SmokeLong Quarterly

I am a guy and I am fighting you naked. We roll around. We roll around some more. We bounce into walls, into furniture. It’s hard to grab a naked man but you try. I dart, twist free, your hands slide from my skin now polished with sweat. Maybe you think it feels gay, chasing a naked man, pig-grunting as you lunge, miss, lunge, stab, miss, charge, punch, miss. I feel sleek and dangerous like a diamondback gazelle except for the freeloader that is my lolling penis, which flops and sways in opposition to every graceful brave move I make. It is an embarrassing sidekick. I want to tuck it. I want the smooth, windswept, streamlined mound of a mons pubis. I hesitate in my frustration and you stab me in the thigh with your knife. I roll to the side, grab a lead pipe and swing it at your head. It connects with a THWACK. The pipe is hard, stiff, damage-doing. My penis just lazes with my rolling, it dangles useless, while the blood pools from the part of your head that has turned away from me. Your face is there, however, holding your mouth that is pulsing open and shut like a fish or a struggling asshole. Maybe your eyes see me, maybe they don’t. I am too tired and uncaring to try to find out. I attempt to find strength in my legs so that I can stand and when I do, it’s only partway. My knees are on my hands and I’m breathing like a thoroughbred racehorse after a morning sprint through the fog. My penis hangs and, like it or not, we’re nose to nose. I look at the pipe. I look at my penis. I look at the pipe. I pick up the pipe. It’s much better, I think, more useful.