Paper Lover

.

Paper Lover

A mini opera

~

1.

Dusk descends on the desert. As the skies dim, the Leather Lizard strokes his finely made coat, vivid and new from the shedding. Its scaly beauty is strange and rough; full of tiny polished pebbles and an alien gleam.

LIZARD:

If she knew my limbs were sheathed in leather,

My kisses like sandpaper

If she knew how I tilt my head

at the sun and let it burn me,

Lie in the scorching grit and feel it turn me

Into scales and tail and terror, would she

Still love me?

If she could hear my breath at night

Rattling and whispering like bone-dust

Full of cold reptilian lust

Would she lie next to me?

I would rather hide my skin in paper

Wrap my words in ink

Whisper loving things and let them sink

Into her dreams of me.

Lizard love is what I give;

A love on which you cannot live.

MOLE:

Lizard love is a mystery

Your words lead to my destiny.

Across the land, the Restless Mole responds to the Leather Lizard’s letters. She was born in darkness and, like most moles, is half-blind. But her vision – and her desire – goes beyond what she can physically see.

MOLE:

My eyes may be full of clouds

And my nights and days the same

Yet I would be touched by claws beyond the damp,

Beyond the earth. A tongue untamed

Speaks to me through paper and promises

Sand-speckled words formed into kisses.

You feed me constantly

But not enough.

I must see you, eventually;

I love you. Believe me.

So let me cross the land, and water too

Let your paper trail lead me to you.

_____________________________

2.

Morning. The Leather Lizard watches the dust motes rise early and begin their languid dance against the purple skies. They mock him with traces of her scent.

LIZARD:

The blind are brave

And the brave are blind

And one way or another,

We all shall find

Those we deserve;

Not those we love.

I am not worthy of your bravery

Not worthy of your grace

Not deserving of the veil

That clouds your childish gaze

So why do you crawl

And swim and grow tall

While my courage grows small?

Why do you seek me

And love me and need me?

Meanwhile the Restless Mole inches her way determinedly toward her final destination. She sniffs the air occasionally and smiles when she hears a whisper, a rattle, that might be him.

LIZARD:

My sandy lips will wound you

MOLE:

Your strange, sweet tongue will woo me

LIZARD:

My sharp tail will repulse you

MOLE:

Your every twitch will charm me

LIZARD:

My cool hard skin will make you

Wish you’d stayed away

MOLE:

Why should I not say

(TOGETHER):
And you won’t be / That I’m in love

So in love / Yes, in love

With me / With you.

_____________________________

3.

High noon in the mountains. It seems ludicrous for a soft-bodied, half-blind mole to be here; but here she is. She clambers onto a ridge where a smattering of tough greens and wildflowers grow, and looks to the unforgiving landscape before her.

MOLE:

Not far now. I hear you on the wind

A susurrus of painted kisses soaking time and again

Into precious paper laced with sand and lined with love.

Your attitude, reptilian;

Your poetry, full of passion.

Soon I’ll be right behind you;

I cannot see, but I will find you.

Somewhere else, on a dead gnarled tree, the Leather Lizard perches and sighs, knowing he cannot stop her.

LIZARD:

Our feelings were never meant to flee

The borders of each letter.

Here beneath the arid wind, I

Cannot be your protector.

MOLE:

They say my courage is misplaced

And my dreams full of poison;

Spineless, crawling in the dark,

They knew I wouldn’t listen.

LIZARD:

You wish to die bravely

And leave me to cry?

MOLE:

You wish to live easy

And blinder than I?

LIZARD:

I wish that both of us live long.

MOLE:

I wish to live while love is strong.

LIZARD:

You’re a child who thinks she can have it all.

MOLE:

You are weak, and scared, and small.

LIZARD:

Ignorant fool of the underground!

MOLE:

Shrinking, scaly, two-tongued clown!

LIZARD:

I wish to the gods we’d never met.

MOLE:

You’re an idiot I should just forget.

As they fling their passionate insults, they don’t realise they’re getting closer – until his head emerges from a scraggly bush, and hers from behind a sandy dune.

Both stare at each other, then away, then back again. The Leather Lizard blinks as if seeing with new eyes; the Restless Mole breathes the air deeply.

MOLE:

We meet at last.

LIZARD:

Well, that was…fast.

MOLE:

How does it feel now, letter writer?

LIZARD:

Better than expected, paper lover.

They stay that way for a long moment, each one out of words and searching for new ones. The sun starts to fall. Silence descends.

_____________________________

4.

Evening. The desert is bare save for two small figures half-buried by the shifting sands, content in the curve of each other’s bodies.

MOLE:

If I died tonight counting every scale on your belly

If I spent my last few seconds recounting every word in every letter

If I breathed my last breath so it would mingle with yours

And felt my last drop of warmth melt into your pores

I would die happy.

LIZARD:

If I lived my last hour with my face in your fur

If the last thing I felt was the curve of your limbs

If I made my last vision the moon in your eyes

And died with my tail in your deep dark crevices,

I would leave blissful.

The edges of the desert dune begin to crinkle. It seems two giant hands are folding and tweaking the scene – which we realize is made of painted paper, like a most intricate origami piece.

~

Transition into the following scene. We see an old man, an artist, at his table making creatures and stories out of paper. Leftover cuttings, stray shreds, paints and various paraphernalia litter the cozy space. In the middle of all this is two familiar origami figures: a handsomely made lizard and a velvety-grey mole.

OLD MAN:

Ah, what a fine thing it is

to tell stories through paper.

To close gaps, cross continents and travel through paper.

To bring paradise closer, to make dreams realer,

To make happy endings for lovers through paper.

Ah, life is a foolish bet;

I’ve chased love only to exchange it for regret

I’ve been through too many bad endings to count.

But as a lover of paper, I can turn them around.

He smiles wistfully and gets up to turn off the lights. The room darkens until we see the remaining lamp shining on the paper lizard and mole. Then the switch is flicked. The scene goes dark.

-

Lyrics of the day.

Touch.

Touch in the flame's desires
Feeling the pain's denial,
And your fingers in the fire

Look:

Look in the candle light
See in the flame of life
And my spell is our lie

Taste the love,
The Lucifer's magic that makes you numb
The passion and all the pain are one,
You're sleeping in the fire
Taste the love,
The Lucifer's magic that makes you numb
You feel what it does and you're drunk on love,
You're sleeping in the fire

I gaze at the flame and fire burn
And cry out the name of which I yearn

Taste the love.
The Lucifer's magic that makes you numb
The passion and all the pain are one.
You're sleeping in the fire.

-

Still

'I still love him.'

Those were the four plaintive words on my last tweet. The painful lovechild of a three-year attraction and the inability to let him go.

Ah the curse of this beautiful season, that amplifies both joy and melancholy.

Every endearment he throws casually on me, every smile, every playful jibe, I treat like fragile beautiful things. I am so afraid of letting my more-than-affection slip through. He is an unusually intuitive person; he might well sense it. Might well back away from me, so that I lose even that one thing I have from him: his friendship.

The tender festering flower inside me blooms for him still. Its velvet petals breathe tentatively, half-dead, yet half-awake, and wait mindless for his return.

But there is no return. It would not matter if we were neighbours; if we were roommates, even. I can never tell him.

I can never risk losing him.

I can never...


~ ~ ~

Love that loves alone can turn to hate. That is the damning flaw in the human need: for two halves to be a whole.
Serpent 25:12

Said woman take it slow, it'll work itself out fine; all we need is just a little patience.
G'nR 19:92


-

Love & Hate: a christmas story

“For fuck’s sake pull over.”

“As you wish, princess.”

I hated it when he called me that. It used to be a fond nickname for my long silky hair, my sulking fits. Lately it had lost its fondness and gained a condescending hardness. A cruel edge he kept away from the public, and from the girls who loved him.

But not from me.

The Buick came to a rusty stop about a half mile from the Strip. I stuck my head out the window; damn sky was still shitting snow. When I turned around, he was sucking languidly on a candy cane. The dark pink lips, almost obscene in their lushness, pulled steadily on the pink streaks to drain them from the white. Push and pull, push and pull. Working the cane like a pro. I pulled away from the steady rhythmic sucking and glared at the bright lights ahead.

“We’re lost, you know that.”

“No we ain’t. We’re exactly where we planned to be. Bottle’s in the back.” Referring to the Stolichnaya, of course.

“I mean we’ve lost it. I dunno where we’re going anymore. We can walk into that club now, be all friendly, and you know you’d be wanting to piss on me inside…. Hey.” I pushed my face into his. “Hey. Hey, look at me. LOOK AT ME, motherfucker.”

He tilted his head slightly in my direction. Although his eyes could have been closed for all I know. They hid as usual behind their veil of dense, tightly wound curls, his way of hiding from the world. A trail of candy sugar glistened at the corner of his mouth.

“You really want me to go?”

He stared at me for the longest time in response. Turned off the engine. In the silence of the heavy, musty interior, my question sunk in like an anchor.

Just a month earlier, I had slapped him with the same silence. But then I hadn’t been there to savour it. No, I had just…left. Stormed out of the room as the music died behind me. It hit me then that I was a difficult bitch. I should have held out.

Should have let him be the one to walk.

He started to reach for a smoke as usual – then stopped. His shoulders sagged. He looked tired, defeated. The hundreds of fights in the past four years suddenly came crashing down. But still he didn’t say a word; didn’t move from his sunken position. A minute passed.

“Fine. I’ll go then.” I got out. It was a bitter night, and I had no idea how to get back, but hell. There was no going back. This was it, then. This was how it ended. Not in fire and brimstone, but in icy silence.

I was pulling my denim jacket tighter when I heard it.

“Princess. Wait.”

The sudden rawness in his voice hit me like a hot knife. Where was the hardness, where was the cruel teasing edge? There was a different shape to the words. A quiet desperation. I heard it pouring from the softness of his mouth, and everything changed.

A stiff breeze scraped my sharp cheekbones, making me shiver. With a fierce urgency he reached out and pulled me inside. Rubbed the life back into my fingers. His hands came up to warm my frozen face, to smooth the frost from my straight fine hair. His hands were all over.

“I love you,” I spat through gritted teeth.

“I know.”

Then he was pinning me down and stroking me, stroking the colour into my stiff candy cane, kissing me. Was the door closed? Would they see us? Would they care?

I didn’t. My hands reached down: I felt the leather wrapping his legs and his hips, a gift to me; and then the leather came off and his thighs pushed into mine. His tobacco breath was hot against the steel that pierced my left nipple. His lips breathed warmth into my being as I hardened with love for him.

“Merry Christmas, you bastard,” I whispered.

“Merry Christmas, Axl.”

-

An Apocalypse Theory of Love

you will never know the scenes in which i leaned over your desk and whispered lust into your ear. you will never see the words i erased from my machine as i left you one more time. 

but you could have

if the world existed for you and i.

* * *

IMAGINE
the end, in ashen-faced clarity
The world in dust at our feet
So we would be free to
Finally live it

The sunlight cuts neon gaps in the Venetian blinds. It is dark where he sits, though, and he is ever nestled in a thundercloud. I feel his heat. I watch his hands simmer in stillness.

Weary,
Secrets spill amidst the gunfire
We hide, closer than rules allow
We touch, united by the terror
Of being human

The whiteness of the walls deaden sensation, but not feeling. I warm my hands in coffee-steam. Soon, evening will settle into restless night. You walk past for the third time but it feels like the first.


Dust
Settles on the sunset
High up in a tower, we wait
Holding on for need of comfort
As the skies turn nuclear red


There is another dimension between the patchwork of incidental closeness and almost-coincidence. A love that lies in wait amidst the clacking of keyboards, waiting for the world to fall so that truth can finally be told.


Inevitable.
What triumph be your accidental kiss
What victory is this war-torn attraction?
Your hand in mine, at the edge
of the universe.