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Thread: The brat-prince: Harlow.

  1. #11
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    <center>pick a song and sing a yellow nectarine
    take a bath, i?ll drink the water that you leave
    if you should die before me -
    ask if you can bring a friend


    harlowx</center>

  2. #12
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    Fuck being star-crossed lovers, we fucked our names into the stars. My obsession with our strapping young lad, Mr. Chance Laurent is strutting (in lethal stilettos, might I add) on the dotted borderline of lunacy. Obsession, infatuation, compulsion, addiction, fixation --there is no word for it. My brain is perpetually strangled in some stylishly-buckled straitjacket, because we've written a novel of a definition for the word love. We've created a new breed; one that runs on the power lines of impulse and madness.

    Every time he walks through the door of my bedroom there's some revolution of synapses jolting through my body. He dirties my mind and triggers this need to lay out like a virgin whore on an altar for him. Whenever we're apart, he sits in the very front pocket of my imagination. I try to form actual words and actual sentences, but his name just stage dives from my tongue (which is always proud to bore his juice.)

    "Have you the time, sir?"

    "Chance?"

    "Harlow, have you sent in the mail order?"

    "Chance?"

    "What is the property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force?"

    "Chance?"

    Oh, but I do not treat it as a curse. I embrace my madness for him whole-heartedly. I let everyone know it. The sky knows because I often converse with it about how his lips feel like the finest chiffon, the sheets know because I often brag about how that his ass is the sauciest thing on the planet, the city knows because our thrilling, exhibitionist tendencies know no boundaries. I laugh and pity all the sane, tedious couples that hold hands and go out to dinner on weeknights. I pity their zombie smiles, fumbling hands and modest first dates. They don't know what it's like to come so hard that the world becomes your own dizzy carousel ride. They don't know what it's like to want to kill anyone that looks at your lover wrong with your bare hands without a drop of guilt.

    Do they miss their lover so much when they're gone and have to pollute themselves with the sick essence of the real world for a few hours that they actually stalk them? I think not. Our love is a thousand layers below rational. I worship every patch of skin; every solitary pore on my sweet prince's body, so much that when he slaps me and I fall back to dent the wall, I wear the imprint on my cheek like a diamond ring.

    What I would give to keep him stuffed in my pillowcase like some toy figurine to bring out anytime at my own convenience to play with. I'd keep him tethered in the corner of my bedroom, drag him out onto the city streets on a leash of chain links wrapped in velvet, stifle him in a muzzle when I just wanted to drink in his beautiful face, and climb inside his skin and be him for a day.

    I've picked up on his every microscopic, little quirk. I've watched his routines vary on his way to work almost everyday. I memorize the exact slant of the clock's hand when he comes home from work.

    We're beyond taking bullets for one-another. I'd take the worst brand of death for him; I'd let someone's bare hands crush my throat until my jugular caved, I'd lose a limb and bleed myself dry all over a barbed-wire war trench, I'd be buried alive, choking on moths wings and oil. And why? Because I know that when I die, he'll die with me. I'll arrive on some alternate plane, on some new demented dimension --deliriously giddy because I know I'll wake in his arms, and we'll fuck each other into oblivion.

    Our love is a dark kind. It's forbidden by stitched-together lips and chopped up tongues. We've created our own kingdom, where he's this radiating tyrant crowned in lead, and I'm his brat-prince, curled up in the hearth of his lap, grinning high-wattage smiles of deviance. Together, of course we'll take over the world. Nobody knows that yet.

    <font color="#737371" size="1">[ January 04, 2005 08:04 AM: Message edited by: london's burning ]</font>

  3. #13
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    He was a shy, insecure, but passionate bastard son in his childhood. His mother often told him he was going to grow to be the most charming little prince, but his ego didn't bud-- he remained sweet and handed her the dishes. It only took one week when he was nine-years-old to drain the innocence from his eyes. She watched his perspectives change, she watched him tear apart cancerous dandelions without making a wish first, she realized he wasn't staring out at the other children in envy any longer (because the weather was damp, and he was in no condition to play) but was rather visually dissecting their flaws for his own sick pleasure. She watched him grow into a wicked spitfire, baiting boys and girls by a barbed-wire leash, before he eventually left because he had always been too big for Limerick. Taking a strut across the Atlantic on the unfurled tongue of a velvet red carpet, he reclined in his scar-encrusted throne, building scrapbook memories by turning everyone he met into enemies. By the time he was finally crowned in the gold-painted jawbones of all the skeletons that crumbled at his feet over the years, a foreign hand extended, and he was shockingly merciful towards it. It seemed that the world was the unfurling tongue of a velvet red carpet for them. For the first time since he was nine-years-old (when his innocence was drained, and he stepped into an emotionless comatose) he became electric-eyed and giddy. There was the promise of open-heart surgery in those eyes and stitches for all of his wounds. And the brat-prince swore that his suitor had 'happily ever after' etched in Braille goose bumps whenever he kissed him.

  4. #14
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    If anything, I'm too stubborn to seek him out. I haven't seen Chance in over a week, and instead of leaving obsessive messages on his voicemail (which I'm tempted to do) I figure I might as well wait it out. I have this nervewracking knot in my stomach, that I'm not sure is a product of returning to Limerick for a short while to show him off like a diamond ring, or if it's because I'm paranoid and guess that maybe he's not going to call.

    On a lighter note, tonight I wrote thirty-four unedited pages. I've started a new project ---which I musn't reveal yet, but I've never been so excited before in regards to my own work. The past two days have been quiet, but let's just say that this week I've made a few grand, and I'm very glad that first-class was an option.

  5. #15
    Inactive Member iipsick@aol.com's Avatar
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    Ever since I was a child, I've been having the same nightmare again, and again. Since I've met Chance, they've all but stopped completely. But this week, oh, this mad, mad week it's begun again. The week's been wild, I've been starving, literally and metaphorically; my color's wan, my ribcage is nibbling impatiently at the skin, my fingernails are full of flesh, my insides are frostbitten. Thoughts of suicide were raging, and the floodgates of my imagination opened. My whole entire world became very dark---and in that nightmarish way. But, Chance is back, and he's explained himself quite well. I never even dreamt he'd have surprises up his sleeves, gliding along the winding blue of his veins.

    Back to my nightmares. In my nightmares, I'm always confronting a mirror. No, my face isn't terribly disfigured. I always look like me, depending on the different physical phases of my life. I'm just breathing, I feel paralyzed and cemented to the floor. But that doesn't stop my chest from rising and falling heavily. I can feel my pores popping out these scalding crystals of sweat, and my cheeks running red. Then, a cold hand glides along the slope of my shoulder, massages me, falls away. Whoever it is, whoever it is, whispers against my ear and tells me to do horrible things. In these nightmares, I want to fulfill them, too. I want to do these things that I'd never dream of doing while I was awake--even in my darkest fantasies.

    It tells me to hurt the people I love, to hurt myself. I don't love many people, so the list is very, very narrowed. When I was a child and growing older, it was my mother. Then it was my mother and Samantha. When Samantha fell out of the spotlight, it was just my mother again. But now, it's Chance. I wake up, and I'm heaving dry sobs, because just the thought alone of harming Chance even if its completely imaginary makes me nauseous.

    Last night, was the first time in any of those nightmares that I actually looked up and realized who it was. I should've been able to tell by the descriptive hoarseness of his breathing, and the pudgy hand. I abandoned Chance to throw up in the bathroom, and cling to the toilet bowl. Because it was him. And I never thought I'd ever think about him again.

  6. #16
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    <center>
    the time has come to speak of many things
    of jacks and queens and kings

    i bared my wrists and promised to begin
    but you cut the blade straight in

    the time has come: let's play 'find the missing song'
    there is something very wrong

    try hard, my love do you hear the distant strings?
    please remember what this means

    did i come back for all of this?
    it seems absurd somehow...
    with one well-placed flick of the wrist
    you've really done it now...

    all of my blind ambition left me deaf with perfect vision

    it took that cut to bring me back to life
    they're bleeding and they're frightened
    still i hold out both my hands:
    no one in the world will ever touch me there again.


    -- the dresden dolls.</center>


    Week one.
    Tuesday

    The television had been going for quite some time. The wall's plaster provided a screen for all the fractured blue flickers reflecting from the television screen. His draperies were shields from the leak of moonlight and the jeweled stars (they had his fate scrawled in their peppered wonder -- and the future wasn't nearly as bright). 'Mute' glared from the corner of the screen in a neon-green glow, and the reporter with a plastic-squeaky smile relayed the weather from beneath a rain-splattered umbrella.

    The clock in the kitchen's hands were muffled by the shivers rupturing in his throat. But, it was creeping ominously on 3:52 AM.

    Harlow was crouching on the couch, with his kneecaps drawbridged against his scrawny, naked chest. There was a throw blanket pooled at his side, which he neglected to use. He rocked himself to the tune of his own ragged breath. His delicate face was distorted with a wry mask of agony, and the tears were greasy sheets all over his cheekbones. His spine rippled violently like a demon possessed with every stifled sob. All along his gaze was trapped on the door-- just two fever-red pinholes, hoping, and wishing. There was a prayer hammering in his heartcage.

    Week two.
    Friday

    The room was divided like there had been a civil war between two lovers. His bed was a mess. The sheets were tousled from chronic tossing-and-turning, the pillows were napping on the floor. Once again, it was the middle of the night, and Harlow was cradling himself in a chair on the opposite side of the room, staring at the bed.

    He nursed a cigarette and ashed in the crevice of his own furniture, and kept silently debating with himself. Every now and again his muscles would flinch beneath the chalky leash of his flesh, but he'd just seep back into a heap of bones in his chair again. His bare toes flexed and audibly cracked. The more he thought about sleeping in that bed alone, the more his fingers his fingers lost their tolerance and submitted to sickly earthquakes.

    He stubbed his cigarette with a blind, smoldering kiss on the polished wood arm, and ascended to his feet. Like a ghost, he sauntered across the floorboards, spilling his own shadow. He braked suddenly a few feet from the bed, and lost himself to a kneel, like a saint cuffed to pews. Using his foreknuckle as his personal kleenex, he soaked up the only tear left, and continued on his pilgrimage to his own mattress.

    By the time he slithered onboard the linen canvas, he felt nauseous, and tried to quell the feeling by fisting a tuft of the sheets. He dripped forehead first over, the braille of his spine cutting in the air, as he folded in half.

    But, little boys always managed to whimper themselves to sleep.

    Week Three.
    Wednesday

    The brat-prince jerked the shades aside, standing tall and hollow at his sliding glass window in nothing but dress pants and argyle socks. It was a hazy early morning, striped with fog and city birds singing the prelude to spring.

    Despite being freckled in goosebumps, he seemed to be virtually immune to the cold. He floated onto the balcony platform, and hitched his jaunty elbows on the railing. It was slippery with raindrop-laminated rust, but he managed just fine. That was when he heard it---the skitter and shuffling of tiny feet, and weeping coos.

    He glanced down to the cement, and his glossy, watercolor iris melted over the pathetic imagery of a wounded pigeon. It was trying in vain to thrash its wings, but one just wasn't cooperating, and take-off just wasn't an option right now. It did everything in its power to avoid contact with the human, but Harlow steadily advanced on it, and used his sock-clad toes to nudge it from the balcony.

    He watched it plummet to its death on the cement below, but didn't react. His gaze just switched to the puffy sky and the smoggy luminescence of the sun. He became enraptured by the sight of his own breath clashing with the cold. Spring.

    Week four.
    Monday

    Knotting his burgundy tie in front of the mirror in his bedroom, he smoothed a hand through his glossy, sienna hair. It was growing shaggy, because it'd been over two months since it'd seen the gleam of scissors. He openly cringed at the sight of the miniscule blemish on his chin, and dotted over it with his forefinger, viewing himself as though it weren't there to begin with. In the backdrop his bed was crisp and made, and it was inheriting crashing strands of sunlight from the gaping window.

    The soles of his dress shoes clapped against the floor, and he tossed his coat over the crook of his arm, and bowed to collect his suitcase.

    Before he departed from the room to take the subway to work, he whipped one more glance to the mirror for the sake of vanity, and grinned.

    You beautiful, beautiful fucker.

    <font color="#EE0000" size="1">[ April 02, 2005 12:20 PM: Message edited by: softcore jukebox ]</font>

  7. #17
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    He still made her feel beautiful, you know.


    She was jealous of his ribcage, even though she was strumming it. It faired well against his youthful, chalk-white skin. His stomach was concave. His flesh was just scrolling luxury. There wasn't a mole in sight. Twenty-five, and he still had a body of a nineteen year-old.

    Forty-five, and Vivian looked her age.

    They were stretched out on royal red. He was nursing a cigarette, with one scrawny arm folded behind his mussed hair, his eyes gravitated towards the ceiling. She was snug against his side, latching on for dear life, letting her pores dry, dreading the moment when he'd finish his cigarette and leave. Usually, she didn't attempt conversation in the afterglow of sex, but she couldn't help but to lift one stencilled brow, sheeted with tangled auburn-dyed hair. Her lipstick was smeared like a clown, and it disgusted him. He spoke nothing of it. The ceiling was more attractive.

    "Harlow..."

    There was no response, just another ribbon of smoke crawling from his flared nostrils.

    "You were a little rough this afternoon, is there something bothering you, honey? You know you can tell me..."

    He paused for a long, gaping moment of silence, before he whipped her sheets again, and craned over in seated composure at the side of the bed to stub out his cigarette. He slammed to his feet with an apologetically raw brashness, and started footing in his pants. His hands were preoccupied with galloping over the buttons of his shirt, his eyes were downcast.

    She shifted in the bed, startled and shocked. The poor boy never treated her like a client. He made her beg like a starving slave. She never felt desperate in her whole entire life, until he came along every Wednesday at four PM.

    "Where is it?" He murmured, drunk with his Irish slur, moodswinging under his breath.

    "What?" She couldn't dissect what it was he said.

    "I said --where is it?" His voice was sharper this time, the look that snapped over his shoulder was drenched with disgust.

    Helplessly, she erected her forefinger to jab towards the dresser, embellished with antique lamps and an envelope.

    The moment he ironed out his tie, and slid into his shoes, he clattered across the floor and swiped the envelope. He replaced it in his inner three-piece pocket, and swiped the neon-orange Rx bottle of Valium.

    She collapsed just in time to listen to the click of his soles demanding their way to the doorway. Usually, he hesitated to blow her a kiss. But this afternoon, he didn't.

    Two-grand and a bottle of Valium: that was what she promised him every week. But, Harlow Adams was starting to get expensive.

  8. #18
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    I've always been quite the clever liar, but lately, I have not been so sly to say that perhaps, I am a tiny, tiny bit of a walking trainwreck. That doesn't mean that I've diverged at all from my path, or rather, my routine. I've been going to work (both jobs) religiously, I cash my checks, I come home and write. The book is coming along a lot better than the others. Tainted lovers and darkness are subjects that I never stray from, but this time I think it may transform into a tale that might actually captivate readers rather than ... repulse them. But, publishing companies are petty. What do they know?

    There isn't one moment when he isn't on my mind - you know. In the shower, on the rattling subway, under my sheets---in my head, always, always in my head. Sometimes, when I stretch my arms high in the morning, there's a lapse in my heartbeat and in that very small fragment of time one thought races through my mind before a hasty dismissal: "Will I ever fall in love again?"

    Now, if love comes twice in a person's life, they are very, very lucky. I have never been a man blessed with much luck. I have my own cruel charm, and let us thank the Lord Jesus for giving me such gorgeous face, a razorsharp memory and a mind like a sponge. I know that I will never love another man as much as I love Chance, because there was no closure to the end of our relationship. It wasn't sealed away mutually, it was wrecklessly torn apart and shredded into a thousand pieces. I don't know where he is. I don't understand why he left. I don't even know if he's dead or alive. His parents claim that he disappears on whim, and reassure me that I musn't worry -- but I know him, he would never leave me! I'm not his parents! He will never, ever, ever find another man like me, because there isn't a soul out there that could possibly adore him as much as I did! There is no one that could relate to him on those sick, sadistic levels. No one that will take the time to watch him as he sleeps, and trace their names on his ribcage when he inhales! Fuck him if he ever, for one moment, contemplates kissing another man! If he's out there right now, in somebody else's arms, I'll find out. I'll find out and I'll murder them both, and I'll make sure I rip his beautiful, Norwegian dick off and feed it to a merciless pack of hogs, and then we'll see who will be missing who, and who will be laughing.

    -- On a lighter note, I bought a pair of veiltail fish and a tank for company. They're rather boring, but I'm managing.

  9. #19
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    His jeans were cuffed at mid-calf, his feet saturated by the froth of the tide (that lunged at him like a yipping terrier all of a sudden, and receded seconds later because it was intimidated, only to make another rebound) his whole entire body caked with sand. The family Caravan crowds that had been swarming the beach earlier were rinsing away, baked by the scorching breath of the sun, miserable and exhausted. Day was shrugging off the shawl of its fluorescent charm, and twilight came in romantic pastel scribbles over the neverending horizon of the churning sea.

    All day long, Harlow had been snapping like a twig at the cock-eyed, aimless seagulls that dared to trot near his masterpiece. Now, they were in a group huddle several yards away, gossiping in screeches and caws like an amateur's sour musical notes. His sandcastle was this uncommonly sophisticated architecture; its anatomy was sculpted with careful fingers and seashells.

    Prepubescent teenage girls in their skimpy, string-tied bikinis had strutted by with indian-brown tans and tidal waves of highlights, muting their sprees of giggles into the open wombs of their hands through the entirety of the afternoon. There was something so very sickeningly cute about a modern day James Dean packing away at his sand castle as though it were the most important thing in the world. Harlow paid no mind, as their presence was just as trivial as the seagull's.

    Finally, he reclined onto his hands as a tent of support, and admired his fancy masterpiece. There was even a fucking moat. He had just enough time to pull his t-shirt back on when a little boy that couldn't have been older than seven strolled on by with his parents. They were hauling origami-folded beach chairs, and a chunky cooler, but his striped beach bag wasn't enough to stifle him.

    "Ma! Dad! Lookit his sand castle!"

    Harlow did his best to ignore the kid, he went as far as to blink up at the sky, searching for an answer to some hidden riddle in darkening clouds.

    "Mine's better though. Right, ma?" The boy arrowed a finger at a soggy, puddled castle molded by toy store buckets just down the way. His mother wearily nodded, and kept on sluggishly. The boy took just enough time to stick out his tongue before he rushed up to his mother's side again.

    Harlow's mouth hung open in disbelief. Slowly, he tripped to his feet, his hands like broomsticks, blotting away at all the sand. Casually, he ambled over to the boy's miniature castle. Bordering his thick mouth with a cupped hand to make his voice carry with reverb, he shouted.

    "Hey!"

    The trio stopped and pivoted halfway.

    Once he had their full attention, he started to stampede on the castle, flattening it to the ground until there was nothing left but memories. The entire family stared, gaping in sheer horror, but Harlow was grinning wolfishly like an officer with a brand-new, glimmering badge. His teeth only bared when the kid exploded into tears and waterworks.

  10. #20
    HB Forum Owner greedy fly's Avatar
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    This is not constitutional, but I've never been a morally upstanding citizen. I've felt my old nickname waning in the recent year considerably. I am no longer the brat prince. I've gone from episodic monotony to cloning each day. I go to work, I rattle timidly on the subway. I give lectures, I avoid argument or debate. I go crazy with my red tape. I bathe in bath salt, I soak in nostalgia until my skin is infant-red. But instead of rebirth, I just feel the weight. Chance is gone now, he is not coming back. He was not resurrected in Christian. I know that now. Christian is a different person. Of course, I was stubborn and openly resisted him. But I'm going to have him. Why? Because he is worthwhile, because I'd like to see his lips sore after he kisses me. My bed is inanimate, but no matter how hard I try to shuffle the white sheets on the left side of the bed, it refuses to budge. It knows already that the right side will hold an indent, and the right side only. I despise being so predictable. The wall clock mocks me, as does my litter box of cologne. There is no one to impress.

    But I will impress you, my darling. I'm sorry if this will scare you. If I get away with it, you'll wake every morning with 'thank you' hanging like a thread on your lips.

    I know that the act has to be impulse. There is no success in slow and calculating. I've always known that.

    I will have you, though. That is the ending to this story.

    Because I said so.

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