11187 visits since 03/07/01 -=Mail/MSN=- sprained_soul@hotmail.com -=Featured Link=- Listening to 11.975hz - The official webcomic of #a!. 09/30/06 Cocktail Time Kill. 12/11/03 Conveyerbelt dreamscape. 09/24/03 Studded leather Envy. 06/26/03 Your very own anything. 02/11/03 I am part Hamlet, part eunuch. 11/17/02 I liked you better when I didn't know you. 10/13/02 No one likes you and you're going to lose. 09/13/02 I'd sell my soul for a Klondike Bar. 09/12/02 From lonely to only. 06/14/02 Spoonfulls of sidewalk wisdom. 05/11/02 Spontaneous human combustion on a bus. 03/24/02 We are all there is now. 03/18/02 Know what I'm talking about? 03/11/02 I wonder what it's like to be dead. 03/07/02 Lights off, Insanity on.			Your very own anything I can hear him grind deep inside of her, despite the protest of the soiled,decade old mattress springs. I usually bring a book with me to the stone and plaster shoe box so I can escape,so I can ignore her business hours, so I can combat the car wreck, dead body compulsions. The humid nights have always been the worst because I have to lay down in stale puddles of patronage and parry away wafts of business day left-overs. She's stopped grunting and I hear a fly zip - Now serving number two-thirteen. "Who's got two-thirteen?" Summer in the sprawl is the apex of natural selection for us as a species, burning brick wall sweat, lead pipes belching out steam and prison yard eyes on everyone you see. Me and her, we're broken people locked in wished away days,bound to dead end broken promise nights, trapped in the "living up to".Our partner in crime is our smoldering city, a thrashing and ugly crisis that bespeaks changes that will never come. She finds all she needs from it, me, I just try to find anything. Number two-thirteen puts down his briefcase and loosens his tie, his dried salt skin droops heavily around his eyes as they light up and he half shuffles, half runs over to the door frame where he pensively rummages in his pockets. Number two-twelve swings wide the door, baring a sweat covered politician smile and a peek into our room, the place where tortured and decaying dreams lay down to die. Two-thirteen deftly slithers through the crack and locks it in one time-honed motion while his predecessor ambles over to me and throws down a pile of moist and steaming bills. He offers me a "Sure is a hot one, I tell you what" and wanders back out onto the claustrophobic, sticky summer streets. The springs recommence their protests and are joined by rhythmic, muffled screams. My memories are coated in echoes of swing jazz, for ever dead end alley I walk down there is a mournful and forgotten horn, piano or slurred voice to herald me on your way. We met when we were young, she fucked men while I waited diligently in the car and hummed Frank Sinatra. I remember screaming Dean Martin while I rocked back and forth, transfixed by death scented hospital walls as state-approved men killed the last bit of life left in her. Bobby Darin gave me words to tell her, ours is a love greater than the world has ever known. We dance around this routine every week and speak about it as with the frequency of an eclipse. We passively sift through motions with unconventionality, it's dirty and sloppy and covered with brown spots because it's real, real like addiction and heart attacks, realer than reality TV, real like rent payments. Trying to change the way someone is about as pointless as standing ankle-deep in a puddle while holding and umbrella, so I've never asked her to stop, but she's never asked me why I haven't asked her to stop. We are a knowing glance in a bar full of monsters. There was a climax, a cacophonic wail ringing of finality and another fly zipped up. Without so much as wipe of his brow, he's out the door with a "She could make a dead man come" as his money floated to the ground - I lock the door behind him. Sliding into bed with her already asleep, my arm goes around her and she curls in tight while I stare at the ceiling. It's half water damage, half smoke stain and all ugly, but it's it's full of stars sometimes, when you look close enough. Just like I thought, I'm laying in dead men's sweat but she's smiling, deep inside a dream of things I could never understand. The sprawl bends and breathes and the humidity settles in, sticking to the side of secret keeping buildings and lost yellow cabs, and I try to smile too because I've found my anything. The methods and rules you set up within your life, your mental boundaries and romantic conscience were driven into the ground of your life through experience and impression. "I will not fall in love with this person because it will only destroy me" is an assassination plot, a secret grab at self-empowerment through anti-action instead conscious effort. You skirt around the edges of the flame because it burns the naked flesh, not knowing the flesh isn't to be saved, your viciously protected tenderness is meant to be squandered. It's not sacrifice, it's not masochism, it's purification. This is me, this is love, this is life. Heat defines passion. Real passion is as good as real love, even if it doesn't quench the soul. Us, we're as passionate as a hate crime, we are a manslaughter charge, we are what brings god to his knees. It's going to be a long, hot summer.