I'm talking machine shop love, splintered barber pole love, binging on cold sausage grease love. Love the color of a skeleton's kiss. Love as sharp as buttermilk served freezing cold from an old nippled beer bottle. Love pure. Love sweet as gum licked off the bottom of the theater seat. Love filling your head like cigar smoke from the nostrils of faeries. Love to make Kafka wet himself in the middle of a dream soon to be forgotten forever. I fell in love, hard like old nuns, sturdy as the gold standard used to be, drinking down thick black coffee in the rectory, cup after syrupy smoldering cup. Love like sneaking into a burned out movie house and finding a nickel and a melted pack of licorice Nibs behind the charred counter. Love that squeals in your brain like the crab racing from the boiling pot at the last possible moment. Love so strong I gripped the armrest tight, twisted my wrist and felt old wood snapping off, love that got me down on my knees in the aisle on rotten stinking carpet, love that burst me into weeping and made me curse and worship the cloudy flickering gods lit up on that tattered gray screen, love to make soup in your brain so hardy and heavy and bloody that a full-grown man could roller skate on it noon until night. Love they don't even try to describe using words, love they just cry about at the very thought of, while praying that the loving and the crying never end.
Then I noticed it was just a bug on my glasses.
published in 1991 by Anaconda Press ("Snakeskin") in a very different form.
Damn bug anyway, because that was some love. And I can still smell that burned out movie house.
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