i want to stab myself with a fork so that it'll hurt and it'll leave a mark, so that it'll remind me not to be so stupid again.

so i mixed the tablets like it said to do on the website and washed half of it down with water, and it didn't seem right. so for the remainder i used chivas instead and i knew somehow that that was correct.

and ten minutes later, my throat goes dry and there's this acrid taste of sulphur at the back of it and i have to keep swallowing or i will dry up, dry out, just fucking DIE because it grinds like sand and it smells like rotorua and this is what hell is like, this it what the wind in hell smells of, this is what the air in hell tastes of.

in the distance, there's this pain in my gut. something tells me it hurts. it actually hurts bad, but i push the thought away. it's annoying. like a fly.

i stare at my laptop screen as the windows media player plays, and it's so utterly lovingly fascinating. cominatcha, the swirling colors declare themselves, and i agree. the words that leak out of the speakers roar like the sea. i can't see the sun anymore, but i don't mind, you're by my side, and i feel fine. i use the words like a blanket and lie in them. they're warm and comforting. i mouth the lyrics to myself. butterflies in my head, dead moths that leave my (sulphur) stinking mouth.

when it was over, i needed to pee and i needed a drink. or two. maybe more. my stomach creaks and knots itself over and over again. i'm hungry and have to search the kitchen for food. i want to puke but nothing comes up but stringy spit. i look at it stretch and plop into the toilet bowl and immediately feel like puking again.

there's a place I used to go
there's a world I used to know
there was a light and it was you
every word I say is true
I say -

every day I will wait - till youre mine again
I will die every day - till youre mine again
theres no words to explain - no beginning and no end
I will dream, I will pray - youll be mine again

I can see you dressed in red
all the secret things you said
lying barefoot in the grass
now my heart is in your hands
your hands -

every day I will wait - till youre mine again
I will die every day - till youre mine again
theres no words to explain - no beginning and no end
I will dream, I will pray - youll be mine again

it's just time that runs between us
it's the ocean underneath us
it's the picture that won't fade away

every day I will wait - youll be mine again
brings me close to the day - youll be mine again
theres no words to explain - no beginning and no end
I will dream, I will pray - youll be mine again

I feel my wings have broken in your hands
I feel the words unspoken inside

When they pull you under
And I would give you anything you want
Well all I wanted
All my dreams have fallen down
Crawling around somebody save me
And two warm hands break right through me
Somebody save me
I don't care how you do it
Just stay
Stay
Come on
I've been waiting for you

I see the world has folded in your heart
I feel the waves crash down inside

And they pull me under
I would give you anything you want
Well all I wanted
And all my dreams have fallen down
Crawling around somebody save me
And two warm hands break right through me
Somebody save me
I don't care how you do it
Just stay
Stay
Come on
I've been waiting for you

And all my dreams are on the ground

Crawling around somebody save me
And two warm hands break right through me
Somebody save me
I don't care how you do it
Just save me

I've made this whole world shine for
Just stay
Stay
Come on
I'm still waiting for you

if i asked you, would you still say yes?

Cray was the leader of our little gang. Cray was two years older than all of us and was already wearing glasses. And he was our friend. We hung out at the nearby playground after school and skated and pooled our money to buy chocolate ice cream floats from the diner. We held up twigs in our mouth and cupped a hand over it pretending we were smoking cigarettes. Once, a concerned mother marched up and shouted at us for being delinquents. Cray stood up and threw the branch in his hand away. He looked the angry woman in the eye and scrunched up his face.

‘FUCK!’ he said.

Spittle flew from his lips and a small gob landed on her dress with a tiny plop. It blossomed there like a flower. We held our breath. Cray stood there purple in the face, heaving like a bull. The woman opened her mouth, snapped it shut and walked away.

We didn’t know what ‘fuck’ meant. We asked Cray later on, and he told us that ‘fuck’ was a short form for ‘fucking’, who was a grown up who did something with his bellybutton and wee-wee, to make children. When you parents want a kid, they talk to this guy and he does the thing with his bellybutton and wee wee and makes a kid for them. But he urged us not to ask our parents about it because it was supposed to be a secret. ‘Fucking hell’ therefore, was when you spent eternity with this man.

Gross.

After that incident, Cray became the stuff of legend. No one had ever stood up to a grown up. He was a hero among the kids. In class, they whispered and pointed at us and told each other of the amazing bravery of Cray’s Gang. We let them talk, occasionally fuelling it when the furor seemed to be dying down, adding little details when it suited us. The woman punched Timmy in the head but he got right up and punched her back. She pulled an evil sword from behind her waist and it cried with the gabazillion souls it had consumed. She swung it and it howled and it would have taken Greg’s head off had he not ducked. We fought the mighty witch from noon to night with sticks and stones but we were fast tiring. But she was defeated when little Johnnie picked up the last rock and threw it and it hit her right in the eye. She screamed and turned into a bat but Cray shouted a spell and she flew away. Johnnie still has the rock. He carries it with him in case she comes back. Witch’s Bane, he calls it. If you’re nice and you ask politely maybe he’ll show it to you.
After that, none of the bullies dared to touch us. Some even declared us their friends. We smiled and said nothing (I guess little kids know discretion) and swaggered around like we owned the neighborhood. To a ten year old, this was amazing street cred.

The problem with Cray wasn’t his energy or his attention span. It was his intelligence. He always had these Super Duper ideas that he’d think of after watching something on the TV.

‘Hey, let’s build a hang glider!’

‘Fellas, I saw this guy put rockets on his bicycle. Wanna try it?’

‘If I put the hang glider on the rocket bike, do you think I can fly?’

Cray was magnanimous.

He had the grand ideas, but we were his Super Duper friends, and he’d let us be part of it. Cray’s Super Duper Team. He would paint beautiful dreams for us and we would nod our heads, high-five and say yes. After Timmy broke his arm and fractured his leg while trying to fly the rocket bike off his parent’s roof, we were a bit more apprehensive though. but there was nothing Cray couldn’t do. When he couldn’t cajole us into helping, he would sulk and make us feel sorry. And when that didn’t work, he would bribe us with money or candy bars. Money could be saved to buy ice cream floats. Candy bars were heaven, and that way, he had us. We built robots from soup cans, and spent hours scratching the heads off matchsticks and pounding them into fine powder with a stone. We used the match powder to make a huge firecracker that didn’t work when we lit the fuse, but worked when Johnnie walked over to check it, burning off both of his eyebrows.

Then one day, he said, ‘Hey, wanna build an electromagnet? I saw it on the Discovery channel.’

That didn’t sound too bad.

But Cray didn’t want to make a magnet to pick up metal filings or needles. He wanted to build an electromagnet to move cars. He wanted to turn on his magnet and WHAM, a plane would come tumbling out of the sky and clang resoundingly on his magnet. People would come out and say ‘Oh wow, how did he build that? Oh my god, and he’s only a kid!’

‘Nobody has ever built a magnet that powerful before. How did he do it? This boy is a genius!'

And Cray would just stand there and smile, and let them take photos with him. The Next Einstein, they would call him, and he would get the Nobel Prize and marry the pretty girl in class and have many dogs. No babies. Babies were icky.

Super Cray’s Super Duper Magnet. How awesome was that? Ka-pow!

We all trooped down to his house with dreams of selling our invention to the army and crushing tanks and fighter jets and whatnot and jumped on his bed and played with Bellman, his cat as he scrounged around for the necessary parts to his Super Duper Magnet. When he returned, he dragged along an old iron, a pair of kitchen scissors, a penknife and a nail he had found in his father’s toolbox. We sat down and he told us that we could magnetize the nail by stroking it with a magnet, but that would be too weak to bring down airplanes. He saw on the telly that the way to make a more powerful electromagnet was to wrap the nail in wire and connect both ends of the wire to a battery. Cray’s plan was grander though. We used the scissors to cut the cable and the plug off the iron and carefully stripped a large length of the wires bare. Greg was the neatest of us all and so he was chosen to be the one to wrap the wire around the nail. When he was done, Cray, grinning, took the weird mating of nail, wire and plug and plugged it in. The rest of us ran outside to watch out for the falling airplanes and cars.

Well, we didn’t get any Super Duper Car Moving but there was a Super Duper Explosion.

i like girls' bedrooms. they're intoxicating. always sweet-smelling and soft and clean. and they're always so.
bright.
even when they are empty they always seem filled. they're like extensions. they're not there, just so she has a place to sleep in when she's not out, a table to sit at, a window to look out of.

i am a toilet roll

you never could write better than i do, but
then again, not many people could,
(and it never was an issue, at least not for me anyway).
until i asked, what happened, curious like a cat, and you told me.
and for all my words, i didn't know what
to say.

i couldn't tell you that it was going to be ok,
because it really wasn't, and it was fucking cliche.
or that i understand,
that i know what he meant.
i couldn't tell you if there's anything i can do for you,
i would do, because that wouldn't be true.
or that he would have wanted to be strong,
not grieving the way you are, for as long
as you decide it.
i didn't want to tell you what i didn't know,
because, for god's sake, i know you have enough of those.

i didn't know him
(and i wouldn't be so arrogant to think that i did),
and never will, and so i said something stupid and wished you well
while your eyes and everything else told me more
than any words would tell me how you feel.
i made up my mind then, and so when it is all over
(but who am i trying to kid, it will never be over)
when we talk and laugh and smoke and eat and whatever that we do,
when you sit beside me like you did last night
at least for those hours with me, you wouldn't remember.

while i hope you heal, the way things like this never seem to do
and see the way you smile like a fish, the way you used to.

i wish i could say i would have wrote this for him,
but that would be a lie.
i wrote this for you, and you know it as well as i.

my imaginary one armed, one eyed, club footed midget friend with scoliosis can play better soccer than patrice evra.

and golden point sucks. there's no email submission option? wtf? are they still using type writers and model t fords or something.

Three years back, when we first started out, I never thought this was what it would be like.
We went to plays, we clubbed, he brought me to playgrounds to ride the swings and the see-saws. We sat in the dark and looked each other in the eyes. We were like kids; twenty three year old kids. We printed out fake name cards one year, and went down to the beer festival pretending to be pub and restaurant owners just so we could get a few free beers from the suppliers trying desperately to get their beers on tap somewhere. They were desperate for a reason. Their beers sucked. We drank and we ate, and we drank some more. After the festival, we drove up to a quiet place he knew near the river front. We crawled to the back of the car and talked and laughed and made stupid jokes. I was warm from the free beer and I could tell my cheeks were flushed. My words were butterflies in my head, giggling dead moths when they came out of mouth. I felt like I was in love with the world, everything in it. I waved at the other couples in their own cars, on the park benches, and they would take one look at me and duck away like frightened rabbits.
‘Funny bunny,’ I shouted at them, laughing. ‘Hunny bunny funny.’
‘I love you, J,’ he said, and kissed me on the nose. His face was pink. His breath smelled of stale ale and pork. He looked at me and declared.
‘I want to marry you.’
‘Mm.’ I giggled and kissed him back.
‘I want to marry you too.’
We were cuddling in the back of his car, a little Suzuki Swift, and I was wearing a short skirt that exposed a lot of my legs. I saw him gazing at them.
‘Where shall we get married?’ I asked him, watching him, loving him.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’
‘How about Paris?’
‘Cheesy.’
‘Pusan? I’ve always wanted to go to Pusan.’
He thought for a moment.
‘Hmm.’ He paused. ‘Let me think for a second.’
He was still staring at my legs. But at the same time he wasn’t. He was frowning that cute little frown of his that made his face, normally boyish to the point of being baby-like, age ten years. He was serious. About the marriage. About me. I wanted him.
‘Can you kiss me while you think?’ I asked, and leaned against him, pressing my chest against his arm.
‘That may interfere with the thought processes,’ He said softly. ‘Let’s see.’
And he leaned over and kissed me, one hand tilting my chin up to meet his. I love it when guys do that. Touching my face as we kiss. It seems some how, more. Intimate. His tongue flicked against mine and he reached up with his other hand. I took it and guided it to my breast. My heart was pumping away and I felt like I was sixteen again, like the time I went speeding down the highway at three in the morning in my mom’s car, with no other vehicles in sight. Three lanes wide and no one to stop you.
I wanted him so bad.
‘Mark?’
‘Yes.’
‘Make love to me? Do you want to?’
‘Yes,’ he said, a shadow in the dark. ‘I would like that.’
‘Now. Right here.’
‘Yes.’ I could see his eyes, wide in the dark, looking at me. They glinted in the street light.
“Oh, J,” he said, and when we met, I imagined a thousand cupids applauding somewhere after shooting our asses full of arrows.

It was at a small theater in Brooklyn, close to where I stayed. I was smoking a cigarette, walking back to my place when I saw it. The poster on the wall of the theater was grubby. Romeo and Juliet, it proclaimed, in bold Times New Roman. The matinee was today. Above, pink light flickered. THE GLOWING BELL. The double “L”s were smashed and dark. As I looked, the “-WING” behind GLO sputtered once like a death rattle and went to neon tube heaven. What kind of theater calls itself “The Glowing Bell”? I took one last drag from the cigarette. It was a spur of the moment thing. I took the money I had been thinking of using to buy a new pair of shoes and after a moment of hesitation, I stubbed out my cigarette on the sidewalk and entered the theater. The ticket lady was a fat, bored looking lump filing her nails with an emery board. I approached her and cleared my throat when she didn’t look up. “One ticket please.” Jabba the Hutt put down the board and pushed herself on her little roller chair over to the machine. She tapped stuff into it. The machine grumbled, spat out the ticket and she slapped it down on the counter, chair squeaking in abject pain. No words were spoken. I smoothed out my ball of crumpled notes as much as I could and passed it over the counter. “Packed house?” I asked, trying to break the silence. She looked up and stared at me like I was crazy. I let the excuse of a conversation die, took the ticket and walked in. It was dark and damp. I could smell mould. There were no ushers. I couldn’t tell what seat I was supposed to be on as I couldn’t read the smudgy font on the ticket. I grabbed a mid-row seat anyway, not that it mattered. The theater was nearly empty. There was a young couple snuggled near the back, moving shadows in the dark. The girl was on the guy’s lap making stifled moaning noises as they tried their best to have stealthy sex. They couldn’t have been more than sixteen. There was an old man on the left, head hanging back, sleeping. He was Jewish, that much was apparent by his beard, and reminded me uncomfortably of a long buried memory I couldn’t place. He looked dead. The lights dimmed further, stage lights went on, and that’s when it started.

i could fly,
oh yes, i could.
but i would rather
sleep instead.

Sex.

That’s what it’s like.

The way his fingers found their way around the keys, like lovers. There was a silence in the hall, a silence you never heard, will never hear again. A silence not made up of whirring minds counting off twenty four full bar rests, minds running through the next entry, minds tensing up for the conductor’s glance and baton twitch that will cue you in. a silence not made up of nicotine craving minds in the audience, impatience to give the flowers, for dinner, for the inevitable sleep when it was over and you got home. Just enraptured faces staring on, swallowing everything greedily, everything, everything in case you missed out on a single moment.

We watch like voyeurs, violinists and woodwinds and brass, all as part of the audience as the audience as he, with a name no one can pronounce, let alone remember, made love to the piano the way we could only dream about, making love to our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our spouses. It would haunt me forever, whenever I lie in the dark with a warm body next to mine, that it would never be as great, never be as good as all the porn in the world, which would never be as good as that nine minutes I still remember from six years ago when I saw an ugly, skinny man who could not speak a word of English spoke in the language of angels with his piano.

Love. I am in love with that man, and what he could do, what he had done in that single encore as the last note trailed away and everyone stared at him like he was god, a god who couldn't speak, a god whose name we don't know and never will, a god who stood up and strode off in the silence after that miracle.

there is something about school and you i can't fit together.

being extremely lucky and being too stupid to be bluffed is a winning combination in poker.

richard.

marcus.

so what's up? you doing ok?

you want to know if i'm getting any?

no i mean in the business. i read your screenplay. "screwed on" was it? i thought it was incredible. it was more than incredible actually, it was good. the critics loved it. especially the scene with the baby girl. i heard you wrote a sequel.

"screw off".

what?

"screw off". that's the name.

i see. to be honest, it seems like it went under without a ripple. i didn't even get a chance to look at it.

yeah, the producers of "Screw On" kept insisting i write another, considering the success of the first one. i was all against it actually, but i figured if i came up with a good story they would buy it.

and of course the pay was good.

yeah the pay was good. for the week or so when it was actually in my bank account.

so what happened?

well, it bombed. the mainstream producers thought it was boring, and the arthouse potheads got daunted by the size of it.

shows how much they know.

one firm took us up on it though. it didn't open well and they yanked the cord after two weeks or so. honestly it wasn't that good anyway.

what a screw up.

what?

i said, quote "what a screw up" unquote.

i'll drink to that.

how's james?

not very happy nowadays. hard to be after realising you spent quarter of a million on a lemon.

maybe you could write another sequel. "Screw Up". a satire or something. a costumed villain builds a projector to emit radio waves that make people befuddled and unable to tell a good movie from a bad one.

laughs.

no one wants to film anything from a writer who's last screenplay couldn't make two thousand at the box office.

"screwed on" was amazing. doesn't that count for something?

no.

there used to be words here.