, eviscerate you — forgo the tempered edge of steel and bonded leather and clamp down with my knuckles, nails, trailing down until the skin begins to split, swell like a nectarine. Canines, thickened with sugar and machine grease slotted like the fractured wings of a wounded pelican double back, try to toe up for the flecks of crimson beneath the lip only to puncture themselves on sores oozing pus. I maneuver, grab from my boot a dew-slick knife wrapped in chromium splendor bought at a Pride parade, stuff my blade into the inlet beneath your ribs, feeling the springsteel snap, rear back until the thin plate of a guard digs into my ribs. I didn’t see your hands—tacked beneath your backside striking once, twice, into the earth, the roots that furrowed, creased across your soiled cloak—begin to work themselves free, in short spurts of movement—inching themselves down my arms before shooting forward, the glace face of the aviator watch, fastened like a cleat to your wrist making a landing against the inner curve of my jawbone.
What were we doing—squeezing out dials, radials into oozing pulp and petals like dandruff, glutting, feasting ourselves on our hands–our dismembered latitudes?
Poetry. It dislodges like a brick from a building after the shockwave of a class-III thermo-nuclear warhead.
Your fingers drag themselves along the hennaed outlines of a corset, pausing intermittently to press, grubby and flush into the velvet ribs—gills of oiled bronze for covered archways of bone. The lower lip quivers. Draws back as the bruises latch, take hold beneath chapped skin.
We shuck apart, skin and crimson parting back like a tilapia’s belly. Knotting, flaking and balling back up, stripping back raw like marzipan and lead sinkers simmering with the fronds of sunlight shafting down through the satin boughs buttressing canvas and wooden struts at rest. You make a break for the grove—stepping over the wicker skids, the asbestos-bronze alloy that was the busted engine manifolds, the palms, the rounded edges of fingers glancing off trunks more dowels than growth.
Because we are the goat’s eye—turned sideways in the horizon-line—a new dimension unfolds—in the morning, with—every new perspective—comes revelations with every revolution—comes profoundations.
Sag against the tail-rotor. I twist my unleavened neck to clear free beneath the little window of atmospheric mercury that foams, bubbles up, almost like mead in a basalt glass paddling with steamer funnels and radio masts streaming long over a hemorrhaging sunset. The first aid kit—a roll wrapped, bonded in more shoe leather and resin than cheesecloth bindings emerges from my breast pocket, splits apart into segments, scratching against pinkish skin like a trampled lotus. Scratch a moat into the talus—feeling the muscle repulse, wince in the sensation, the whitecaps of tumbled granite and quartz that lacerated, winched our wounds wide open. Skip the capsule of clove oil and go for the gauze, still scented of kelp-injected hardtack and tobacco film. Meanwhile, you paint red over the notches on the sextant, still swinging on a length of twine high above the angular prow, aiming for the bowl of indigo beneath the granite cleft.
The perspiration comes away, crystalline, antifreeze. Or the bodies of seahorses and anemone littering the oxidized decks like blisters clinging to the ribbing of razor clams, the rubbery skin of kraken limbs, pores sheathed in the shreds that once were the bellies of humpback whales and bottle noses speared by ship motors, bleeding mercury streaming down with guy lines and the shafts of propellers.
“Try walking like you’re stepping through snow,” you mock, but you are not speaking and I am fluttering. Then you sweep your arms again. Flap and twist. And you parry me, aim true and straight to my heart.
Now we dance—across time—together, apart, star-studded freaks—splitting like seamcutters—pinpricks—of time—in the big top—’s gaps between red and white—like pus between muscle and bone—where striated pinpricks where architects built—their stitching into something—grand.
We break it—we break it all.
We’re dancing over worlds again, plop into an old-growth forest and its series of switchbacks. The foot fodder crumbles under my hiking boots and I leap upwards, alive and bandaged and smelling not of cloves but of green oil and minty-hot anger, mindful of the nettles under my bare, bruised, bloodied feet — I leave a trail of rubies on the floor, and you so deftly care not for the industry of ecosystems beneath us, because where I use the trails you cross straight in-between. Zig-zagging up the mountain, you are gaining on me but using the paths before me I am faster than I was before, and your thrusts barely graze my skin until I step backwards on a rock, swing forward and — pop! There goes a rib, a satisfying crunch like biting into cartilage at the end of a turkey bone the ill-slept night after Thanksgiving dinner with the sun rising on too-full bellies and fridges too stuffed and brains too confused on serotonin and insomnia with too many leftovers to know what to do with. Rotting, all of it, from the fungus: fruiting chicken of the woods bodies I slam into on my back, knocking the wind out of me and you tread over, to the orange and cranberry spread left forgotten on the dinner table behind the potted plant, to be discovered days after this with time showing its bitemarks, because Time is always hungry, as rafts of fuzzy green and grey, softer than kittens, over a crimson-jellied and orange zest sea.
And then we are in the orange and cranberry zest sea — your thrust aims down, just under my teeth, and knocks my chin skyward. The wind is freezing and solid, a living animal of reptillian nature with a thousand hungry mouths instead of scales, like shark skin. I have a rapier and you have a pole, and there are thirteen ravens sitting benign behind you on the quarterdeck. I have not eaten again, as some part of myself remembers between a parry and a backstep, and now my muscles cry. Grow up, I tell myself. Don’t be so hungry. And yet they cry, because now there is nothing to power myself with in my dreams. Fool o’ me, and you are glistening, powerful, salt-slicked and spined with icicles, a jumping spider dancing for its mate, and you leap forward in your oilskins and heavy winter coats, and I am there in my dancer’s attire of leggings and barefootedness and hundred places now between the forest and the sea where you have killed me, knocked me, brought me down. And each time you do, you show more of your true nature.
You land, straighten, stand there, sheath your weapon — I know this trick, you have tried it on me before, and I am so used to being attacked but when you display nonaggression, even when I know you are about to hit, I don’t know what to do. So my shields come down, of course, and all I can do is parry your strike when you whirl your staff over your head and then you whirl again, spinning and striking down like your staff is a sword and I am swine to be cut from head to foot in clean for an anatomy course at the academy you and I teach at in waking — cherry blossoms in the wind fill my view again, at that, and your staff crunches down onto my kneecap and I am only close enough to draw my little knife from my belt and slide it feather-light as the ravens fly through the blooms, cutting pink sunrise with midnight, across the skin of your throat.
Toluene tailwinds. Spinal columns of saffron, compressed and spackled across the horizon, splitting across the curved faces of mooring towers and aerial wharves. Telegraph lines—strung like the strings of a sitar from thatched huts to the soft, pulpy underbellies of barges, laid flat along the breaker line: the flattened spillway to the yawing mouth of a superposed sun. The rays had managed to breach over the seawall, the plaster-of-paris carvings of extinguished muses, little minarets and radio masts of dormitories, interlinked with cables. One catches you with its bulk and sea-wings and you are too kind, once, hideous but kind, to destroy it and so I gain an advantage in a hundred and hook you in the liver and reach up under your ribcage until I am inside.
The heat. The blotted over faces. The woolen stink. The honey mead, lukewarm and tasting vaguely of vulcanized rubber from our canteens. Pages spill, splay over the floor. The surge of the sea is here again and we are in the desert at the base of a wall the height of the Hoover dam holding back the mass of water. What singular streak of bronze and diffusion masts and the corpses of beach swordfish and dolphins, their scales and pulverized blubber mixed into the mortar is lost between the cobblestones, the warehouses and cooling towers — skyscraper-heights, casting serrated shadows down the barren dry concrete blinding white-grey in the noon. If the road slating down from the turbines hadn’t been so rough, the decomposed granite so pummeled and tongue-lashed with ruts, we would have gone barefoot. We spar in the dust at the foot where the taverns drop away to the quay. And then even as the bells and electromagnetic klaxons tolled, shaking the endless dry-wet marsh-seas of rice grain, stab wounds bloom.
Then we are high in an airplane, separated and gutting the plane for the fastest sabotage of the other, and they always said that when you’re in the air, you’re neither a memory nor a dream, when the electric eye fixed atop the engineer’s console glares back and ballast tanks flush, dump out the last of the helium, hydrogen forced, pumped through the auxiliary scrubbers to be burned off in anticipation for the inevitable tailspin and the clouds begin to mass, growing thick, leaden, against the waxing yolk of the sun, throwing the last of its pale hues over the churning whitecaps below and the condensation in the pilot’s seat, I see now as I burst the bulkhead, dribbling behind your ear and down from the gunshot wound, self-inflicted because there was no way for us to win, and I realize that it just happened because I can’t hear and before your limbs die too your finger twitches and the barrel flashes white.
And then we are moving again, and not far. Bermuda. Corsica. Mallorca. The far edge of Venice — the Vegas kind — latching fast to a wrought iron railing, body like a compass with all cardinal directions, too straightforward and taut and wrong, heels scrambling, thrashing against spackling and plastic vines and ceramic garibaldi twitching beneath the rebounding digits of Griffin’s Throne. “Come back,” I tell you, feeling an elbow shock away damp, patched over with spittle and crimson, and there — tied with instant coffee bouncers and racetrack figures and battery-fed shock batons you beat me and one of us wheels — reveling behind screen-printed friezes and savannahs — burning somewhere else—and the other follows. And you tell me, “I despise you.”
You are hideous in the cave where I cannot see, and you are the enemy in the putrid jungles set ablaze with Agent Orange and modern Greek fire. We are ants, after that, because how could we not be crushed underfoot when we are fighting a different war, and you cut me clean in half, and you are awful in your movements, mandibles sharpened to perfection. I am too far behind. I cannot keep up with you, and your snowtreads are blue in the red-orange glow of the snow at sunset, diced with shadows so the world is honeysuckle and lavender and not a drop more paint on the canvas.
The snow is so cold against my cheek. I turn, armour from the Mesoamerican pyramids pinching cold and tight against my skin. The dojo in the jungle was closed, but we were inventive about breaking in before our fight, mutually agreeing to a peacetime before we were dashed to bits by the cars on the humid street-highways overarching it. A fight atop a moving vehicle will come another day.
“Why do you deny me?” you ask, and I settle deeper into the orange snow bathed blue by shadows coming in from the broken rooftop.
“Because I am scared of you,” I say to the muffling snow.
You roll over. Your snow angel is accidental and immaculate. “Are you afraid of me,” you ask through the diamonds studding your metal teeth, beautiful as a wedding ring that I hope you will give me, “or are you afraid of change?”
“I think I’m afraid of leaving myself behind,” I say. “Of being wrong about who I once was.”
That gives you pause. The snow is so loud, a thousand flakes in a murmuring ssshhhhh all around. And at last you respond, your voice a lullaby: “What you used to be served you well, once.”
The snow cracks somewhere down the mountain like thunder. You’re amending yourself now, talking to the sky’s thin scraps of silk: “You’re never abandoning your old self when you change. Does a tree bemoan the inner rings, so strong and compressed that they become heartwood?”
The sun sets before you speak again. “Why do we work so hard to hollow out the heartwood that supports us, rotten or not? It’s ours. It’s what makes us people.” Your voice is a sugared treat in a famine, your lips raspberry pink and blue.
I roll over. You are looking straight through me. Your eyes reflect green from the pupils, and inside your irises is the night sky, like an owl infected with copper and iron deposits in the lens — there are universes behind your gaze. The snow is suffocating, I realize, and before I know it, I am drowning, drowned, the sky engulfs me on the mountain so high and I am so very warm, and I mutter something into the snow but don’t know what it is before I am gone.
I think it’s I love you.
We are Galapagos finches in a thunderstorm. How we somersault, wings exalted, unshackled by neither leaded weights strung with wire or heavy, leeward fronts that seemed to suction—redline the gauges and the rig, the frame, crushing the gas in the tank until the fumes penetrate up through the floorboards. My wings are ablaze with the remnants of lightning, and the rain screams as I cut through it, piercing your throat in a guttural howl of the storm. I do not care if I die on my way to destroying you. You will die first.
We are fighting on salt-spined fishing docks astride a fishing dock adrift in the storm. You have a javelin, and so I light the fuse and detonate the line of claymores. The shrapnel obliterates your brains an inch before your javelin’s point crescendoes the latter half of my skull.
We are in the ocean. The water holds the taste of charred spools of dismembered VHS tapes being incinerated — there is an oil rig above, and great globs of black gloop their way to the surface from pipelines. I swim down, heedless of my nitrogen levels, and with my diving knife stab your oxygen tanks while you are still gaining your bearings. You scream, air bubbling from your exhalatory mouthpiece, no rebreather, like the oil bubbles from the pipe below us and I do not hesitate: I grab your shoulders and thrust us both down into the delta v of pipe just below, and you are a crab torn asunder, thrashing and then utterly still and gone, and then—
I am holding you by the throat beneath the cherry tree. I still reek of oil, and your honeyed skin is an acrylic rainbow of mottles and bruises, cuts and scrapes, stab wounds and I am there too, heavy and wet, nothing like you but utterly identical. You are not moving, and I am so very strong. I lay you down, floppy doll I am, unspooled marionette you are. We lie there in the grass, the moss, the kingdom of ants and beetles. A centipede marches by with the fervour of a thunderstorm. Death hasn’t happened to everything else yet, despite all our movements. Despite all the cherry petals halved by our blades, no matter where we go. Life moves on, despite all the hate and destruction we add to the world.
I lie down. Beneath the petals the earth has regained plasticizer, but it doesn’t tack. Stick. Your eyes are pools of snowmelt, utterly blue and green and black and strange and enticing, promising a frozen drowning — alluring because of it. You are still breathing, and I am a just-hatched butterfly beside the budding chrysalis of its sibling. Sleeping with the eyes open, you are wise. When you wake, I will die again. But I think you are beautiful, now. You aren’t someone I should fear, despite what everyone else says. When you wake, I will die, but I will not be gone for long. I would die to spend a little longer by your side, even as you sleep.
Close your eyelids. Open them again. Then, impulsively, passionately, lean over and kiss you, wet and soft and sweet. You taste like roses, cinnamon. I curl up beside you, skin steaming, Spring rain falling gently through the petals in the tree and slow-curling wind. Sweat beads on my face, my back, the heat of us cooking me slower than frogs in a pot and I am okay with drowning if I am the one who drowns. I am the left wing of the butterfly we make.
I hope that you do not kill me when we wake. I am okay with it if you do, though, because there’s always tomorrow. I hope you take my hand and dance with me, one of these days. Let us waltz. I think you can hear these thoughts. I think you are me, the history of myself. The butterfly to my cocoon, or was it the other way around? I think you are me on another day, and I have yet to realize it for myself. Until I become you, and I fight the past, not my future.
Love you. See you soon, and let us spar again in the mirror.
A year in the making. Fight your demons, but never fail to recognize your history. Accept it as part of you, even in passing.