rust
I guess under different circumstances I’d have thought it pretty. I love textures, decay, something uneven and not quite right. I love the way rust grows like mould over metal, taking away its gloss and shine.
This time, it was pressed to my rib. There wasn’t time to admire it.
Anger filled me up. The kind no one should hold in their belly. Afterwards, I joked it was the second hand smoke from the crack pipe he’d pulled out after he sucked my cock.
His gold tooth shone under the street lights. Like I said, under different circumstances it might have been romantic. I was gonna go home with another straight man, I guess that’s my thing. And I was gonna go home with another straight man drunk, I guess that’s even more my thing.
I followed his promises of a room, and my hope of intimacy.
All I got was a quick suck. They’re always cold, they never fulfil that hope of intimacy but at least they’re normally in a warm bed. After they’ve cum, they don’t always pull out a crack pipe.
Anyway,
I ran outside onto a road I didn’t recognise. I ran outside angry at myself. At another bad decision.
*
Yesterday, my mum told me she’d watched 24 hour A&E and seen a man who had to have open heart surgery 20 years after a random stabbing. She told me this after I’d drunkenly mentioned a fight I had the day before with a homophobe.
*
I screamed.
In a cold car park. My screams echoed around short, reddish-brownish flats, surrounding us on all sides. The colour of rust, I guess nobody heard.
I stood still. I hate the phrase stood my ground - like an angry man I don't want to be. But my anger, my own anger, had strength. He put the knife down.
*
Everyone was right, I shouldn’t have let this rage fill me up. But I did and somehow God was on my side in that silent car park far away from home, away from my mother.
*
I lost my phone anyway. All that and of course I did!
Rationalising it later, I realised my phone’s fate was sealed. But mine wasn’t. That knife - no, him - could have changed it all.
But who knows, he could have done it all under that first street light if I’d said no anyway. If I’d made the right decision.
