Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

I have been in this asylum for so long that its corridors have become my arteries and its rooms my veins. I really feel more than a little lost, and my gums are covered with a grainy film. I don’t know why I stopped here.

I don’t know why I was stopped here.

Why I got so used to this thing I became.
I became this thing because I was used, why?

Paint.

It glosses in crooked layers upon the old school steel chair at my back and it begs to fall in clumps from the walls of this stoic hall as I sit. Go ahead fold room, surge in if it is your fuckin’ will. No, it’s just colour and nothing more… but then, its tint hums and it sparks and I reach for invisible things.

What was in that cocktail that you mixed with your thumb as you passed it on to me? Your kiss upon lips whose callouses warn aginst your whisper.
I laugh and I swallow and I taste something I ate from you yesterday.

My glass glints, so smug as it offers your depravity up and spills it down and over my hunched and blistered flesh. I want to breathe but there is only but dust, the ruin of woody things that once were.

Remember trees? They were huge browny greeny yellowly creatures made of books.
Roots remember things because they are always digging into the past.

I rub my sin into the mound and I wonder why I love your laugh. It’s a bit raspy, maybe that’s the hook? But there must be more than that, or maybe I just listen to simple things.

I know it’s not me and I know you give it no mind but what is this thing that prods you to rapture? The planet is ceasing. The planet is nothing more than a sand-strewn canvas and just look at our finger jabbed art. Watch how very soon all trace of us will disappear as the page it is turned.
You think I flood myself with fashion but I’m only swimming to find the thinnest of lingerie. You stole in the night and wear all that I was. You took me away from the dribbles that stream at my thigh.

I ram oily rags and used pads into my pillow and I sleep upon the smell of my very best blood. But in the morning I awake and I find my crooked self naked and tonguing the floor and oh how I know I am real.

I drink milk alone on my kitchen floor and I talk to the cold, cold tiles as they bite and play with the pores of my lazy ass. And I sing exactly like Chris Cornell.

Sometimes when I stagger I reach out and grasp at things that are not there. Not you but sometimes your clothes, that jacket that both you and I wore.

I think I belong here but that you do not.

I will paint my thick lips purple and rake scars across of my face, I will put out my eyes to escape you.

I immersed in a surge that is pushing me on. A current that pulls me gently away from the rock upon which you stand.
My tongue in your mouth meant nothing more than beats in a second. We have been together far, far too long.

I know of a place, an island on a distant planet I saw for sale on the screen. It has three houses and a jetty and paths and tall trees and it is drenched in places upon which you can press my body.

We are so slow as we move. I don’t think I’ll be able to hear you there.

And time ebbs and it pulls and plastic bottles and fantastical sea creatures dance and they dance again and they die. And, still I am here.

This planet is exceptional… for who else would have gathered in my ruined self? But as my body lays erect and obscene on the sandbank and the acid tide breaks and eats at the shells… I think maybe I need a grappa.