Household Items: An Imagination Born from the Nighttime Spins

I Can't Survive Your Warmth

I’m a pad of butter. You’re a hot knife. We’re not meant to be together, yet here we are, you slicing into me day after day, clean and through. Yet I can’t help but feel that I need you. That we’re meant to be together, and it’s not a self-hate thing I promise swear it on the stars stuck to the ceiling of the kitchen, ya know? I want to be here forever, waiting until I grow bad and stinky, unwanted and unused except by you. Yet, I like the warmth you give me and miss it even, aching to be whittled away, for our momentary flings to no longer be momentary. Sink into me. Feel me sizzle and boil and burst at your touch your cut the only way you can show me affection. I get it I do. I just feel this sick sense of satisfaction when there are bits of me stuck to you in unceremonious clumps, that you’re old and unwashed of me, that you took me with you, that I’m a part of you like you are of me. Gross, I know but that’s why you love me right? Wrong, you must hate being kept over a low flame to be hot enough, finally hot enough, to cut clean through me and make me spread. Does that make you feel like you’re not enough that you need to be altered for me? Never! I take it back, I don’t like the warmth, I just like you. I am something to be consumed so consume me. Fuck guilt and regret, a foreign concept for something as perishable as me, as us, as this. Love me kill me love me same thing. The remedy is the disease, the disease is the remedy. Don’t you see? Your acts of violence your annihilation of me is a confession of love. Consume me.

I Can't Be A Crowbar

I wonder what it’s like to be something that can be opened, what it’s like to be a box. Do you like the fact that you’re at my mercy to unveil, to see how you tick to know your insides and contents? Do you crave it? Are you just waiting to be opened by someone like me? Or are you envious of someone like me, of my metal and curves, of how it’s my purpose to open and yours to be opened? But also to contain, right? A vessel, to be filled with things. Like love. No I don’t want that at all, to give up my secrecy and my power. But would you want it, just to see what it was like? To feel it’s quiet domination and pick at its straying ends? Is it wrong to wonder? To not be something unbendable unforgiving and iconoclastic, but something cherished and protected, something valued. I’m a tool, but you, you’re an object! Something that can be desired, whereas I’m something to be used. And discarded. Forgotten. I am willing and wanting and nervous—just wanting someone to treat me like precious cargo. I want so many things, like being something that glitters instead glints in the light, instead of something to pick up and put down right after, never something to wait for, to protect. There’s a loud shyness to you that must come from being something that lives to be sublimated. I know it is. Your destiny is to be filled up by other things, things that aren’t you. Yet they are! You take on the identity of what fills you up because you’re nothing. Ha! You’re nothing, but me— I am an opener, a doer, a catalyst for change. Change is the universal currency and you’re broke except for the unlucky pennies I’ll throw inside you. It won’t be gentle. Neither will I. 

I Can't Heat Up Your Thai Food

So I come home after a long day of doing work, well pretending to do work, well figuring out what I’m doing with my life while staring out the window and sighing audibly for the whole library to hear because misery likes company. I shut the door to my room behind me, pass the plate with the butter and the dirtied knife while kicking the crowbar at my feet out of the way before I hop over the emptied box. I look at them each for half a second too long. Oh, but then I remember that I have leftover takeout in the fridge and pop it into the microwave and watch the food spin-spin for a while and then I take it out— still cold. Try again and again and I see it spin-spin and make the beep sound and the hum which I think means that the radioactivity is working can you believe that’s how microwaves work I mean I don’t actually know how they work but I know they use something radioactive and that’s why when you put your guinea pig in there it explodes. I only know that because my friend in high school’s girlfriend said she did that, put the guinea pig in the microwave that is, and it went splat. She got grounded for two weeks because of that and she said it in a way where she was annoyed that she was punished and hadn’t killed it like that when she literally fucking murdered her pet Sprinkles. Regardless, my microwave spins and spins things around but doesn’t or can’t heat things up and there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, right? It’s absurd, how the microwave is so good at performing that it’s a microwave yet is incapable of doing what it is supposed to be doing. It’s really good at making it seem like it is it can that it can whir and stir to its user’s satisfaction but it can’t fucking do it. Am I a broken microwave? Am I just performing myself to not just the world, but to me too? I can’t heat anything up, I just spin-spin until bedtime, or until I can stare out a window or go on a run and cease to be for a little. Spin-spin and pretend to heat things up until they take their Thai food out of me and leave me to rest. But there’s always more Thai food to heat up, for me to fail to heat up. Forgive me for being me, just this once. I won’t do it again.