Sex Me Moon

by Joseph E. O’Leary

                                                            1

            “I don’t know,” she said, feeling the crumpled walls with her callused fingers. “What other option do I have?”

            I lit a cigarette in the dark, just to see the match flare up. I was rolling my eyes around, knowing she wasn’t quick enough to catch them. Euphoric moonlight came in, masked by dusty venetian blinds. The whole room was swimming in it. The Nameless Cat had poked her head in several times just to see if anything had changed. It hadn’t.

            “Four hours on a bus, thirty minutes in a taxi, and for what? To hopefully - to make a mission out of my life? For what again? Who-”

            I knew her eyes were on the ashtray. I wanted to pretend I was asleep, but couldn’t bear to part with the cigarette. I could not oblige, this time.

            “And then what?” Almost tears, almost like fluorescent lights themselves, constellations in her freckles, cheeks reflecting. I was hungry for a wan. I could smell the dingy sheets, all warm and cum and sex, tossed and wrinkled. Like a plasticbodegabag. A pack, Winston Box, ice cold beer. Que hora es? Quatro? Thirty? Hey buddy I know you have the time, could you throw a little my way, spot me a blunt and I’ll buy you two tomorrow, you know I’m good for it, papito...

            “What do you think?”

            “I do think. My thoughts are formless and void, earth before man, universe before god, without substance, streamlined, amorphous.”

            A moment of silence. She wanted one too, I could tell. The way her lips mocked her shaking fingers. Suspicious eyes on the ashtray. Butts piled up in nearly-finished forty bottles. The clean air.

            “I think my hands are pretty. A bit small, though.”

            When?

            “This will help. All I want is to be free,” she said, soundwaves in air, outside the open window traveled, ghostly...

                                                            2

            Vices averse to helping solve the inner complexities that abound inside these tortured weeks. My soul shines in its new charge. It’s the factor of the virgin, fresh off another molt, so sensitive to the environment, overwhelmed, and fragile, so in a hurry to thicken and become productive. The newborn’s found self, expressing in the throat what cannot be said, as of yet.

            I’m stuck on these streets, an umbilical cord from my soul to the dizzy street-lights of Broadway and 96th street, so many experiences, memories, moments gone, to be replaced by the broad silence cloaking my inner joy, my shades drawn, expanding my physical body into the space around it.

            To cut or not to cut?

            The dreams bind the tie, the connection: so natural, circulatory, keeping the moist underside as fragile and as eager as it would be. To sever raw, would be to cry, and bleed, and be exposed, to callous your mind and your hands in layers of hourless burdens, tough it out, mind your manners, work it... work it out. The last hope for those with the patience to dig to the very bottom.

            I confess, I confess. I’m cut and scarred and completely blank to the sky above, its patient stars waiting for me on the other side, after the yearly cycle turns again, the weather comes and goes and comes and goes. My keys, my scars, the blood in my head and the head in my heart, my fists pulled tightly parallel to my waist, shining like the eyes of the goddess and kneeling in the dirt of this fine planet...

                                                                        3

            Two red dots in inverted sunshine...

            I AM INTO THIS

            I’ve walked away and it’s gone and over and it’s gone and over and out and now I’m here alone and can’t even muster up the three dollars it would take to remove me from the hollow essence of a dead neighborhood and the weak, spineless, of the ones that remained. Oh, shit.

            Has it really come to this? What have I done?

            Where is she?

                                                            4

            It’s three a.m. and the woman is thinking about how it’s more or less certain that the president is asleep. She’s sure- even though she’s in New York City and he’s in Washington (this would be Bill Clinton, Friday morning, Jan 28, 2000) and she’s never met him and probably never will- that’s he’s probably sound asleep. She’s outside, walking down Broadway- and what a windtunnel Broadway is in the winter if the wind has push to it at all- and she’s seen the debates and she’s heard the news and she’s wondered why she’d never be president and has decided that it’s a result of her sleeping schedule. She’d never be able to switch to a 9-5 M-F schedule at this point (look she thinks its three), maybe for a job as important as PRESIDENT but certainly not if you’re talking Primary Season- she’d never be able to conger up the motivation. Why? she’d ask her bleary-eyed campaigners over late night sessions and coffee and Dunkin Donuts and bonghits...

            Why? Why do you want a president to keep a 9-5 schedule? Why do you want your president to be sleeping at night? Wouldn’t you want your president to be awake and ready when there’s someone cold and (heartbroken), and almost hysteric, alone in the middle of the night? Hysteric alone crying afraid?

            She is afraid. The fear is different at night, you know, she thinks. This kind of situation does not occur in the daytime. The circumstances prohibit it. They don’t favor it. Knowing everyone- even your president- is sleeping? The fear is different at night. He’s asleep (why did he hurt me? why is he afraid? am I in denial? what is my Choice? why couldn’t he just be ready, why’d he have to leave me here, so alone, at night?).

            He actually isn’t asleep, he’s awake and thinking of her, but there’s no way she can know this.

            She thinks: when everyone is sleeping. There isn’t even anyone else on Broadway to bother her. But the buildings sag down and lean on her, like the moon, and the shadows don’t jump but SPREAD and nothing is hiding in the shadows but the SHADOWS THEMSELVES ARE HIDING- and the cold  gradually

            pushed hard enough and

            seeps in and numbs her extended fingers

                        foolishly trying to

                  grip

                     a cigarette...

            Hysterical. Alone. Crying.

                                                            5

            Once again, the mirror stares back at me, he thinks. Always a sincere boot kicking my ass to feel. But whose boot? Mine? Hers? But the question is part of the answer. He thinks: I am into this.

            At the same time he’s thinking this, waiting for her to settle her shit, she’s waiting for HIM to settle HIS shit. What created his foul mood the past week. The paranoia... arrgh... always the paranoia does him in and he knows this and he’s trying to work on this... jealousy, anger, impatience...

            The moral compass, always points north. Always shows the way. Stealing the headline glory off the front page of the newspaper, a constant in the ongoing battle between sponge and faucet. Always in debt, always a friend indeed. Always the random end of the page filler.