The long chemical light flickers and traces thin, very thin, outlines of bodies, profiles of movements: light traits left in the dark… and junkies look cool no matter what they say. All style and no substance… slim and tight: tight skin hugging the bones and tight clothes hugging the skin hugging the bones.
Smack heads and crack heads and drunks all a-quivering an’ a-twitching an’ a-slippin’ an’ a-slidin’. There is no depth here, none of us even pretend that there is – we all stick out like splinters. Nothing goes in, not even the needle. It all pushes out. Each twitch, every movement punches out but never gets out – everything happens over the surface.
Bodies are like bones pushed out of taut rubber – voices, words, language, just the same, just shapes pushing into the surface – love, hate, indifference, thought, not-thought, real, not-real, all come to pass on this slippery surface.
“But what of the orgasms?” they will ask. “And what of the bone chiseling pain?”
“Skin deep, skin deep, tra-la-la!” If there are things lurking beneath the surface, what are they to us, anyhow? The pain is not under the skin but over it; vibrating across it! In this light, pain is only a remote reflex of wills.
The long chemical light flickers and no one is real under these conditions… not real-life real at any rate. We are dream-real; partially all there and totally fragmented.
I drift into the open air. The sea is as green as the morning blue. I smell that salty air and I am a child again … I can hear the pebbles rattling under the waves crashing around a small boat rocking – wood gently knocking wood…
