LOVE IS A CAGED RAT GIVING ITSELF ORGASMS

RUTH ISABEL FIELD

Love is a caged rat giving itself orgasms Ruth Isabel Field 2014 contact me at ruthifield@gmail.com

for Rebecca Foster

Contents
My stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve razorblades, but Im still dreaming about you ............. 1 My brain is 85% water, the earth is 70% ocean, I never learnt how to swim. ..................................... 3 Love is a caged rat giving itself orgasms ............................................................................................. 4 The dog who licked the tears from my face every time I thought about suicide just died ................... 5 Tales of Ordinary Madness ................................................................................................................ 6 Im not flexible enough for all these acrobatics .................................................................................. 8 Summer ............................................................................................................................................ 9 Grandiose delusions ........................................................................................................................ 11 Objects in mirror may appear closer than they are .......................................................................... 12 La petite mort ................................................................................................................................. 13 Road kill .......................................................................................................................................... 14 Warning signs .................................................................................................................................. 15 Pointless.......................................................................................................................................... 16 Turn around when possible, idiot .................................................................................................... 18 Venus rotates so slowly on its axis a day there is longer than a year ................................................ 19 Red.................................................................................................................................................. 20 Hey, Hemingway, its raining diamonds on Jupiter ........................................................................... 22

My stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve razorblades, but Im still dreaming about you i. Scientists say sleeping in a cold room increases the likelihood of having a bad dream. These nights I am lying on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean waking up screaming.

ii. In my body three hundred million cells die every minute. Sometimes that sounds like too much. Sometimes it doesnt sound like enough.

iii. Each day humans have sex 120 million times. I havent gotten laid in 9 months. There are 7 billion people in the world and I am a single insignificant body living on an isolated island 4000 miles from where I want to be. I know youre probably fucking some gorgeous girl 180cm tall with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio and the odds of us sleeping together again are against me in every instance.

iv. I am shaving my legs and slipping into a short dress. I am drinking dark spirits on an empty stomach.

Digestive acid is strong enough to dissolve razorblades. I guess that explains why I taste such bitterness when I bring you up on a Saturday night after too much liquor.

v. The human nose can remember 50,000 scents. A passing encounter with a stranger wearing the same cologne as the one you wore back when I wasnt alone undoes the agonising effort of all those hours I spent struggling to forget.

vi. Scientists say the higher your IQ, the more you dream. I am in a constant state of fantasising yet Im not smart enough to figure out how to let go of what I desperately want but never get.

My brain is 85% water, the earth is 70% ocean, I never learnt how to swim. my dear girl, learn to hold your heart like glass the thick-walled kind you find in aquariums I have spent so long in the depths that I am evolving like an anglerfish my only light is the one luring prey to my mouth I will open wide for anything that comes close just to stop the dark from devouring me It is December I am either walking on water or pinned to the ocean floor I am hungry for something more I wish everything that was ever cracked open lit up inside like the door of a refrigerator at eleven p.m. on a lonely night

Love is a caged rat giving itself orgasms la douleur exquise describes that exquisite pain of wanting someone you can never have Italian students who reported recently falling in love were found to have 40% lower serotonin levels low serotonin has been associated with anxiety and depression theres a similarity in the physiology of rejected lovers, obsessive compulsives, and cocaine addicts if you place electrodes into the pleasure centre of a rats brain then teach it that pressing a lever will result in stimulation the rat will self-administer endless orgasmic bliss using the lever up to two thousand times an hour forgoing food and water until it drops dead. What Im saying is fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

5 The dog who licked the tears from my face every time I thought about suicide just died When I cry I get red eyes and a puffy face for two days straight I am at my most ugly when I am full of emotion my dog died and we had to dig a hole a metre wide and a metre deep roughly the size of the emptiness that burrows inside me we buried him out by the veggie garden in the backyard and my parents planted a blackberry bush on top of his dead body so that his decomposing flesh will get sucked up into thorny stems and sprout into fruit that we can one day sit around the dinner table and eat as we talk about jobs and money and existence and nothing at all and pretend that we arent going to end in the same desperate way. I have spent so long fixated on how sick the circle of life is that I swear some nights the only reason I ever came home was to see that dog standing at the gate waiting for me because honest to god I would run if I had the money if I had the money and the knowledge and the coldness and the courage and the happiness and the hope and the hardness because I miss the way he put up with me as I dragged him around the neighbourhood listening to Bright Eyes trying to dissolve a bad mood and yet today I walked all the way to Hokowhitu listening to something strangely upbeat laughing into the shoulderblade of a boy who makes me giddy and it constantly surprises me how easy it is to accept that life just stops and starts and the bang that originally sounded like a gunshot straight through the heart was just a car backfiring two streets over on a particularly dark night.

6 Tales of Ordinary Madness Another boy who thinks Bukowski is a city in Eastern Europe and the best thing about Barcelona is the Running of the Bulls (thats Pamplona, not Barcelona. Whatever, baby, its all the same to me.) He doesnt understand why I see things differently. I wonder if this place will ever provide passion, will ever mean more than shallow notches in bedposts. I scrawl boring boring boring in all the poetry he promises to read but never does.

Im not even looking for love in this sad town anymore because no one here is good enough for the person I believe I can be if I just live somewhere better.

Im not flexible enough for all these acrobatics And all the boys whove loved me like a carnival in the night drunk and bright and dizzying left me, let me wake to tired silence on fragile mornings humming bodies now hushed and historical, archived look but dont touch Id run away to join the circus but even they would send me packing summer is a string of bedrooms visited like museums exhibitions of all the girls whove been here before, better than me.

9 Summer Static electricity, silk skirts sticking to skin clinging to curves falling to the floor. Sunshine gives boys who drive an excuse to stare, to lean out windows and whistle. I think of sangria and the way you looked in Spain last September, skinny-dipping salty kisses. The sun is different here, in the Southern hemisphere, harsher. There is a hole in the ozone

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and I am exposed beneath it, alone in this heat craving sex and siestas.

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Grandiose delusions Were still praying to St Christopher even though he was stripped of his sainthood back in 69 cause the Catholic church said theres not enough evidence he ever existed God knows Im terrified of dying old and insignificant its just like me to be talking to shadows Im so far off the road theres nowhere else to go not a single soul left to guide my travels Its summer and were dreaming Peter-Pan youth and Looking-Glass illusions that blue-sky sunshine sparking grandiose delusions Im lying on the lawn saying Im going to write a book Im going to live alone in a little apartment in a big city and shes following love to Australia come February even though theyve got spiders the size of houses there and were both terrified of life eating us alive.

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Objects in mirror may appear closer than they are When I check the rear vision mirror I can see him sitting in the back seat smirking as Auckland City slides by the sharp smudge of him captioned: OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY APPEAR CLOSER THAN THEY ARE And I forget to check my blind spot again crashing into lust as I change lanes too soon Im so hopelessly hopeful Ill kiss all the boys who breathe a little in my direction or put their hand on my bare shoulder, reaching forward from the back seat skin brushing as late summer sun filters through the windscreen, 59 Sound on the stereo life feeling like yellow dashed lines franticly flicking by The GPS keeps warning YOU ARE OVER THE SPEED LIMIT scolding us every time we get lost so my friend tries to fix it HE LAUGHS I tell it to shut the fuck up as we fly down the highway 3 kilometres too fast and miss all the exits we should be taking.

13 La petite mort You are my favourite city and I am a tourist. The violent sadness of being missed. Im back home, finally knowing what it feels like to be alone. The difference between most lovers is that one always stays and one always goes. You kiss in foreign currency. I remember a rainy morning when you ran across the road, recklessly, right in front of the machine that cleans the cluttered gutters of slick city streets. A taxi tooted. It was 2 a.m. You were already on the other side. I stood stuck in the middle, straddling yellow-dashed lines. The sky hesitated somewhere nearby. And I cant really imagine being old when I die. Musicians and poets both have increased risk of suicide. Funny how some facts have the ability to keep you up at night. Like how I know you measure out your life in cities visited (currencies collected; lips bitten). How our time together is always limited. The kissing felt like fists. It was dark or it was light. It was melancholy happiness. Next time well be somewhere completely different and Ill bite down on your fingers as it happens. When you fuck me, being a person goes blank like life reeling on the brink of poetry. La petite mort. The little death. Youre constantly on top and Im six feet underneath. Lover, all I ever want any more is for you to keep killing me over and over in foreign cities.

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Road kill You eat into my optimism when we make love like maggots writhing in a carcass lumped on the side of the road struck down by a truck travelling long distances on a lonely November night. Its late. Ill still come over if you ask me to. Something about a deer caught in headlights.

15 Warning signs There are three funeral homes within a 1 km radius of the house where I grew up. I guess that explains why I was born so dead inside. Theres a crick in my neck from anxious sleep in awkward positions, from shouldering heavy thoughts. I am about to drop it all. In the unlikely event of an emergency, brace for impact. Do not cross the yellow line. Remember to lift with your knees. Stand clear of closing doors. The cautions I read never prepare me for what I actually need. Write me a manual on How to survive inside your own head. Today I made it out of bed, somehow managed to move lifeless muscles. The spring wind had died down to a bearable whisper so I walked beneath a whimsical sky, a little high on painkillers and insomnia. The only way to get by is to exist just outside your mind. Warm air wrapped itself around my body like an emergency blanket, a shiny foil sheet catching sunlight like a silver lining. Im hypothermic from sadness. My brain is shutting down. I sauntered beside the main road out of town. There are four vacant car yards within a 1 km radius of the house where I live now, nothing but weeds pushing through cracks in concrete forecourts. My body is abandoned. My mind is overgrown. Sanity is split between three funeral homes. You dont know loneliness until youve walked along industrial streets trying to catch the eye of steel-driving men at work fabric clinging to hips, lips slightly parted in the heat desperate to be appreciated by someone. Look up. The sky is blue. Thoughts are buried. Our bodies are a graveyard. Theres a boy with greasy hands smiling beneath a sign that declares Collision Repair

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Pointless How on earth can I be sure of anything when every few million years even the North and South poles are prone to flipping? A mere matter of minutes and the magnetic pull of your pushy mouth left me directionless. You learnt about love lost in a field burning ants with a magnifying glass smoking in the woods whispering wispy secrets to pretty schoolgirls bedded on forest floors bare limbs twisted beneath pine trees finding your way with needles pointing to drug-fuelled oblivion I swear going down with you could have meant something but how can I be sure of anything when the worlds compasses will one day point South and call it North

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and all the lines of poetry Ive written for you snorted off a bedside table when you were drifting through the dark at 2 a.m. and needed to feel nothing.

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Turn around when possible, idiot There are people who follow their GPS systems so closely they accelerate right off the road or crash into creeks or end up stranded in the middle of the desert sitting on empty slumped over the steering wheel cursing their stupidity I guess thats a metaphor for love remember, remember when I captured you like a satellite image you were a marbled mix of milky clouds and moody seas I was orbiting you like space debris I have no inner compass just a magnetic pull towards bad decisions life landlocked and directionless Im in the city looking at the sky wishing on the flashing lights of satellites someone teach me celestial navigation I want to be beautiful and impractical broken emotion adrift on the ocean bumping up against your body fragments shored against ruins Im on an isolated island the GPS on my phone has an American accent she cant pronounce New Zealand street names correctly I get confused I argue with her I take too many wrong turns I end up lost she tells me Im fucking useless I drive off a cliff this is a metaphor for my existence.

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Venus rotates so slowly on its axis a day there is longer than a year There you are kissing under mistletoe or locking lips when the clock strikes twelve were all just idiots marking the end of another collection of moments that mean nothing my hands have memorised what it feels like to be alone we stand three feet apart and stare the sky the fireworks over the harbour explode under my skin Ill laugh at you if you sleep with me Ill laugh so hard I cry Venus rotates so slowly on its axis a single day there is longer than a year I told you thats what depression feels like you tried to tongue time back into my body eternity lumbered on Apollo tied my corpse to his chariot dragged me limp and lifeless across the horizon you tried to shake me into a circadian rhythm everything was out of sync Venus is the second brightest object in the night sky (the moon is more luminous and has such a beautiful pull) sadness is a continuous solar eclipse Its written in the stars that Ill always be this way happiness is second rate second from the sun any closer and Ill self-combust Im sorry I forgot how to kiss you back sometimes I am so sure I can be somebody that it just paralyses me.

20 Red Another Saturday spent looking for love wearing a shade of lipstick called Hollywood nails done in Double Decker Red - chipped before the nights end drinking English gin Mexican tequila Russian vodka German beer Irish whiskey Australian wine whatever attempting to paint this town something other than pale pink but mostly I dance in clubs too loud for intelligent conversation kiss men Im only marginally interested in and then stumble home alone. Ive lost count of how many weekends Ive dressed myself up only for this dismal city to let me down. 4a.m., my friend lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the sky I sighed we lay down on the footpath in front of my house she said, You want too much out of life to find love here. I laughed and it sounded like all the places Ive ever been like sun on the Mediterranean sea like cobblestones and masquerade parties in Italy like archaeological sites and centuries of history like twilight swimming in Loch Ness and burning whisky accents all rough and sexy foreign boys kissing me. I said, Thats a dangerous thing to tell someone who has a known tendency to run

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the end of her cigarette burned bright against the dullness of life - fiery red, Hollywood red, Double Decker red like a little glowing lightbulb signalling a bad idea, like a single star outshining its constellation. We were quiet for a second, staring up at the speckled expanse at the complete blackness and the startling brilliance even the big cities around here are so small you can glimpse entire galaxies in the Sunday morning sky and I almost saw a shooting star but it was only the taillights of an aeroplane I wished on it anyway, wished to be on it flying somewhere very far from here.

22 Hey, Hemingway, its raining diamonds on Jupiter Scientists have proposed it rains diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter. In some astronomical atmospheres turbulent thunderstorms cause clouds of soot, carbon dust collecting in moody skies. As dark particles drift down heat and pressure compress the carbon into graphite; further falling and the pressure becomes so great graphite is crushed into carbons crystalline form, diamond precious stones the size of pebbles floating in the planets fluid layers. Baby I think thats beautiful. Today is grey-skied, heavy-eyed. There is a dark dust settled in my mind, untouched by light for too long; I can barely get out of bed yesterday and today.

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I am afraid Ill always be this way. But its raining diamonds on Jupiter. I wouldnt be a writer if I didnt hurt. I wouldnt be alive if I didnt write. Courage is grace under pressure. Everything is going to be okay.