puncture — things longer than a paragraph
still need be said.

demons of love

demons of love, © 2003-2009 i.m ruzz

she’s set there in the slack and sallow amber glow of a single interior car lamp. surrounding her a sheet of black gloss; the night weeping dark rains. her hair pulled tight to her brow but for an errant skein of wispy brown suggestions. he fusses, shifting awkawrd into the envelope of orange yellow, and settles next to her.

i wasn’t sure it was you, he said. it’s me she said and smiled. He paused long enough to warm some or study the raucous tremolo errupting from unknown origin within his body, then shifted the car to drive and pulled them onto the night black road.

where should he go? he asked. she said wherever as he slowly turned the car. Wherever you want.

he set to with no path through this dark and its complications. No bridge to cross. No map lamplit and specked to lead them hurtless and deliver him to her long hair, arms, and need.

He drove deeper into the night and the reflected streetlights followed, racing alongside on dark pavement rough and unending, unshakable.

They found the rest of the night waiting on them impatient

They found their way through deep-red wooden bannisters, hard-worn railings and haggard waitresses working short unexciting weekshifts. Through rains and long silences. through memories, good or undetermined. through the deep chasm of space from one to the other till birthed into the early morning hours with squared cutglass tumblers filled of the remains of other unsolvable nights, heavy with intents with no means to act upon them.

he watched as if a bystander at a horrible car wreck as she leaned into the rounding of his shoulder and left him alone with their bodies. he kissed the top of her head and said quiet all the things pregnant in him while she slept. He sat a while longer in the growing western-blue morning light, then pulled himself again from her and set to.