No saints seen or rumored, lost or with stolen hearts like us this Good Friday. We kiss fuck but she’s not satisfied till 2nd orgasm with razors for teeth drawing my blood in the dark and dripping on her cross.
Running from the cops I get away with nothing too high I fall twice. Jeans torn bloody at the knees that hurt for weeks for smoking weed in the park and holding half a hard-earned minimum wage C note of coke in my back pocket I’d just scored. Which was sure to make Olivia spread her legs further or so she’d promised. I couldn’t/wouldn’t throw that chance away. Running blind instead fell, fucked my knees bad on concrete stairs that for years on rainy days I could still feel. A whistle in the bones yet a half smile at Olivia letting me have her near the baseball field and still moaned pretty when I couldn’t find her clit after beer and lines days later. I can taste the sweat now as I ran fear and adrenaline and equal parts of lust limping me past reach of police lights and the law.
I was surprised there were no piercings or tattoos, needle marks, or tiny razor blade cuts. Not even stitches or old wounds from a surgeon or deranged lover.
She looked surprisingly normal. Her poems and letters had been exquisite diaries of deviance with sex a device to buy crystal meth.
A home broken by two absentee drunks for parents and a brother who’d touched her over her pajamas when he thought she was asleep.
Her letters and a phone call had told me all this… I expected a cross between Courtney Love and the Marquis De Sade.
But it was all imagination, she’d tell me later. She thought as a writer I’d appreciate that. I have to say it was a bit of a letdown.
So was the sex. We had both drunk too much. I had problems with the condoms. Fuck it she said. We lay there and smoked, conjuring large, while clouds that were perfect. At least something was.
Blood moon thinking of the gun her ex-boyfriend bought her.
Driving all night at speeds to make suicides laugh one last time.
Give me again the stars that filled your eyes when we first exchanged words and called them ours stolen by dreams of terrorists.
Further removed inside my arms between the gunfire.
Wanting to leave this city this decayed monument to vanquished hallucination and war. It’s broken screams equal parts clandestine passion and our dying rage.
I blink and snowflake on her tongue vanishes.
Gas rations shivering in winter only the cigarette burns
Rp Verlaine, a retired English teacher living in NYC, has an MFA in creative writing from City College. He has several collections of poetry including Femme Fatales Movie Starlets & Rockers (2018) and Lies From The Autobiography 1-3 (2018-2020). Rp’s work has been featured in Punk Noir, Ygdrasil, and Runcible Spoon.
