Like a structure in the night she sleeps in steady motion, keen with awareness and bellowing breaths that heave the clouds off of her chest and clear the fog from the visions that play intangibly before her glossy lid-closed eyes. I watch her from distant cactus as she lays in the desert sand swimming in private cerebral recollection that only she and herself can revel in, and I piss with my prick dangerously close to cacti blood thirsty bristles, wondering how it is she sleeps so soundly, absorbed in her own profound self with the moon coughing stars of light onto us and everything from here to the sun and beyond, and as I think this she stirs slightly and I zip up my drainer and pocket it back into my denim shell. I reach out one hand to gesticulate a loving caress on her body twelve yards away, galaxies of sand in between us, and the other hand teases the skin of the cactus, and it sips blood from my fingers, for the moon did not lie when it showed me the sharp teeth of this plant in the night, I saw it and believed it was there but I needed to feel it with my hands to grasp its existence. And now I chuckle indignantly to myself as snakes slither by on their own, lost, blindness seeping from their scales, intimate little crimson droplets like cherry arteries fall from my wondering finger tips, raped by the sand plant through consent of myself and my dangerously curious hands, the hands which argue with the eyes that revolve in the ivory rock of my skull; the snake slithers by, amused.
I yawn for the moon washes me with its persistence, drowns me in its lunar influence, and I wade through the tide of sand, a vile vial of time kept locked in the glass of the sky and played with by time; time which only exists in itself and on the faces of passerby's in twilight drenched evenings in Frisco, the faces all the same and aware of the stigmata they wear on their wrists to remind them that they really have no time at all; they wear time on themselves to try to absorb it into their skin so that in all effortlessness they become time, conscious of the cycles that spin and sink into the pits of peoples stomachs, and when they glance at the watch face and find that there is no time at all but only the suns presence and the moons loneliness they conclude the cosmic equation -- that which time is but a measurement graphed into our lungs and how far we can manage to expand them before they burst within us...
She is still fluttering her lashes, like a bug, and in her stomach lurks a jarful of iridescent butterflies. I sit by the fire that has blinked off into ash, and, tired, dissolved into smoke. Asleep she looks aware as she sucks up sand through her nostrils, nose hairs that obstruct any entrance, not even my own quivering air. She is like the cactus with its thorns, protecting itself from bloodsucking predators (like myself) using her unconsidered glare, and her withheld resistance from natures equation, the mantra of her wheezing exhales, brick tenors that ring like the ferry horn on the bay. She breathes in the sand as if it was particles of oxygen, gets air in her teeth and sand in her throat. I lay next to her, fold my knees up into the backs of hers, push my crotch against the ripened fruit of her own, and wrap my self around her, try to merge our bodies together. The aroma of her hair burns like a silver candle, singing my lungs as I breathe in her natural perfume. She has receded like the ocean. Her hair is the only product of time, and I think of how the hell we got this far.
In the morning I wake and brush the sand off of us. The motor-bike is a few cacti away, leaning against the prickly fruit. She asks if they are safe to eat, the cacti, and I say, “Safer than snakes or jars of butterflies.”
With my razor blade I dice a section off of the tip of the cacti. I am bit again on my hand by the green teeth, and my fingers weep red. I curse aloud and she takes the cactus from me, plucks its thorns, and pops a piece in my mouth. It tastes of the memory of the desert. She swallows a pulpy cube painted with traces of my blood without word.
The sun has appeared without even making an entrance. I watch her stare at it through closed eyes, illuminating the thin layer of eyelid for herself so she can watch her veins funnel thoughts through themselves. I open my mouth to speak a melody for her but she beat me to it:
“The sun plays on the illusion that it is actually there, for the light we see is eight minutes old, someone told me once before, and if the sun dried up like a peach pit we wouldn't even know the bulb was burnt out for another eight minutes, that's how dreadfully far we are, how microscopic our thoughts really are. We build ourselves up, stack brick upon brick of ego until we have a wall of comfort to block out the fact that we are so small, and hope that we will never see over the top of the wall and look into the eye of the sun.”
She looked away from the sun and opened her eyes. Her irises were drained of color, evaporated perhaps. She smiled and her teeth became bulbs of their own. I went over to her and licked her teeth clean of any dust. She grabbed my hand and rubbed her fingers against the holes made by the cactus thorns. She grabs a handful of sand and rubs it on the little wound, and it feels like what salt would feel like poured onto my eyes, but instead performed on my fingers. I don't object to this minor sting, this microcosmic pain, for it is not comparable at all to the pain I had put her through...
It became brighter outside, so we got on the bike and left to find the road and where it went.
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