Seraphim Voids

On a day when the sun’s heartbeat was too static to see, a bus crashed into me while the American national anthem played. 

I wish that could mean something; 

it could if I was a different person; 

if I was American and had the mind of songwriting genius Gerard Way who sampled the ballad of conquerors in Goodnite Dr. Death, but I’m not American and my arm’s lying like a string of cod three feet away from me. 

And I thought about you, or really I didn’t think about anything because I was dead, and this is just a nice image, one of being ripped apart by a soulless machine, because the harder poem to write is the one about how most violence comes from a place of love. 

At dawn I was a seraphim coiled inside the motherboard. 

My eyes were scattered around the sky for coma patients to peer down at their own bodies with. We’re all pornography of ourselves/all pornography of our own desires. Searching for a body to live for. Searching for a body perfect enough to sin for.  

We’re all pornography of ourselves/ all pornography of our own desires 

When I was 16 I was dancing in my bedroom, and suddenly I couldn’t stand all the mirrors turned away from me so I laced my eyes with poison, merbromin, because I couldn’t stand not being able to find a body worthy enough to live for. 

What’s more romantic necrophilia or cannibalism?  

And I say to a guy with soft eyes at a party I don’t belong to that to be trans is to be a masochist.  

In my twilight years, my lust developed a taste for abstracts. 

I was a tattoo artist in a reality TV show; I’m a greasy guy who drinks too much because I grew up ugly, bullied, bad at sports - symbolically gay - but now I’m never single for more than a year because once everyone graduated high school, charisma revolves around being a guy weak enough for others to break. 

I want to be so many things that sometimes I forget how to start being myself. 

I’m a fan artist travelling around to different conventions; I’m the prettiest girl at the morgue my family sold their cornhouse to. I have colourless cheeks, stoner eyes, and moved to Germany after haunting the countryside as a medicated child collecting sheep skulls. 

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m trying to find an escape from myself because I can’t handle you seeing me. I wish I never met you. Why would I even write this without you? Of course I would but maybe I wouldn’t struggle to eat. Why would you make me write that?

If I was a man alive in 2005 I’d sing about wanting to blow you up with a bomb strapped to my chest. And rather than be called out for my tactless metaphor, someone scribbles in abandoned html codes buried horizontal in digital earth about my flaring homoeroticism. I want to blow someone. But they’re wrong because for once I’m writing about a girl. I’m not gay before the Obama administration, although I kiss guys everytime I drive past churches.

What I really mean is that I’m shivering. 

I want to smother you with synedoches/lists of what I love/petrarchs of worship until there’s nothing left of you for me to crave. 

Underneath the fullstop 6 lines above, I offer to kiss the breath from your nose. And what does love feel like? It’s an opening, the uterus on Christ’s bleeding wounds. I wish you’d scrap a knife to my side like I’m a layer of acrylic paint needing to be sliced open to release an aneurysm of curdled paint. 

Treat my body like it is a tumour.  

I gave you my body to violate. 

Now I’m writing about a man. And you don’t need to think about this because sometimes gender changes nothing, but I still want you to know everything. 

I was undressing you from skin to bone. 

But you won’t touch me. 

If I was a child I’d blame myself for being too disgusting but I don’t know why you can’t hear a fox’s screech during eeeejaculation. I don’t know why you won’t look at me. I’m changing so much but here I am, still in the same body.  

Bite into me. 

Anywhere but preferably my neck so that everyone can see the marks. 

The bus’ fangs sink into my jugular vein. Nothing can stop the end. 

I want you to rub your tongue up and down my ligaments like how you lubricate violin strings. My shoulders relax under the desire of your teeth, and I’m tricked into sharing the intimacies of my thuddering heartbeat with you. 

Metal gashes spray out tears of blood. A nearby tree has stopped the bus’ momentum from driving off with my head. 

I feel your tongue dive underneath my ligaments. It tugs on me. Lifting my nerves up as an offer to heaven. My dick’s hardening but I feel so relaxed under the care of your wetness that teases and circles around my wires of life. 

My nerves almost snap from your force, yet it is your mouth, greedy to have what the tongue is eating, that saves me. Sinking into the rest of my flesh that is begging for you.

I’m shivering. My pants are getting wet from the lube and sweat I’m trying to suppress in the park. I can suddenly feel how my lips are as firm as a plushie’s ear. Plump and ready to suck. I try to grab for the dismembered arm three feet away from me. It feels unreal against my own touch. My skin feels like I’m holding an angel’s wing, or a rubber dildo. It’s not mine. It never was. And I shove it underneath the bus’ torso to stick inside myself.

Your teeth snap one of my veins. I can’t tell if it was deliberate, or just a slip of your tooth against my oral humping, but I lie fully exposed, naked, and vulnerable under your arms watching my wounds twitch round their edges. Riding out the seizures of an orgasm. 

I love you like how Catholics love the Virgin Mary. 

And I stop living when I’m alone so I guess I’ll end here.

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Francis is a disembodied, grotesque and obsessive writer and theatre-maker. He enjoys writing about spiritual masochism, growing up on tumblr, and decolonising trans archives. His fiction, non-fiction and poetry can be found in Minor Literature[s], Cult Magazine, and the Ratking anthology published by Carrion Press. If you wish to follow his shitposting, theatre, or future writings follow @venus.as.a.boy777 on ig