Copenhagen Noir

I won’t! I smile only for money. Your heartless sentiment has been eating away at me for eight days, and I don’t even play the guitar.

I chew the last bite, swallow it with a dry throat while you run around and around, and I want to cry because you’ve ruined my dream about Come, let us go then, you and I. Come, let us go out and watch the evening stretch out under the sky like an ethereal figure longing for the light, let us go then, through half-empty streets, still cringing from the ringing sounds and echoes of the days, the smell of cheap restaurants, the agony of long menus; one street after another goes by like boring arguments that distract you from overwhelming questions: What does your skin taste like? Where can my tongue go, everywhere or nowhere-where precisely? And don’t ask who I am, and what I do, no more questions like, What is it? There isn’t anything, so let us do everything I have dreamed about.

For all this time. That I have dreamed about, for all this time. But come along before the yellow fog arrives to turn your thoughts to things that aren’t going to work, to what you can’t do, what you may not do, like eyes in drafty windowsills, scanning the street with disgust and fear. Love is strong and you’re so sweet, and some day, babe, we got to meet, just anywhere out in the park, out on the street and in the dark.

Where shall we eat, you and I? Alone. Together. At Pastis? They already took the trash out.

I lick your lips and mine at the thought.

First thing in the morning, last thing before I go to sleep.

Leaves go, leaves come.

Wind rises. Summer’s over.

So follow me now, share a bottle of wine. With me and make my heart boil.

Look at me.

Across the rickety table.

Warm for a September evening, don’t you think?

But why not simply smash your face in? Trailer trash for an evening, no problem. Red necks, white trash, black & blue girls, I’m all that.

I toss the paper in the trash can, wipe my mouth, good dog!, and tremble when you jump in through my stomach and we become one flesh, one concentrated killing machine, bad company in every possible way. We cross the road blindly, walk up the steps, and I open the door with these luminous black eyes I always get when someone crosses me, and there it is: laughter, loneliness, and sex and sex and sex, fucked all night and sucked all night and taste that pussy till it taste just right, look at me, I’m finished, I’m totalled, Look at me! I’m in tatters, and well suited for the absolute armpit of the city, the final cockroach left alive in the debris, and I notice that I sway while I search the place for you, and fumble in my pocket for my scrap of metal.

Almost no women, almost only men, but then again: there’s pussy at the bottom of every single beer glass, it’s just a matter of getting down in there. The poets sit over in the corner, shitting words without wiping their mouths afterward. I know them, some of them step on stage once in a while to speak words, as they call it, and they don’t know it’s just chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter ’bout shmat, shmat, shmat. The rest are old and dying, dried-up organisms, rustling folds of skin and toofull beards, and there you are, walking past the kidney-shaped table, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here comes my nineteenth nervous breakdown, my body stiffens, and only my hand has the good grace to close around the sharp edge of the ragged metal in my pocket.