I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to kiss.

The hours of embracing,

drawing near and caressing

the orbit of another;

capturing, weakly, in soft cusp, the palm and fingers, excited suddenly,

that love has found its way to your lands

hungry as they were.

Post argument calm felt like sex, but sex was better, though she hadn’t been aware of that. Instead it was loving him or wanting to kill him, both at the same time, maybe. She only knew the limits set by herself and did not consider where her opponents were holding. He met her hard gripping a can of diet pop at a weekend lecture summit. During his sober day hours he noted in her a queer regard for space and rule. She was peculiar, and for him, in an enticing way. She would bore off to the side, quiet at drinking functions but outspoken in debate with lecturers and audience members.

You are only dust and water, animated with fire.

He relaxed, having spent the cartridges, the room utterly quiet now. Curling into his high, Thomas eyed the air lit up with visions, a large field view of meteorite showers during the day. Fiery sparks across the dome of his cornea, until he leapt to an upright sitting position in his chair, the bright specter gone from his focus and downed the quarter filled pint of porter, warming before him.

He had let go. Lobbed a volley across the table, hit every pin. It had been at least two years, maybe three, he couldn’t recollect the time since the needle had loved him. Indeed it was five years, two hundred seventy-six days, three hours and fifty nine seconds. During that time he knew only the slow, lonesome ride toward self improvement.

Fuck the circumstances, he thought to himself and rose up, poured another glass from a new porter and drank from it, knocking at the bathroom door. She had barricaded herself in there after he unloaded the Glock’s contents throughout the room. He recalled his Father’s admonishment, “when they come for you, don’t be sober.”

Another fucking basket case he wanted to say, but he couldn’t stop his sorrow for her. Instead he conceded and pursued her attention.

“What!?” he heard her speaking without saying anything, but he didn’t connect. She was a stranger now behind the door in this hotel room, protected by his being distracted.

“I am here, I just wanted to say that.”

“You’re a fucking neanderthal.”

Without that kind of indescribable template two people conjoin through, exile and conflict prevail, the momentum swaying from one side to the other and, when comprehended as though between roving swells, the homeland becomes visible occasionally before passing behind walls again, and there will always be a place for us to dwell, if only we can get there.

There was three days of feeling gung ho about a variety of ideas, participating in contemporary exhortations. He’d slip, after the affairs to his room (he paid double for a single occupancy) and inject the heroin; oh, that pinch and burn, the warm slide of comfort on his mattress and the fade, off into the wall paper, the beams, through wires, current running to and fro, in the same place at every moment and he was one with all of it until, as now, he leaned back, naked, nodding in and out of oblivion.

He woke from the stupor, as though yanked to, seeing her revealed, in the unspoken nakedness of her absent modesty. Her form straddled over his chest, rising from knees lost in blanket, thighs flexed with no fright. the broad triangle of her sparse pubic hair, warm and pressed against him, ended as her skin curved and rose, tensed, under the curved hills of youthful fat neglected, with her pulling, all her strength being exerted, at the black leather belt snarled around his throat.

The box sat there, just under her hips, between her legs, the silent fortitude a charade. She was alone now, happily, no one in the room, well, G-d was with us, but no one she had to convince of anything except that space, her neglected box. The fire stoked, the expanse breaks open and warming glows of afternoon linger in the room’s shade as burning tendrils climb her guts and arms multiply and wave, the blood under her skin blue and she becomes Mahakali, the Great Kali.

His strength was not yet diminished by the lack of inhalation and coming to he knew to destroy her quickly and redeem himself, knowing her lack of strength, her brittle grip, all easily breakable; the tremble in her legs pushing against a soft mattress and the pain buried in her.

Instead, gazing at her effort, her turbid understanding of loneliness, he, seeing the baldness of her vulnerability, gripped the sheets, curled his toes in on a rolling meditation, the lights behind his eyes rising, subtle swells of color and pattern, and, deciding not to contribute more sorrow, relinquished himself to her suffering.