Almost Morning

Doesn’t matter who you were fucking last night. Man, she could have been eighteen years old, with nipples as hard and juicy as the mouths of whiskey bottles and a body that swallowed you whole and kept you in the dark with a tallow candle like how the Leviathan swallowed Jonah until he was ready to repent.

Or maybe he was one of those strong, smoldering punk kids, the kind who fucks for ten separate schizophrenic personalities and who is always ready with another magic condom and another dirty story like some kind of Vaudeville comedian. Maybe it was a couple: a scared little Midwestern pair of honeys who needed a bed for the night and who said they were into what you were into, and you agreed, even though you found out pretty quick that they were lying out their sweet coupled-up-in-love asses.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter how sweaty, dirty, and evil you got last night, and it doesn’t matter what you penetrated and for how long. When you wake up, it’s always the same old drag.

You have to see what the world did and you have to do something back.

You hope last night’s paramour/s will sleep for awhile, because then you can softly pad to your computer and tap your mouse to wake it up and check your “inbox,” your “alerts,” and your “feeds.” You can see what blew up. You can see who declared war and what celebrity got caught skinning cats to masturbate with the furry, warm bloodsleeves.

You can see what new books are out. You can see who’s been reading your magazine, and who’s been stealing your quotes, and who hates you today.

You spend an hour letting the world drip into your brain while your conquest/s toss/es and turn/s, and then you spend two hours spitting fire back at the world. Drip, drip, drip, suck, suck, suck, WHOOOOOOOSH. You seize on something you like (something important or something you know about), and then you hammer that little nugget of information into something new and strange, and you send it back out there for other people to worry about, for other people to chew on, mock, or worship. Or maybe you’ve got something brand new you’ve been carving and it just needs a few last minute touches. You polish it up and you roll those bones and see what you get.

Then you wake up last night’s nightcap and you fuck ‘em some more instead of cooking breakfast (hell if you have any food), but this time it’s different.

You aren’t a journalist. You are almost a journalist. You aren’t an editor. You are almost an editor. You are writing, but you aren’t living a writer’s life. You are almost a writer and you are almost alive. You are almost drunk. The shit you spew is almost good, but it’s also almost pointless. What you do every day is almost a waste of time. It’s almost heaven to express everything that hits you almost every day so fast and cheap, but it’s also almost like holding your hand in boiling water and taking notes about how fast the skin peels off.

This time when you fuck, you feel the fire of the screen burning behind your eyes, and no matter where you look when you rut and root, you see a mouse pointer tracking your consciousness like grit glommed onto a contact lens. You are fucking like clicking open windows, trying to get to the source of something, trying to cut all the way to the gut of holy computer truth. Your eyes burn with alpha wave fever, and your fingers caress clits and foreskin the same way you caress a laptop trackpad. There’s no orgasm: just the same feeling of release as when you “post” your latest “update” to your website and you can lean back in your swivel chair, spent.

Your wrists ache the way your heart used to ache.

What the hell are we doing to ourselves? Are we almost human? Or are we almost something else?

- Miracle Jones