Lessons I Learned in Leningrad

-Sometimes the worst Hell is the one you create for yourself.

-You can't force someone to love you even if you threaten them with a loaded pistol.

-Never trust a poet.

-Art created by the soulless and viewed by the eyeless rules the world.

-If you are not committing sin, you are not having fun.

-Drugs are more effective if you do them in the nude in a dirty hotel room on the bad side of town.

-The wrong side of the tracks is all a matter of perspective.

-Greasers always carry switchblades.

-Never let your lovers choose which side of the bed you sleep on.

-Never give your kisses away for free.

-It's only worthwhile to love the truly doomed but always be sure to have 911 on speed-dial.

Stupid Girl

I fucking fell in love with you and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

Gone Home

And that was the worst thing ever written about me. It still makes me cry to read it to this very day. After all there's no distance on a girl like me. Sometimes it doesn't pay to go looking for yourself on the internet and it can be a very bad idea indeed to fuck poets and writers.

One Liners

Love: what a terrible thing to do to another person.

If I had access to C4 there'd be a lot fewer people in the world and a lot more craters in the ground.

Never trust something that bleeds once a month and doesn't die.

The name of my cavalcade of she-vixens: the Cunning Lesbian Interracial Terrorists aka C.L.I.T.

Never write while drunk... it only leads to troubled letters.

'Go Fuck Yourself' is inscribed at the top of my stationary.

Fuck this... I'm going to bed.

Skin

I just want to spend all my time writing about your skin almost as much as I just want to spend all my time touching it.

Bad Art

I know I'm stupid but I'm waiting for you. I don't want the walls or the distance; the two feet you kept between us the whole time. I'm not sure what you are afraid I'm going to do to you but after this same thing happens over and over again with so many different people you kinda start feeling there's something wrong with you. I may have been frustrated and I may have been cruel but that doesn't stop what I feel about you.

Sometimes I am the perfect monster and all I want is blood and pain and weapons. Sometimes I am the perfect source of love in the center of a very bright world with skin like milk and breath like honey. Sometimes I am a terrible writer just trying to get a few ideas out before ennui takes me over again.

Yes it's love and I'm stupid to feel it. You don't want me and that's the way it is. I'm happier in my isolation anyways. Happy without human connection or the buzzing of a million brains around me filling up my skull with emotions that aren't my own. I have never felt someone's moods shift as fast as yours do. I've never felt someone more conflicted about me or felt the wash of disdain at my touch fill me up like poison on a beautiful sunny day.

Every moment I touched you and you didn't shy away felt small and precious. I wrote poems about it. I perpetuated all the bad art I could. But you don't know me. You've never even tried too. You've never tried to understand. Never even asked the story of where I came from. Never asked how I got like this. Never asked how I felt. You know only your own imaged fear at what you think I am. You only think of how I affect your life and not the other way around. I've been a whore to better men than you (and also worse). I know what they did to me when I was young. I know what hands shaped me. I remember those hills. I heard those ghosts. I know what I found in that ground. I know what I am afraid of. I know. I know what I am capable of.

I'm just waiting for the day when I don't have to feel this way.

The Jewel is the Anger

And that was when I let my anger take me over. It was perfect. It was bright. And it was shining. It was the moment when everything made sense. The only moment when it ever would. I knew then that my love was this divine furious living thing and if he couldn't take the pain or the heat that came off my skin then he never would. He would never feel the conviction of the moment. The truth that no one could love him as completely and with as much blind devotion as I could. He would only know the flaw and run forever until time and distance split him in half.

I had all the pieces. They were glued together all crooked but they were all there. They didn't always work but they could if I shook the wires and taped the insides and tapped the glass. It would work if I tried hard enough. He was only into easy ways and distinct creations of false regret. He seemed to live a life so full of guilt and dissatisfaction that it drowned him nightly as he waved his fingers above the tide and then slipped back under happier in drowning than in being rescued. I only love the doomed.

We came together and then we came apart at the seams. It was cruel and it was all too easy. Sometimes, just sometimes, I am a very stupid girl.

Run

If I can outrun the Devil, I can outrun you.

Monster

When he asked, "what are you?", I didn't have an answer. I rose up and straightened to my full height. I stretched my limbs upward. I filled the spaces in between with dark wings bigger than two of me. I felt my skin shifting like scales. My eyes two black hollow spheres. I felt my heart on fire with blue licking flames shining through my chest. Maybe I knew then I was a monster but I could not articulate the words. Couldn't put the sentences together to describe what was coming next.

He said, "I'm losing something." I looked down and said, "you're losing blood." and carefully ran my fingers around the edge of his self-inflicted wounds. I tasted those crimson drops on my finger tips and remember what it felt like to be in love. It felt like a violent past. Like someone come to do your dirty work for you. It felt like something I needed to know and just couldn't fathom.

He cried, "can I go with you?" I didn't have the heart to tell him that he already was. He was following me down whether he liked it or not. Love vibrated on and on as my hand tightened around the hilt. I drove that blade in until I was elbow deep. I kissed him harder than any human lips could have. If my heart burned blue, his burned a more vibrant indigo then I had ever seen. And the fires mingled as the pool deepened in it's red embrace. It took us over. Took us under. And it all went quicker than dark planets colliding between the two of us.

I whispered, "would you have it any other way?", my lips pressed close to his ear. And with a single clear syllable echoing between all the spaces and all the places and all the little darkened hearts, he replied, "No."

Chimera

I think I've been sneaking into your dreams again. I don't mean to. I just close my eyes and that's where I find myself. I know in the real world I'm snoring and drooling all over the pillow but in the ethereal ether I'm slipping into your mind and poking around at the wiring. You dream such strange apocalyptic dreams and you dream a lot about pretty girls and all the orifices you'd like to stick your cock into. It's weird to find myself in a blasted nuclear landscape and then suddenly watching two people have rather oily looking sex in a dry shower. And there always seems to be some sort of hammer involved.

I don't think you have found the door into my dreams yet. At least I haven't seen you there. You probably wouldn't like it much if you found yourself in here. There always seems to be something monstrous in the dark. Sometimes necks get broken and everything lives at an impossible angle. Sometimes there are a fuck of a lot of arms, or severed heads packed into the ground. Sometimes they are tearing each other apart.  And the sex is always interrupted and unsatisfying. A lot of people die and are reborn. And 911 never seems to work. And nothing is ever fucking quiet in here. It's never calm. Never silent and unmoving. I'd give anything for a night where I actually rested.

I'm drinking cup after cup of coffee right now. Trying to keep my jittery hands awake. I know I'll fall asleep at some point. And if you could maybe not be fucking such strange mutated girls in your sleep tonight, that would make this a little easier.