One Night In Florence (A Short Story)

Crowding in your hotel bathroom so we wouldn't wake your roommate, two girls and I smoked stale Italian cigarettes as you lit shots of absinthe next to me on the cold marble floor. The girl lounging on the sink hesitantly took one first, but it was you and I, like Bacchus' only children, who drank till we could drink more. Finishing the green bottle there was more cigarettes and conversation, so vague I cannot remember, yet it was here that we found a light and simple kind of happiness.
But when the brilliant midnight fled and our momentary friends went to their beds, we were left alone to wander the boundless four-star hallway. Disappearing from my sight, I looked for you in a dream… your wicked smile whispering sensually around each turn, your beauty leaving behind a glistening trail on the flowers of the hallway floor. Awakening for a moment I found you outside the door of your female indiscretion gently knocking, quietly begging her, Please let me in. Please.
Guilt and loneliness swelled in my eyes as I watched the scene, for, just like you I'd carelessly left my love back home and took the side of desperate infidelity here in this foreign country. Both abandoned we slid slowly down the wall, sinking fast into the waves that were crashing upon our broken spirits. Realizing we only had each other in this moment, how suddenly we revealed our life's every unforgiving fragment, as if we had been holding it in just for a marriage of great sadness. Two only-children wrapped around each other, we cried till we could cry no more. Strangers, by definition, yet when our crying ceased and we looked at one another, we were starring straight into the cold eyes of our own lonely reflection. Emptied of all emotion you stood up suddenly and started walking towards your only true solace, the radiant moon and sacred life outside these suffocating walls.

While the tourists dreamt of touching ancient lands and golden canvases, we roamed the Florentine dawn, silently searching the empty, dirt covered country roads for a sign of natural life. The breeze cooled our burning eyes, the swaying trees directed us in the darkness, a rooster startled us with his eccentric morning call and the sun slowly peeked its head through evening's open window. After a couple miles we reached the highway and watched the cars drive by, no limit to their speed. With nowhere left to go, nothing left to feel and the new day still feeling like the weary night, we headed back to our lonely beds.
At dinner that evening we were strangers once more not speaking a word to one another. Yet how intimately we exchanged smiles from across the crowded dining room as we steadily drank the sweet red wine, letting it swallow the crushing vulnerability we felt together in that Florentine night.

The End

     The winter night is happening quickly yet time is only known by the color of the sky. And when it stays black for hours I can only assume it's getting late and I should be leaving. But I always stay. Fall down in love with oblivion, hump up against gullibility, waste away with an unreality so beautiful it could never exist so real again. While he, the quiet one, is a wasteland who only uses the word love on his most intensifying drug. This is when he takes my hand. Snorting like a savage all his repressions surface through the blue of his eyes. Now he can't tell his wonderful lies. Vulnerability surrounds him and his sorrow comes forth. But the last time he can remember crying was two years ago at his sister's funeral- a deathly overdose from the same drug he loves to slip away with and arrive at this moment where he has my innocence of eighteen years to ruin or give life to. But this is not the end, the rain outside says; so I quiet my thoughts and gently close my eyes to the wicked shutting of his.

The Lyrical Eclipse

We begin this trip at the border between
the deafening city and the quiet forest.
Abandoning the voices of modern America
we break on into the darkness
The deathly night creeps in, keeps these eyelids open
Speaks in ancient rhymes and faded visions…

The lyrical eclipse, the apocalypse of our youth
The ruination of a dream, the initiation of adulthood
The fire's verse, the beating of drums
praying for pyramids lost underneath the sun.

Untitled

Send
         Reply
                  Delete
                  The ease of the machine's beat

         Ticking,
         down to the final moment…
her battery dead, her power lines down.

Tick                   tock
         tick                   tock
                  cunt                   cock
                           open                   lock
                                    silence                   rock