#liths

Oh fuck. Here I am again. Always finding myself in these same situations. Dragging my feet through the mud again. Entirely plausible but impossible to wriggle my way out of. Its not discomfort this time, thankfully. More so agitation, desperation. Picking at the lock like jesus. Im at the confessional again, the priest breathing too heavy like a dog. I fucking did it again - we both know it. Id lost so much blood I was seeing God on the walls of the bathroom stall. Theres no country left for old men and here i am getting old before my time. My whole stomach is just a stone, squeezing out blood like fucking Heidi back in Deutschland. Take me home, Himmler. Black carriage and hat like im fighting for my rights. JFKs funeral playing through my head while I wait for the bus. Ive done it again, he did it again. Vinnie really got me good this time. Split my lip open like the sky in May. Split me open like a briefcase. Present me to the Court, Attourney Ratt(k)ing. State your case. Defend yourself. Plead to the judge and jurer as equals while I bleed out in the stands. Holding a marbled red white crumpled torn tissue (leviticus) to my nose outside the heavy wooden doors of you. This is not a bad place. Not necessarily. I have blue backlight to my left watching me walk like some kind of 1984 big brother angel in a thai boxing club. You were always watching through the backlight - where I couldnt see you. Capatalise me, facisize me, socialize your earnings to your own state. Count your money, Vinnie, with your boot in my face. I dare you. The trial continues tomorrow - a verdict expected. How did I get here again? I dont know. But Id end up here anyway, eventually. Im still washing the blood from the sink. This time I dont see you in the mirror. Either of us actually. Where have you taken us Vinnie? The Old Man is calling us to the stand.

Billy was always taking photos. Honestly though, always. I think that was my favorite thing about Billy - she had this old film camera right, an old kodak, and she would have these sleepovers with us. Her, me and her little sister. She'd have these sleepovers, and it was just so comfortable ya know? We could do anything. Billy was always fucking around with something occupying because of her little disorder (she made it up but it still made sense - psychoattentive defecite disorder or something), reading a book or fucking around with her camera, and her little sister would be there spewin speeches - i told you about those remember? She always liked to write the ones about God and all that around 2 am, when the sky was all deep purple, and it was spring at that point so the air was always very dewey, and Billys little sister used to get all these pretty little droplets on her forehead while she talked about Moses, low angle on a silver fence on her front deck, dark roof and that purple sky like a halo. Billys little sister was god in those misty mornings i swear, the little fucker made those mornings. But Billys sleepovers were comfort, you know. Sometimes we just didnt speak, save for Billys little sister preaching by the sofa, but we didnt speak. Tshirts and no pants and bare walls ya know. We were just living. Platos humans in the flesh on the brink of philosophy in Billys lounge in the semi dark of November. Dim greens and yellows and black leather couches. I think my favorite thing was that Billy was always taking photos - i could be doing anything ya know, reading a book or something, just fuckin around, and Billy would pull out this camera. Sometimes she would stage them, never fully, but little things. Telling me to shuffle to the right a bit (i was always to left wing) arch my leg pull my shirt up a little. And boom, she'd create these photos. They werent hypersexualised childporn or anything vulgar, but they were just raw and open, a young girl with no pants gives Billys favorite (dead stare) into an old kodak film camera in a dimly lit and sparesely decorated suburban living room in the middle of a socioeconomic revolution. They just looked good. Billys photos belonged in a gallery, or a book you stumble upon by accident, one that doesnt make you feel nostalgia or anger or sexy or anything, just one that makes you wonder. A subconcious confusion. An "i wish i was there". The best ones were the candid ones though. When we were just fucking around and Billy would catch the dead stare all exposed and emotive and just there. Our feelings on a grimy film strip at 3 in the morning. "Bug" she would call. And bang, flash bulb angel on an analog clock and i was there, forever immortalised in a yellow strip. I was a teenager. I was alive. I think i miss that the most about Billy, she took the candid shots with her. I miss having someone capturing me, immortalising my youth. Whos gonna keep young-Bug alive now? Whos gonna take the photos? No-one. Young Bug is dead, Billy is too.

I remember albeit a bit hazily the day I realised that Vinnie was old. I remember we were driving, his dads pontiac had a scar like the grand canyon on its left flank. A mad jaw of a thing. A baby pink ravine a used to bend over and kiss before i jumped in the car. Hair falling round my face and the sun beating down on my back as i paid my dues. We were driving upstate - what difference does it make really. We were driving all the same. It was summer and Vinnie kept rubbing his buzzcut, it was a nervous habit for both of us, but Vinnie had it worse. It was always too long - life was too long for Vinnie. He started talking about the sumners he spent in North Dakota, and how the Golden Gate reminded him of his Grandad, and how the way the sun hit the dashboard snaked its way under his glasses and bugged the hell out of him. Paying a buck for a tint that wouldnt stop the shine. At least he looked good. Crumpled flag on the backseat screaming "Dont tread on me!" As the rattlesnake hums. Vinnie talked about how there was too many chiefs. Big men on big horses fall harder on weak ankles. Vinnies achilles heel was still yet to reveal itself to me. Rolling down my window on the state 1 and hes sighing, hand at the nape of his neck and grazing his thumb along the tendon like a surgeon. Blackwater operative in the snakepit. He was digging through my head in the rearview again. Neutral ground on interstate 4. Hallowed petrolhead at dusk on the freeway. Hitting the plains at four am and the only buzzcut he was gripping was mine. Head over a gas station sink and he had the razor. Blood on my shirt collar - i didnt mind. Vinnie talked about indians the whole way. The men without the safety nets, the back up planless heroes on unshoed horses. Blue dawn and scalps and the land heaving beneath them. Home. Vinnie always had a back up plan. Vinnie learnt from the mistakes of others. Picking up the broken pieces of every great melting icecap of a human you ever read about in the newspaper, sneaking a glance over your daddys shoulder, you were only four. Vinnie made his own puzzle, there arent too many chiefs left now. I watched him plow the fields of his skull with a razor at 0600 hours while the sun rose up through the barred window, illuminating dirty tiles and pipes and a grimy toilet seat in our cramped gas station fort knox that was beginning to feel like home. Every one was the same. It was too hot that sumner, Vinnie wanted to be the only chief left standing. We left the pontiac about a mile into the rolling sheet of the first of Vinnie's great plains. He picked me a nettle and told me to walk, tea brown tint making the world shake in my nausea filled hyper realistic kaleidescope festival film. We walked on.

"Here I am, in the middle of my own Great Plain. Whatever I had I can leave behind - whatever I may have can stay a maybe. The road is like treacle under me, cold treacle, like my bathroom tiles at 3 am when you didnt come and you didnt tell me it was gonna be okay and I had to hold my own hair back while I turned myself inside out trying to find the thorn in my side. The sky mirrors it, its own ride. Endless black dawn like a bruise I wish I had. My mother always told me to leave things exactly as I found them. So here I am,  Again. Leaving the world as I found it - unchanged by my existance. For too many years the rolling sands have beaten the cliffs, beaten the cliffs for so long that they no longer turn to the singing of the tide. Catch my tune as I fall, will you. One last memory. I am not afraid, I am not sad. I am not sorry. There is beauty in my insignificance. I am grateful. Let me go now, let me leave the road unchanged - unmarked. Do not let me linger to regret. I will not think of you, or how my actions may effect yours. The ripple I start will fade long before the impact is noticed. Let me leave gracefully, gratefully. Let me fall - no, let me dive. Let me grasp the cusp of my infinity and the rough hewn hem of my insignificance in the same hand as i clutch my skirts and run for the river, the black river. The road has never stopped calling, I will not think of you. I am selfish, I am tiny, and I am alone. I have not left anything behind, find your solace in the fact that i have left no prints, no marks, no condensed breath on your windowpane. I did not matter, Im leaving, let me go. Im on the road, my Great Plain, my Wide Open Space. I am existing. Let me go."

I woke up on Billies couch in some kind of haze. My frontal lobe is telling me its purple but im sure it was more of a yellow, some kind of duck egg mustard that seeped through the joinery and made the walls swell like kinetic sand. Our little house of cards sagging at the rafters under the weight of all the bodies behind the plaster. I remember when the skin peeled back off my tongue and i scratched at it while all the skeletons crawled out of the closet, and danced with the elephants in the room, dancing the waltz on Billies old vinyl player, secondhand lp called 'Russian Fireworks' and ballet tunes. They were out of step but so were we and that was okay, and Billie kept talking about her dad, humming when she said his name. Every third word was a change in pitch as we hummed deeper. Frequencies sifting as we danced through layers of dirty carpet and fine sand and sea glass. All manner of beer bottles and broken memories of rowdy nights spent in some far off hell hole mafia pit on a Brooklyn pier. Sea glass tumbled so hard against the rock that it was smooth. And we were watching through sea glass as we sweated it out on Billies couch, rubbing our gums, sucking away at the blood in the cracks of our teeth like the indians did, like they did on the Plains. And every step was one great plain, one existence after another. Stepping up till we found him. Our own kaleidoscope on Billies couch and we itched.

But it was a Russian tounge that clicked in her mouth and spat meadows made of smoke that i just wanted to sink in, endless hazes of dawn pinks and humanity and a writhing midnight sky, and she was midnight blue, with an almost clear skin of cloud that twisted like a drop of paint in the water, a flaw in the pristine surface of her, just her, a beautiful flaw, like the drooping eyes of a bloodhound, or an ant in the sugar bowl, but a flaw nonetheless. She tick tocked her way through life on a loose schedule, clocking in and out whenever she pleased, caring none for guilt nor consequence nor me or him or anyone, old bus tickets and gum wrappers telling stories in her pockets and getting old, several bobby pins down the crack of her handbag that she just couldnt get to no matter how far she stretched those daisy little fingers with the long nails that tapped their way up walls and on books and legs and windows and doors, six hundred and fourty nine seconds she stood in the middle of the desert contemplating the idea of giving back to the dying land, i know because i counted, but we knew it wasnt really dying at all and saw through its ruse and saw through her razor blade and walked on. On and on through phantom fields of potatos and corn and cotton and other cash crops sewn by the black man with the scars on his back kinda like the ones on her legs and he used to sing gospel songs! And hell did she love gospel songs, she would clap along with those hands previously described like they were swans and no-one was watching. Hell we walked for hours, i had blisters and i think she did too but she was stubborn and determined and a little hot headed and if she did she didnt say anything just kept on walking through the night like a deer that wasnt quite stuck in the headlights, just a little curious as to what lay behind them.

I feel like im grabbing at loose threads here, grabbing at some kind of fast car that i could just leap into, and drive off into whatever kind of blue dawn future is waiting for me. But shes there ya know, in the drivers seat. As usual. Shes got her two lives in the backseat. Mascara from three years ago in the glovebox and an old ticket - this wasnt her first offence. I dont wanna watch her anymore. There was this kind of heavy feeling that day, a rattling dry cough heat that was keeping my ribs tight, ya know, pulling my stomach down my spine and making my skin stick to the seat. But she didnt open the window - she never wanted to open a fucking window. Her hands gripped the wheel like an L-plater. White knuckles on plastic wood, plastic beach sunshine while she sweated it out next to me. Gridlock traffic and she was stuck and she knew it, this time at least - she knew. She kept flexing her left hand. Tendons rolling like summer underneath her skin. Patchy foundation - stress eczema wreaking havoc like a forest fire. I could see her thinking. I could see every little nervous fucking jaw clench as she debated with herself. Weighing up her options like Osiris, weighing on her little valentine scale with the rust on the bottom. I wanted to get out. I couldnt fucking breathe in there, ya know. Her jaw tightens, she looks at me in the rearview. I dont know how she does it, she knows when i get scared. I tell ya i wanted to run, i wanted to jump out that fucking car and barrel roll my way into the gypsy tattoo sunset redline ocean beside us like HELL. But i was already drowning. Oh boy those placid blue eyes pulled me under in the rearview in a sweet sweet honeysuckle fairylight riptide and just kept pulling, i wasnt fucking lost - i knew exactly where i was in her. I wanted to get out like mad and she knew it. But hell i couldnt go, you know how it feels. I just couldnt leave that goddamn car. She checks her makeup in the visor mirror, flipping her hair like NASA was watching in that car shadow sunset, smirking. The seatbelt got tighter, she looked away. The traffic inched forward a little. Her shoulders rolled. The leopard woman flexed her foot on the gas, she wanted to floor it. Whether it was to drive us over the edge or drive us to safety i couldnt tell but she wanted to go. everything about her was white, she gripped the wheel she gripped the seat she gripped the image of the neo begginning first time purity ring super charged bright light fantasy she saw through the blur of the traffic. But there she goes again, he's texted her - i can tell. She thinks i dont know, i wish i didnt. I can see the clouds in the distance, swollen with something - maybe rain, maybe some kind of holy fishbone baptism. The radio statics its way through a 90's mix, her antenna was always broken. "We've been waiting for this storm to break for a while now Folks!" The fuckboy snickers. "Watch her spill her hell today, i wouldnt wanna be caught in that!". Neither would I - little princess doesnt either - she doesnt want her mask to slip. When you start thinking about the beginning - it means its the end. Her face refracts in the wing mirror. Little mitosis glory baby in two mirrors. Two sets of he(ll)eaven in a silver frame. Two girls. I dont know if i like either.