HOLD

I'm cooling my heels on the hot cement outside an oversized door, dreaming for a moment of the other side, shading my eyes and squinting upwards, my glance catching the side of the building and ricocheting off on a vector to the house next door, then the footpath, then my feet. My hand on the buzzer.

The door is locked and the buzzer doesn't work. Of course. Of course. My hand rests on the chalky paint, retracts, I rub my fingerprints together, embedding fine dust in the whorls and scars that sign me. Reaching out, pushing the door. I let out the dark in a murky stream through the crack, cold, fine whispers of the smoky cold racing into my nostrils.

Blind for a moment, pupils dilate, forms reveal themselves. Floorboards, a staircase, door ajar at the top, a number - seven. The door waits. I want to be inside. It is an invitation.

I could move swiftly from bottom to top and fall upon the pile of bones.

But I move through treacle, heavy, dark and sweet, step upon dragging step, intoxicated by a flow of images which are hallucinating themelves. At the top of the stairs there are more things to look at, more messages to decipher. Blue and Yellow chalk. A faint word, readable, but fingerblurred - milkbar.

I slip in, as I am apparently meant to do, and regard a sentient body, adrift on a sea of cushions, loose bones piled haphazard and contained in the sack of its clothes, reclining easy in its skin. It rolls over to regard me, up here. I understand it cannot stand because it's legs may not hold it. It is a girl.

The walls vibrate with uncommon colours and shapes, a hysterical decor, a sparse psychedelia. Boxes once full of apples and oranges, long since consumed, assimilated, shat, are now sat upon or in, fur and splinters.

Let's go now or never leave.

Out through the louvres, mind the cactus, the dripping succulents. There, as the seabird goes, is the endless glittering blue, sparkling like hard diamonds, slicing the surface of the water.

Out the same way I came in, but we now, and smoother down than up.

I follow an inexorable trajectory, the coast road, a conveyance for mobiles full of sweating bodies, sick for the ocean. A small and nervous body is my treasure, my cargo, my precious, affecting nonchalance.

Regards me sideways, comes out with it...

_you are fucking me from behind, bending me over the table in the kitchen the one pushed up against the windows, I'm screaming out the louvres into the lane below "you assholes don't have any fucking idea how good this feels"_

My heart is busy in my chest, marking time in fits and starts. My desire bleeds out of me. Our dreams riot and slam. We are breathless together, stealing the air in a hyper ventilation. I have to find a park. I drive round and round, not seeing the empty spaces with my name on them. Finally, eyes narrowed against the glare, intent upon rear view, her intent upon me, I manouever between metal skins, a perfect fit.

C'mon, there it is...the ocean of my amplified dreams. Let's take our towels, and burn the wintered soles of our feet. Lie like bleached starfish on the liquid sand, flaccid. Crawl across the beach on our stomachs, crocodiles, and slide silently into the sea, bubbles escaping our nostrils, tongues tasting the tepid salt water. Let's. C'mon.

I do not look directly at her, as she performs the revelation of her body just for me, but assume a deflective gaze, sampling consecutive images, an accretion of parts. Her sweetness is unbearable, almost.

Aberrations on the surface of her skin suggest a history. I fix on an indelible signifier, and see the shining chrome machine, poised to puncture and stain a hundred times a second. A hand encased in latex, chanelling roses, roses, roses. He covets this unbelievable skin, this sweet breast, this unknowing but allknowing sixteen.

Reaching, stretching, clambering out of and into garments, she displays to me explosions of pigment, a rash of freckles splashed across the body where the skin is stretched by improbable bones, the beginnings of wings, the regularity of vertebrae. I imagine her asleep in the sun, delicious and suffocated in dreams loosed by the heat. After, she tears herself from herself, in fine layers, each translucent sheet imprinted with the code to make her again and again.

Holes are stuffed with metal which turns endlessly, sometimes opening the skin so it weeps, becomes sticky. Opens and heals, opens and heals. She picks at the parts of herself that weep crystals, in unselfconscious moments, dislodges the metal, to turn and turn.

Now she runs, suddenly, like a child, slams her body against the water, submerges, arches lazily, ribcage in the sun, dives and dreams, watches for her friends the urchins, is upon me wetly. I take her mouth in the sea, and we bite, fond of the same part of the lip. I am seeping love.

There is no inevitability about the moment, and it is not clear when it arrives, if ever. It is simply an amplification, an accelleration. It is incremental. It is a continuum. The moment is now, and now and now...

There are things I remember.