greyscale pretension

God I want so much
to be black-and-white and fleeting
and open-mouthed and to
write all day surrounded by cigarettes and
city and people who roll over in my bed
tangled in sheets, long-legged
and sleepy-eyed muses who press
themselves into my lips and in
faded serif type press themselves onto my
poems, little typewriter clicks of love,
little typewriter kisses, kisses that are the
smoky punctuation of my smoky
writer’s life. I want to paint over all my imperfections
of colour (the drack brown of my hair) my
imperfections of life (why can't I write today,
why is the world so uninspiring, why)
I want to stud myself through with silver
and tar my lungs with a paintbrush of
nicotine-rebellion and pretentious
hatred of The Man, and I want to laugh
openly and brokenly and let everyone
hear that break in my laugh, and invite millions of
beautiful souls into my home and let them tell
me their stories, lay out their words on the coffee
table next to glasses of wine and sift through
them together, picking them to their bones,
discarding some but leaving many, even the ones
that smell faintly of sewerage, and we’ll weave
them into something beautiful and ugly and true
and I want to do this a million times over
with a million different  people who
spill themselves on to me like water,
soak into my skin
and stain it
like a wash of ink