Giving Aphrodite a run for her rubies would have been easy for you, you are, after all, a postmodern sex goddess. I tried to penetrate the day, but the hours skipped ahead somehow removed from where we sat watching reruns of the Real World.

I thought about Puck. Where did he go after the show? Falling through the darkness, I am terrified of my own crucifixion, which had already begun the day I left my bike on your front porch.

Crushed by love and by war, I miss the stories we used to tell each other at night. I felt ashamed when you said yes. The old man died. You smiled.

“Bitter glory runs in our family,” you said.

There was something I wanted from you – a poor boy’s pale arm – or something like that, I can’t remember.

Do I smell ginger drifting down from the front line?

Internet porn makes life more reasonable when you realise it’s the sub context we think things through, at least for the upwardly mobile anyway, who think it’s erotic to see the source of our modern souls play acted on blackened screens.

“Who would you like to see naked?” I ask her, mildly amusing myself.

“I’d like to see Carl Jung naked while he’s explaining the concept of the collective unconscious and the connection between darkness and vampires and Internet porn that focuses on anuses and amateurs and overweight little freakish Italian men in high heels.”

Sometimes when she talks to me that way, I wish I was a werewolf slayer, like Buffy only buffer.

Why is she here lap dancing me to tears of delight and reverie? I recognise her whore’s eyes now – eyes that attract and dominate and devour time and the handful of people strolling through the garden in the early morning. I listen to her laughter. Boulders roll and chime beneath the current of music whispered to the dead. Like Bruce, I’m on fire. I pray to her in anger hoping she’ll cool my desire. Secretly, I know she will.

She’s a benevolent demon, my petulant little postmodern sex goddess.