bite me.

you're having a good dinner with a good friend.  a medium rare hamburger, blue cheese fries, sharp vinaigrette on the crisp mixed greens, conversation about things and stuff and whatever. 

you bite the burger, chew it and bite the inside of your lower lip.  you bite it once and yelp a little from the pain and the surprise that you'd actually bite your own tender flesh.  you taste a little blood that mixes badly with the blue cheese, but you don't bleed long enough to confuse your taste buds.

you're talking and eating and eating and talking and you intrude upon your own chatter with a forkful of salad and you bite the inside of your lower lip again, in the exact place as the first bite.  fuck.  the vinaigrette burns the bitten skin, you sip ice water and swoosh it. you notice your friend pretending not to notice your lips are leaking liquids.

you engage in an inner dialogue: stop. listen to him. eat and listen. chew and swallow, THEN speak.  but the verbal exchange animates; it cannot be constructed or controlled.

and you bite the inside of your lower lip AGAIN, as if you had been programmed from birth for this precise moment when, during this very meal, your teeth would meet in the wrong place at the wrong time and bite the meat of your mouth with the meat in your mouth in multiples.

you say nothing of this to your friend, but the meal is over for you.  your tongue wants only to run back and forth along the inflamed bump, to soothe the bitten nerves, to protect your inner lower lip from further massacre.  your mind can contain no other thoughts.

you know the drill: the healing will only take a day or so.  saliva is a miracle balm.  you will remember this evening -- the luscious hamburger, the lively intercourse, and the repeated injuries caused by that very combination -- as long as your tongue can find the wound.

but the wound will heal.  there will be another conversation during another meal.

or you can shut up and starve.

3 minutes of madness.

i am nothing but trouble. the good kind of trouble, in which you think you might have fun if you just close your eyes and pretend you've made a promise you can keep so they will throw an old-fashioned ticker tape parade in your honor with your arms open wide enough to catch the moon before it drops behind the mountain where you've hidden treasures that can only be detected by magic spectacles made of candy glass and chicken wire by the brainiac with the golden heart and the dog who resembles groucho marx without the moustache while smoking a cigar that was rolled by nimble cuban fingers in the back room of a cottage snuggled on the eastern shore of lake champlain as it spits sun perch into the fryer for a supper planned well in advance of the ice floes slipping into view from a pigeon-crusted rooftop straight out of hitchcock's damaged soul that rocked the gown worn by the late blonde when she reached for the receiver and asked for mercy on the morning everything we love about macaroni and cheese became a poster child for the past sins of omitted quotations attributed to the twains and nary the twains of longing and hope in the midst of melted irish butter on a stack of platters playing songs that remind us of who we love and why we would rather breathe.