the youth and the cold avoid each other like bats and light

and yet

i, the youth, am joined with he, the cold, in the tombs of codependent lovers

i drape languid in the winter rays by day but quake gently underneath the electric blanket at night

icy and rare, searching for solace in the meeting of the knees and the thorax

am i not a moth, blinded by and drawn to light?

there is no rutting, snorting furnace here, searing with screams and hollers and the melodic shattering of a car window by a baseball bat and above all the red red red desire to dash like predator disguised as prey lit from the inside by unprocessed triumph and from the outside by star-spangled police strobe

the red red red desire to twist backwards into empty space and let a spray of swords unfurl from my shoulder blades, a spray of human hands slicked with neon lights and volcanic bass with eyes maddened and effervescent like champagne spilled on concrete

the red red urge to bare skin, bare flesh, bare teeth, bare souls on the rooftop looking out into a rotating, indifferent starscape and a geometric subterranean suburb and feeling so so alive and itching and vibrating because everything else is so placid, everything except for me and the alcohol and the boy next to me, the stranger whose heat meshes with mine whose blood i can feel straining against the walls of his veins, straining towards mine

the red red red burning hot impulse to surge so fast forward i phase out of my skin momentarily in a shower of joyous sparks and manic, boundless peregrine. to dance forbidden sigils with my feet two centimeters from the ground, hoisted on clouds of black sand enshrined by chtonic heat deepwater embers and coals extracted from the infernal navel of a primordial war goddess bound to the core of the earth with golden thread and bursting in her divine hips with the will to destroy, to create, to laugh like a jackal and cry like a vulture, to kill and slice and trace her immortal, beautiful mark on the new planet with a delicate violence

and to spin on a witch's kerosene chestnut pedestal and to spin like blood snatched and pulled down a sink drain and to spin like incandescent petals from the edges of a burning photograph and to spin like a dreidel dropped in fearful flight from men in boots and crisp uniforms and to spin with divine ankles crossing and divine fingers piercing through the night air and 

she howled at me that night

her voice shredded with molten glass, molten glass pulsing down her cheeks, from her nose, molten glass gurgling in her blue-hot bunsen burner ribcage, molten glass softly glowing from inside her throat

that night i turned away from her, put new earbuds in, tried to listen to music, heard her voice rough with desperation in every e-flat major chord in every song

tuned the radio to an old soviet numbers station where i would not hear her pleading for me to stay

followed sleep, followed lexiconical harmonies that once meant something but now meant nothing

a gossamer frost brushed my lips and enshrouded me like a lover

i pupated into perfection.