MK-135

Perhaps a dream is special only because no one is there, breathing in your hair, explaining as you go.

We watch the surveillance video in the basement office. Ice skaters, black rink. Spotlights following the inexpert skaters. City skaters-- regular people, at leisure. Metro ice arena. Lodz the Dalmacian; blond Lodz the Moral, tells me something is wrong. Look at the way this man is skating. I watch the icy parabolas carve onscreen. A bladed foot kicks something out of the circle of light, following the sweatered, scarved, hatless man. A skittering echo-- something frozen lost in the black of the rink. The albedo is too much to see anything. Surely the skaters, gliding in their tracking moons, would have been able to avoid debris-- I say this to Lodz. That is not what happens, he tells me. Look. How is he Dalmacian? I keep looking. This is City feed-- public network linked to grungy CCTV likely unupgraded since Gretsky inspired the local junior high hockey team to get out on the ice. Central location-- down on the pedestrian mall. Good food trucks down that way. Meat on sticks and pho bleeding heat and fragrance into the City's winter dose.

Lodz gets me to pay attention real close now-- he elbows me with his bent wristback gently. He adjusts the contrast. I lean into the display. Clearly, I watch the blades of the man skating slice off most of a hand, outstretched on the ice, penetrating the spotlight cone just for a moment. I freeze, Lodz' hand still pressing. The skater gracefully continues his arc, trailing blood behind. He picks up speed and slashes a ragged torso farther along-- a headless, dismembered trunk, ragged with detaching ribbons of bloody connective tissue. The hunk of chest and meat is heavily lacerated and kicked spinning away by the skater's blades. The man falters, then recovers, as if completely automated. Reeling, I realize the other spotlit skaters are also chopping bodies apart with their blades, as if they were not even there. Not just chopping-- killing, then cutting up, again and again, but without any recognition. I watch as a middle-aged woman in a puffy silver coat gashes a small boy in the throat as he lies on the ice. She just, up! Hops a little and slices clean through his neck. Gouts of steaming blood burble out in a spreading red fan just caught in the last flash of her tracking light.

There's a party you need to infiltrate. I want you to locate a certain Bad Hombre. Lodz is talking. I have questions. MK-135 says Lodz. It's a rust-inhibiting coining and deburring lubricant used in parts manufacture. It also causes automatic behavior like this. It's... been found. Adulterated mangoefflour juice. I need you to get to the adulterer. The Bad Hombre.

The female body is tight on me as I mingle. I have to keep drinking little doses of some chemical that keeps my real shape from showing too much. The party is a holiday party, everyone in thick sweaters, lots of drinks, lots of punch bowls. I gather samples for Lodz. Why is his name Lodz? He is clearly an American. The Americans want a way in to the City. I am probably working for the CIA. My breasts are too large and I can't see what I'm doing. I try to mingle. I siphon samples of punches and liqueurs on the sly with thin syrettes. This is a J.G. Ballard. This is a Lieber. This is penile inversion, an itchy garden. Inflammatory dream. In the crystal bowls and pitchers I can see sediments. Vodka and mangoefflour juice. The Bad Hombre corners me at the folding table with a vinyl tablecloth with little English flowers around the edges. I begin to panic. I see the look on Bad Hombre's face. He is dark tan, Welsh and Sicilian, with black, ugly hair like Mr. Brady from The Brady Bunch. He notices a male face emerging from behind my female disguise. He wants to rape the real me out of the false me. Hastily I pour myself a glass of vodka mangoefflour, toss in my last vial of infiltration serum with a shrug, and break the tension with a slurp. Bad Hombre seems satisfied. I'm automatic too. Get me outta here, Lodz, I mutter.

It's like being born again, in the back of the surveillance van. Lodz watches as the female body changes, as I emerge in her face, as my corners come back and hers decline. I'm squirted out the top of her head, like toothpase brains through a fontanelle. Like a sea cucumber. He says something about time being real. About the speed of Paradise. About bleeding and heavy, heavy breath. About parting dark curtains. Something that hides a mosaic. The Mosaic of Disorientation.

He drops me off at the ice rink. I lace up my skates.

STAYFREE

Shroud of desire, pink baby, buried at sea-- buried by waves, saline, bromine, butoh ghost-- dime of the moon, swirling in chisels, course-grained faces of the water, faces of the nil child, disrobed and then macerated by eons' broad lace-- faces of the killed, of purple maple and yellow, faces of yarn, knit with guilt, faces of the dogs, throats whistling "Ona, Ona, Ona-ei!" My leaky chaplain, stutterer of months, bruised and bitten, limping and burdened by the broad book-- a dime and a dime fed into his slot-- he whirs mechanoid hymns, guzzles the agony unwrapping the drowned infant-- spreads his coat and lets the animals feed, lets his milk saturate the delta of the exit of thought-- whistles hollow life-- screeches hollow sendings, mapping back up the river of inflammation toward glaciers of numb dissociation-- his semen is sewing machine oil, squirted in the stack of a toy train. White smoke rings puff gently away, spelling Ona, Ona, Ona-ei.

Mystery child, mystery fetus, mystery abortion, mystery made amniocentesis by chugged word, by linking work with wish, clasping itself-- blue child now, blue swallowed by a snake-- pink and blue feeder mouse, down down and pooching out gravity's gullet, through phase space for peacocks, spelling the names of life in the broad book. Ona-ei, drowned child. Drowned, choked lust, want, drowned reaching, drowned song. The same way the store mouse fetches its food, Ona, fetching the bottom of the sea. Half-dime of moon, silly letters gummed black by intervening time, by weight, by pressure. Black, black are the worms of eidetic geometry as the infant skull caves in, fontanelle squirting like toothpaste, like sea cucumber, inky blank now in mock camouflage, rest, rest, examine your rest.

And this is the rest then, a dodge, a flipper, a duck, a wipeout. A blackout. A memory dodge, memory pills, a writing, scrawled by lasers-- the hologram haunts as sight pulls away, revealing the globe in its evil totality, in its twists, its anisotropy-- false specular heavens teeter through, the body chooses such angular aspects so as to comfort itself-- it finds all things to be true-- finds the guts pretzeled and wrung out over continents, boiled in salty seas, the neck cut open and roaring, gargling its own contents like a puppet volcano-- the stare of reality crazily insists it is really real, really simultaneous, really operationally overloaded, really recursive, enfolded by flags and shrouds and demon wings and crowned by an orbiting ring of human gore-- a baby in a gyre, equatorial and gross, a peppered eyeball retching tears, naked in the construct.

There will be no coming back.

GILEAD

How lies the City today?

It lies. It lies and that is all.

From the catapult of youth to the catcher of age, the hurler-back of memory, all a distribution; all an extant history; all a plot, a histogram, a statistical Lord-- Sparrow Christ emerges, robed in industrial paint, carbon fiber, fullerene dust on his shoulders, and plastic wire, chartreuse, gilding his hem. He yawns and beholds the dawn sky. A yellow dawn. A flock of rushing fingers, punching through the stratosphere to dip, brushlike, into the coughed clouds arching overhead. A morning like another morning, blue black and with wan orange bruises; inflammation of part of a mute sky, a mourning dove beating its soft music against the clinging air. A morning of hydrocarbons, their precursors, their chemical afterimages, hexing grimaces in the trees, the ground squirrels hunched and hypoxic. A morning of tetragrams, of randomized puzzles, of lost blood, lost time, hemmorhagic keys, of love's conformal suck, of cosmic dust.

Ecce homo. The Lord, Jesus Christ himself takes a long drag on his cigarette, exhales blue smoke slow across the neutral panel of green gray black, watching it swirl against the pine wall. He knows all formulae, every eddy and Lorenz function, every mote, caught in the dew of spiderwebs only seen in his cat-like ultravision. Considering the holiness, the power, the righteous being radiating from his Lordly countenance, it is easy to forget he is made of sparrows. Such genius. Such loving genius in that flock of chirruping, shitting, mite-ridden short-lived birds.

I nod at the Lord. He nods back, then looks off, dragging again. Kicks his foot and shuffles, coolly. I make my way to the Dollar Store to buy a 9mm pistol. I'm gonna kill myself today, and Jesus thinks that is just okay. Jesus is just alright. Jesus loves you more than you will know. Jesus is my friend. Jesus is the catcher, the waiter, the first responder, the 9-11 cop, the fireman, the emergency planner, the disaster relief agency, the watchdog, the regulatory commission, the NGO humanitarian medical task force, the UN, every Robin Williams character.

It's gonna be alright. You always get what you deserve, in the end.

I walk past an old lady in rags, propped up against a building with smoke rolling out of the windows. Like an office building. She holds out her cup and tries to tell me poetry in Arabic but I don't understand. I give her five dollars, and she doesn't even notice. She has no teeth. Huge liver spots cover her face. I smell farts, I think. I sit down and take the vodka out of my bag. I pass it to her but she waves it away, admonishing me with more poetry. I drink. Three big swigs in succession. I feel the demon power soak through me like wading up to my crotch in a pool of hot jizz. I feel the raw malice steeling my frame. I'm ready to kill. To fuck. To be obliterated. But I just sit there, remembering, with her. It must be horrible to be old, and to remember everything. I say this to her, and she just smiles. I know there is something she has learned about life, something that gives her a kind of peace-- or maybe perspective. Something to rest against, like a building slowly being consumed by fire still offers some solidity. I know what she knows is something I will never learn. It makes me cry. Tears erupt from my eyes. I swallow more vodka. The old woman grabs her belongings and hurries away from me. My shirt gets soaked from my tears. I keep drinking until the vodka is all gone. Then I get up and continue, the other way. I wipe my face with my bare hand, and then I wipe my hand on my pants. All I can think is, how am I gonna hide this?

It's a desolate road, through a run-down business zone. There is a mini-highway for a stretch, and I clamber up the embankment to the bridge connecting the roadway to the countryside way, way down. Hardy grasses and cordlike plants, some remaining thistles, some goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace. I get a few burrs in my shoelaces, stop to dig them out. I hear the unmistakeable roar of skidding tires, and I look up, freaked out. A few hundred meters, a black car wrecks out, shrieking and blasting itself through a fence, down the bank, and flips over and over. I watch in shock, in horror, in disbelief as a body flies into the air like a chewtoy tossed by a dog, and slams back into the sparse, long grasses. I take off running. The car is pancaked. Vapor streams from it and it hisses and rumbles as the engine dies. I look for the driver. I see a crumpled pile of something. I run. Running. Sliding. Tripping. It's a woman. Heavyset with dark skin and long hair. her face is smashed open. She has a cranial avulsion and her brains are scattered in little piles around her. Her limbs are twisted and bones are stabbing through her dress. The smell of ruptured bowel assaults me. I vomit like crazy, turn away and just puke and puke. It's a few minutes before I can stand to look at her. Her eyes are just... staring up. Like, she is looking at the ceiling. Not the sky, but something closer, above her. I can almost imagine her eyes tracking something. Imagine her eyes tracking... her lover. Her mother. A movie on Netflix. A mobile game. The rushing road, right before she lost control. She is undoubtedly dead. I stoop a little closer. No brains in there. None. She opens her mouth, looks right at me.

AGHAAHAGGGAHHAALLAHHAALLAHHAHGGAAAGGA

I fall back, dumbfounded. I pick myself and run. I don't stop running. I fall, crazily without ground under me, down into a drainage ditch. I hit my forehead on a rock. Lights out.

I wake up in the parking lot behind the Dollar Store. I'm a mess. Blood is crusting my hair and it's all over my fingers. I'm holding a gun. It's bright orange, like a capgun, but I open it up. Looks like real bullets. Like a .38 like the cops used to carry. I stick it in my mouth and pull back the hammer. I try to pull the trigger, but something snaps. My finger breaks. I take out the gun and look. My finger was just a dry thing, hollow inside. I watch, fascinated, as little white mites pour out of the hole. Stream out of me like... automata... like purposeful sperm. They carry  themselves in waves over my body, exiting my finger hole in uniform pulses. Soon I'm covered. As they begin to consume my flesh, I see the Lord. He's pushing a cart full of plastic bottles and crushed beer cans. Probably gonna get his deposit back from the Dollar Store. He waves, then goes in to see the cashier.

AXON

What's the matter?

I--think I'm injured.

What's wrong? Where are you hurt?

I'm bleeding. I was in bed and I felt it. Bleeding, so much, it was like a pool around me.

I don't see any blood.

I'm bleeding time.

Bleeding time?

Yes. Like it's a liquid, just pouring out of me everywhere. Loads of it. I think-- something bit me.

Like... an insect? An animal? Something in your bed?

No. I mean, not really. It was-- when I was-- younger. I must have started bleeding then.

Well... I mean, what exactly happened?

I was on the floor, on my back. Something-- came-- out of the white of the ceiling-- at me.

Like a spider?

Well. I mean maybe, but huge. I couldn't see all of it, just its head, and some long things like legs, anchoring it to the other walls-- but--

Go on...

It was invisible. Like, like its shape was there, but its surfaces were just copies of whatever was behind it. I didn't even see it until it had come down right on top of me. I had my eyes wide open, and it just-- lunged-- at me.

What did you do?

Nothing. I was-- paralyzed, I think. It filled up my whole vision, and then it said my full name in my own voice. And it-- bit me. In my mind. Somewhere in my mind. And all this time it just kept bleeding inside me.

Bleeding time, you said.

Yes, exactly.

But isn't time just a... an illusion? A consequence of being made of matter?

No.

It isn't?

Time is real. It is more precious than your blood. And things-- something-- hunted me down for it. I think it has been following me for years. I-- see it sometimes, against the ceiling corners, waiting to drink from me.

But... But what IS it?

Acompheacmocmecniaz.

What??

You asked me what it is. That is what it is. It told me.

I thought it just said your name.

It's my name too. Just-- the negative of it. Like a-- reciprocal function of my name. An inversion maybe. I heard it, in the spaces, between the phonemes, when it used my voice, to say my name.

Are you in the bath tub again?

Yes.

Burning your feet?

Yes. I only feel good in here now, and for a little bit after. I have had three today.

Try to get some sleep.

Yeah.

DA LI JE ONO

Work calls me on a Saturday. They can't find the country ham. It's in the fridge. I tell them it's there, and they are then able to recognize it. Fatah is running a leaf blower three inches away during the phone call. I hang up.

I'm still sick. I felt headachey when I got up, but not horrible. Then it's like I remembered something and the fatigue shot back through me like a vaccine. Curing me of any ambition. I'm a rat at sea on a piece of floating wood, passing out, waking up, watching the land of my life get further away as I get drenched and then cooked over and over by the waves and the bastard sun. Fungus from the wood is reprogramming me, replacing my cells with its rank bloom. I've been dreaming, tossed in my sleep. Themes all knotted together like an octopus in tetany, in freak spasm. Familiar faces who were secret encounters, incognito cameos earlier in the story, now revealed as agents in secret roles, filling as many holes in the mechanic as they then create. Lines of narrative, world tracks in a fever bulk. But a cold fever. No gauze, just razor brite.

Yesterday I forgot to take the cats back to the vet for their second shots. I will have to call and tell them I have been horribly sick. They'll understand. They'll let me off the hook.

I get back in the bathtub. I'm not even really sick. I just don't have energy. I keep thinking of Peter Watts' parable of the woman who died of thirst, not because she couldn't see the water faucet, but because she couldn't recognize it.

I let the water burn my feet. I just keep them in there, burning, getting redder. The nerves are like pampered slaves, reluctantly and with much shuffling of feet, carrying their message of banal pain to the big house. Infoweb. Neobiology. Shunt topology. Knot theory. All happening serially with the pig blood, rat blood, bird blood pooching out my body meat.

Somehow, nothing really changes. Things just become less and less recognizable to me.

The one thing I keep coming back to-- of the pistol gagging me, of the maybe tears it would bring to my eyes, of the romance of the clitoral trigger attached to the phallic weapon, and sucking it, fingering it, like the last lover. It's like hugging a pillow, to imagine it.

Zzzz

DARK EMERALD, RED TRIANGLE

Don't wake up

Lonely times, pilgrim. Turns out, there isn't even anyone to laugh at you, when it's all over. No smug face of God, no aw-shucks fingersnap of Satan. There's just Your face, crying on its little pillow in a dark room, any room.  Oh but there are demons galore, circumscribing the night caught by your pretty lids. Underneath. Inside. Dark emerald turns its face bloody with polygonal sweat. Blood? Is it tears, or drops of blood, that someone is weeping? How tragic to write oneself into a dream, only to ape Christ there too. His letters red, your letters blue. Your blue letters to the widow, stuffing your pillow like swollen feathers. The emerald demons with red, triune eyes-- a columnar array enfolds the widow in wings, enfolds her wings of devotion, her paper wings with love's scribbles.

Are you God? Why?

A corpse can think. It realizes it was right or wrong. It has plenty of time. A corpse knows we all go back to God, one way or another. Love or hate, widow or demon, no one can leave him out of their picture. If God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent his widow. A corpse has enough time, but you don't. You are ruining the paper giving you rest. Soaking the pillow cradling your dead skull. Your skull shines through your face like dark emerald. Your mouth was always a few triangles, worn against some kind of loss. I am a polygon now. I am a Platonic solid's corpse. I am a higher-order shape's widow, just like you. You are me and that is what is killing us. We are evil.

Sometimes the eyes open a little, to let in more fresh gauze, to sop the oozing of the head. The head that trickles oozes, that flows down a high face, a hard thing, cutting randomly a channel ooze, an oxbow's caress in the hour of the ox, crucifying sweet curses on the crucifix of the corpse's face's crux, opening the bloom of silent sight.

A corpse has plenty of time.

Don't wake up

CUCK

I listen to the fake music in these voices. I listen to the histrionics, the coos, the slide-whistle delivery of all slack-faced bitches, of mutterers on the mushmouthed go, of jittering, McCafe-dunked goatees of men too stupid to despair of themselves. Are you an American? Yes shit, Sherlock. Up and down, like a stooge hand hypnotizing another stooge, setting up the slap, the dismal nutgrab of serial stuttering pukes into its relentless broadcast, riding the carrier wave of promised violence like a dollar-menu hooker, each attempted speech act a resurrected abortion wiped back against the burst hymen of the ears. I fail and fail. I wither. I shrink in the presence of the 50-ish tanned devils and their sensible jewelry. I cut open my shirt with artless life, baring myself towards the loaded benches, pews, booths, stinking of taupe flower vomit-- of foundation, of fake hay, of wall treatments, studio backdrops, of cagey deathsquad eyes fiddling through soccer moms' skulls like maniac totenkopfs, dunkelgelb pantsuits, Carharts, and the bone-numbing, mechanized roar of their excuses for children. Here is my chest. Just put the spear in me.

See if my meat has reached a foodsafe temperature.

There is no sense of loss-- there never has been even one moment past, nothing passed away, nothing forgotten, nothing wasted-- none of this was ever any different. I have lost only the ability to defend myself against such insistent life. I didn't last long. Didn't have the stuff, stuffing me. I am damage. I am wounds. I am dysfunction, wearing clothes.

I'm worse than anyone. I know how to be quiet.

The clock strikes the magic moment-- here I am, unwilling to wish again. I listen sometimes, to the birds. I listen to the People. The People never ask me anything-- they just reach at me and grab on full auto zombie. Every utterance is a play of wind for anything other than its own timbre. A defence. An interposed move. A hedge against some scary future in which I erupt and kill it. Against the bloody mess I make. Talking for its own sake, having no preconception or intention, just to destroy silence. Just to pretend something ever happens. Someone walks into a room and shuts down anything beautiful before it can be born. I see her sometimes, behind my eyes-- the widow in a niqab of tetany, hanging out of a dead horse's vagina. I need to start drinking again as soon as possible to save my soul. I guess I won't.

HEY, is there enough sugar in the fucking house? My god, how on earth are you 300 fucking pounds and counting, you fat shit. I am the enemy of sugar and television. I have no irony left. This is how I go out-- against these least demons. Nevermind truth, or love, or beauty after all. Sugar and noise, taken out in a suicidal blossom. It takes all the blood in one poet to eliminate one bag of Twix, Snickers, Milky Way, and Three Musketeers minis. Rate of exchange. Are you an American? This is your world. You fat shit.

We are precious, oh so precious, in our cotton puffs. Our cottony, moist butt-puffs. Little precious tufts. Candy pump. Cotton pup, cunny pop. Puffy pussy, lovey luffs, little giggle homey niche knockers. Little beddy warmfluffs. Little buttcakes. Waggle tush. Wadding wiggle, a beddy giggle, a safey blanky. Fluffy bear buffy butt, a moist chew. Good chew! A bubble, a foamy patty smooth, oh smooth! Frosting cheaty, icing oops!  Butt-butt patty-- safety scissors and rainbow warnings, patty tummy. A puffy niceman, touchy frills. A shopping rainbow. A retail razzle. Nice munchy man, spreading treats. A bunch of honey crunch humps. Chewy dazzle-- Good dazzle! A nicey dad and happy mum, helping dad! Handy dad! Peeping sleepers in a country quilt. A poppy home, a snoozy sofa. Light sleepy, light goofs. A wiggle in the stuffing, a bunch of money. A tip-up oops! A two-glass haha. A movie puff. A stay-here butt-pat. Dressing-gown moo gown! Good gown! A team. Moving money sizzles. Wallet drizzle. Happy peeps, mopey teen-tut. A stacky-mart food hut! Grizzly dadcar! Flossy sleeps, gargly breakfasts. Nuggy chunks, woozy sips, sleepy creeps in sizzle-sun. Hey it's me, what are you doing? Phoning you by phoney home fun, by healthy funsex, by health phone. A tickly textpat, a puffnest, a seat pat, a pillow pit. A woozy widdle war crime; a teensy thought cime. Good mom! Good dad! Cruelty-guilty free, Whiskers and Spot! A cozy little hot spot! A home!

To be a thing it is like something to be. To fuck an electric oven. To face-sit the stove burner. To mutilate a lolling, gummy corpse. To fuck a lover. To fate, to fate with the Internet. Magical cum-circuit of eternal lust. Springboard of dreamspring, of fuckfall, of fatewinter. Alternative shiteat. Savior of discerning idiots. Not like the People. Our mouths drop in amazement at the Hitler Jugend, still eating annual pies. Still with funnel cake, with corn cob, with pig and horse. The hotdog of time is a limp penis. Force its meatus on the burner, to the coil! Brand shut the spurting dick of time! We're not better. I am the worst. I am going to hell. I said nothing has ever happened and I mean it. I'm your enemy, and don't you forget it.

Are you an American? This is your world.

You fat shit.

CHELM

The map of the City changes each night, but the main features of its plan, its intent, are always there. My clouds of sparrows operate as distributed camera networks-- simple screeching retinal dirtstorms sampling the topography of surface streets and freeways, skyways, and bridges. Bridges to somewhere I'd still be familiarly unwelcome. My little bushgangs of birds tower up and hunch above the traffic cameras, bending double like wretching Christ, scrambling to pull the plug on his slated reboot, but rooted, frozen in dipshit shock at his own handiwork. Unable to unsee the orthography of the streets as they route themselves in blasphemies and obscene curlicues, glinting in the fool's gold sun.

I watch the spans of the toll bridges spread away in their arcs, delimiting the river in chopped up parts-- a great serpent strangled by stone block thighs. The legs of the freeway are always spread wide, in pretensioned labor-- tapeworm masses of interchanges stretching open like lips, like birthing mouths-- there are the crowning heads of trash monoliths, about to mewl, about to suckle, about to factor themselves into our calculus. Sparrow Christ pulls out his beard one whisker, one infected feather at a time and drops them behind, a trail for his movements, his housecalls; roving, trying to catch each birthed bundle like the Great Physician should, but he has no hands because he is made of stupid birds. I record everything he shows me in my files; wait for my next chance to sleep.

I kill the connection. I stretch back far in my broken chair, pretending to relax for no one in particular. I don't need to look anymore. The topology is always the same, even if the map changes. The features of the City are merely externalizations of the scriptures writing themselves inside us-- merely an expression of something unsayable, like some greying spectrum of decayed qualia; like some metastatic, dragonesque heart. I try to imagine what passes for love here-- some specialized form of protracted, asymmetrical combat. A low-intensity proxy war. Bleak beacons beating out to each other and bludgeoning each other numb with encrypted pulses, as vehement as they are uncrackable; message content jellied to noise-- only metadata; frequency, number of hops, time-to-death, packet size, nodal origin, transmission protocol, hardware signatures, nude microwaves-- none of the poetry everyone supposes is inside. No actual communion. Everyone dragging their heavy weapons through spiritual mud, cutting permanent trenches in it, from the flat, sprawled shitshow of the pan-faced outskirts, all the way in through the meat, through the cytoskeleton of the megapolis, to its grand nucleus-- the double horns of the twin towers, sucking off the light in mute, negative flashes, wreathed in flexing tendrils of champagne mustard vesicant. A beating heart in sustained collapse-- or maybe there is final destruction somewhere. Somewhere even here perhaps the infinite dwells-- in some sub-basement between rental trucks stuffed with fertilizer explosives, there is a singularity, couched in mountain ranges of denial and black-body gloom, slowly sipping all this away, as we just can't help but mattress-surf its slowly shrinking horizon.

CENTESIS

I know where they keep Satan locked up. He's disassembled, in large pieces, behind fences with razorwire and gates that are closed at night. During the day you can go visit his head, stashed between event trailers and some junkers baking in the sun. He is missing his jaw-- he is reduced to a massive, LaVeyan cranium with squinting, pupilless eyes; cheeks tightened in a grin half excised and stuffed elsewhere in lockdown. Somewhere there his batwings and barbed tail are mothballed too, but I never bothered to look. I never bothered to go inside to pay my respects. I just drive by, several times a week. I'm always driving somewhere, aren't I?

Yesterday I drove in the almost-countryside. There was a house with a yard hidden from the road by willows and mulberry trees. I could see through in one place, into a zone of our double murder. Piles of broken white plastic furniture, shaded blue by the diffuse light from the bluegrass. A cold-place blue-- an outer-blue place I could never go. A part of the world blue where You don't exist. Erasure blue. Investigation is the vector of the curse. Ushi no toki mairi. Investigation is the breaking of the curse. Witnesses, witnesses. Inversions. Now you are writing the spells and I'm stabbing your doll. Right in the heart. Drawing down your breath. Breaking the rules. This morning I Iooked up at the sheets of rain, and I saw shiranui in the sky, through the rook ramparts of the heavy trucks waiting to crush me out like a cigarette, or like a beetle. I'm so used to being watched I don't even notice. It's nothing. I'm nothing. Just a messenger, like Ayesha, only clothed in noctuidae.

Ashes of thought. Of will. Mosquitos have become so small that you can't even see them against the grey grey light we are left with. Their centesis is the vector of our disease. All my blood's blue has gone to murder and be murdered. I have mislaid its chroma key. I'm being sampled, bitwise, having my bloody points described so I can be mathematically turned inside out like an obscene manifold. I'm a surface made of other surfaces, like a patchwork of gore. I'm both your patchwork woman and raw material for your next quilt. Practice for your next fatal psychosexual suicide pact. Who will take Satan out of his cage and put him back together? All the king's horses, no doubt. Here is the red wide way then, raw and bleeding; here is the militant illuminated in laser light-- all that is left is for you to strike. Abort and terminate in one release.

A possible semiosis is that aspect of an octopus which reaches into elsewhere; blue broken yards where we do not exist. Razor yards penetrated by its searching tentacles, shunting my curses, hostelizing fear and certainty of decay-- biting with its beak, back into the apple of love's promise, strangling with its inky braided intentionalities our protesting necks, shuffling away, collapsing, and dealing out certain other fictions-- other cards drawn against the rules, against secret conduct in condemned half-lives. Lucy rising with nipples bloody, bitten hard by crooked teeth-- hard-edged angels with plastic swords, hollowing out pumpkins with guarana firebreath, to lay at olied, nymphal feet. To guard the holy flaming triple fuckscene as the ragamuffin hordes slump past.

All yards are beds, all beds are windows, all windows are open graves. Blessed be the gawkers.

S ORI 52

Everything happens infinite times. Has already happened, somewhere in our eternal past. Ask Susskind, not me. All I have are fictions. Maybe we really are coasting the mobius; maybe we'll come again. Sometimes planets are ejected from their birth systems-- some cataclysm with no witnesses but themselves. They wander frozen through the dark, barely changing. Only a few particles and some radiation for company. Sometimes they encounter vagabonds like themselves, passing silently, with a terrible gulf protracting their boundary influences. But sometimes they pass so close, they feel what it is like to be each other, and they become entangled. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they fuck, roped together and grinding in a fatal, final companion arc-- tidal forces awakening geothermic flows. Lava ice, lava cum-- geysers of it, spalling out into silver wedding rings, locked in a Cat's Cradle of gravitational lovemess.

But then what?

KAKONYM

Maybe evil is merely a lack of vision.

Just in case, I remain attentive, even vigilant when I can muster such a stance; I am the custodian of filthy visions in oil-stained cement floors, chemically altered halos, cigarette bonfires, dingy exterior stucco spattered with bleaching agents, particle board tangrams, gravel and pavemented parking lots, corrupted by weeds. I sit in the garage, unfocus my eyes, and wait for the next crest of the nightmare to swell. Emerge. Emerging. Arising from that spot where we are all blind as mole rats, where the cunning architecture of the eye is marred by the fished-through cabling of the optic nerve. This negative zone, this sulcus of sight, from which all abominations ook forth. They begin to enact their dharma in my vision like tutting, tearful pontiffs subtending a large masterwork painting, rising from the blotchy stains on the floor-- emerging echoes of The Battle of Alexander at Issus and Dynamism of a Soccer Player interfere with and chop one another up into a vortex of art-object debris. Several flies investigate and are caught up within the swirl of lightlike angular momentum-- all housed in a single plane, yet reaching out to me in cunningly wrought holography-- a waking dream before me. I hum a nothing tune, pretending to ignore its wiles. Maybe I don't want to watch this time. The obscene clanking uproar of a garbage truck shits down the street, dunking turd after turd of post-consumer offal into itself with its hookshot robot arm. The maelstrom teeters, threatens to divest itself from the world of vision. I'm starving myself, I think. I focus hard on the knife in my belly-- the autosurgery is well underway-- can't quit it without losing the patient. Doc, am I gonna make it? Don't bullshit me! Give it to me straight, Doc. Et cetera.

I snort and choke on faux gusts, sneezing up spores and dust. A heavy, earthen breath breaks out of my lungs-- cellar smells and earth-wet flavors of bedewed mushroom heads drooping in low grey light-- I've been colonized; a janitor-apostle peddling fungal apocrypha between vomit mop-ups. Maybe I should leap from my chair and run-- run through the tripwires set by spiders in the night, unbelievably long ones, silver lines cast in lucky breezes, flashing like razor edges against the mundane lozenges of American yards. Unspool the wires of the weed eaters... choke out the chumps wielding them... wipe out the gasoline tongues tanging the dirt; the phonemes of flies, the hapless cellphone convos yammering ceaselessly under business casual planes cruising the smug blue envelope of sky. It's a nice day to destroy. The wreckage in my chest smashes against itself, independent bergs of garbage floating on a violent saline-spittle sea. I still see the moth from this morning, the orange one, flapping on the floor, peppering the air with little orange scales, never gonna fly again, you. I'll leave you to your agony's long, slow attenuation.

She steps out of the art vortex, just like I knew she would. I'm ready I guess, bludgeoned into submission by all the rampant distraction. I've got my pen, ready to describe, and not much else. Not even a hangover. My eyes are plastic bags, lazily and inexpertly filled with Halloween candy. My penis and scrotum are afterthoughts, like bad lines jotted on the phonebook cover of my body. My chocolaty eyes grow huge at her shape, appearing, scissoring into the universe. Her lips are a copulating pair of pseudoplusia includens. Her chin and neck, forged in gradients of Nebuchadnezzar's electrum dream. Her splayed, encompassing arms are snaking towers constantly both falling apart and being rebuilt, with dark hairs like scaffolding. Her fingers are long, squawking hooked bills, each holding some kind of alien nut in its jealous, bifurcated grip. Her head is shaven close, with white stubble, and crowning her is a floating, black ziggurat, rotating in space like a 3-D model, casting aliased shadows that break on her brow. Her breasts are avocados that cut themselves open, revealing large pits and green-yellow fatty flesh, then reseal without seam their bumpy dark rinds, over and over, turning and twisting the skin of her chest with them, never following the line of any previous cut. Her nipples orbit roughly where they ought to be, bite-size black licorice. Her skull is a white truck barreling towards me at top speed-- total approach, never arriving. She is murderous to behold, but I don't flinch. It wouldn't do. Eyes like the strobing muzzle flashes of automatic weapons track me on whining gimbals; ears, hourglasses of red ferrous sand, shrieking about my time running out; her bulging belly a clear aquarium-- a charnel-pit of sundered fetal parts, sloshing side to side as her coquette pelvis churns within the dervish, and tipping, spilling splotches of sizzling amniotic fluid and baby blood onto the floor, each stain a snapshot of a vulture in flight, snatched up and animated by the whirling art-devil undulating before me.

She castigates me:

Ho, supplicant! I am called your condemnatrix by you who shall one day wring me defiant into the world-- I am your dying wish-- I have come from your death bed where you lay in misery, flopping in fevers. Not so much older, mind you. Nevertheless! My bottle you did rub rightly, and usher unto you now in this time I shall, your own judgment. You who have stolen every moment, such there are none left for anyone else. All down your gullet like a grandiose drain on the bottom of the world. All through your pretty fingers-- how like a woman's they are! How golden your tongue through your fingertips in its fullness of bloom. Only just twice, or perhaps four times, did you surpass yourself in words. But you fueled your desires with ill-gotten time. All these precious, stolen moments, and now they are gone. Wasted. Vanished. None left for the world or even for the prayers of children. I have come for my bride-price, pilgrim!

Her accusation roars like an airliner through the garage-- I am deafened. Grit swirls in whips through the air, cutting my eyes, my mouth, sanding my hair. Am I supposed to understand her meaning? She clips forward a step, revealing through the swarm tattered scarlet taffeta robes, fragments of dresses, slips, skirts, scarves, all rioting with the holographic chaff of the miasmic paintings twisting in the confused air. Her body is revealed more and more in its ostentatious lunacy. Two crescent moons of hips about to kiss.

"I really don't know if I can pull this off!" I protest. Every five seconds, one of the dull denizens of the house rattles through the door, stumping and snuffling around for loose tobacco, utterly oblivious to the scene taking place. I can see, as if for the first time, a certain truth. They are coccooned in television halos, like condoms made of garish commercial broadcasts. I almost envy them their ignorance now, more than ever. Me? I'm a naked larva, wriggling and hurt by both the real and by dreams. My genitals vanish completely inside my abdomen. She seems to notice this fact beneath my clothes, and she smirks. Her face does appear to have normal skin, but it's broken out in heat bumps. I peer at it intently, trying to puzzle out if some kind of message or clue to her admonishings are in there, steganographically encoded in her blemishes. Deviation from mean distance, from mean size-- maybe at least Fibonacci's sequence in the number in each cluster. She wrinkles her nose in disgust. She takes another step forward. It's only then that my concentration is shattered with the awareness that her lower half, borne up, sure enough, by four, bone-white-but-fading-to-brown legs, is that of a horse.

How does one respond to the invective of a horse goddess? The alkies are still milling through the tableau, trying to interrupt me with chit-chat about the heatwave of recent weeks. The centaurine entity appears not to notice them either-- are these the enemies of contemplation? Have I stolen all their moments? Is that how people disappear? How many people have I deleted, five minutes here, ten minutes there, escaping wherever I was at the time-- whatever I was supposed to be doing, in daydreams? Did I destroy the human race through my thievery? Ridiculous!

I'm not sure I can pull this one off. I'm always stuck between a bunch of pricker bushes and some certain death, like a white delivery truck speeding past. Sometimes I even sit in my car, just to steal more moments. I'm really not made for this. I wish I was made to fuck-- to be a real fucker, and now I have no dick. I want to feel my cum shoot like some large animal's, bruising the cervix, massive impact on each fertile moon, way up inside the warp tubes of some bony Empress, but now my balls are gone, lost somewhere in my fat body like vagabond anal beads. I'm vulgar. A libertine in a blue-collar straightjacket. A demonic force more in sobriety than liquored up. Manic. Mentally unsound. If I ever did a good thing, I swear I didn't mean it. I was never any good for longer than a couple weeks. Because I always wanted to be somewhere else, right? Is that what life is? Is life just a few moments of pure rapture, and the rest just made up of drudgery and sprinkled, stolen moments of pining to get back there? Is that why Paradise is such a success? Did I really send this Great Horsey Scarlet Harlot back through time with my own dying old-man wish? Is that how the pity party really ends?

Am I on to something? Am I pulling myself off?

SOLIPSE

Emblazoned with a four, a numeral made of knives, having one more than necessary, the coffin hums with motor vibration. Inside a cranium is being cleaned by suckling drapery; fringed arrays of tubular frills, siphoning away the meat from maxilla and zygomatic; from occipital and temporal, with the loving selection of delicate organisms filtering and feeding. It feeds on the flanks, the cheeks of the body. It feeds on the arms, the legs, the feet. It feeds on the face, and the cheeks on the face are the cheeks of the face, like the flanks are the cheeks of the body. Cheeks that would rise in a too-generous smile (never quite overcoming the eyes) are hollowed out, along with all the meat of the body, in time. In time, only the churning fist of maggots will be left unmolested by the sarcophagic machinery-- only larvae alone are fit to deal with the heart inside. Hidden, snuffling detectors meter the isolated decay, waiting for a specific molecular threshold to be reached inside the chamber, to sound the electronic bell. They have ordained a sulking moratorium then-- a known quantity of time, prescribed at the moment of death. What will happen when the bell tolls?

The room conspires to arrange a kind of wake for the body inside. The bed is drunk already. The curtains sweat and sob. The TV performs  a eulogy in Korean. The clutter on the dresser mills about in a stupor, searching for a face in the mirror. The mirror shows the shining flanks of a chestnut horse flickering across its width, knots twitching, long black switch of tail sweeping for flies. Whatever hills outside muster up an echo of a smile, like those devoured cheeks used to smile-- the skull has eclipsed them at last-- broken free of its cage. All the objects in the room quiver in the static mania of a death party, awaiting the arrival of the guest. At last, a final figure enters through the door. There was no knock. A discarded phone ringtones an organ fugue, and clop-clip go the figure's steps, until it stands in the middle of everything in the room. It reaches out from somewhere in its cookie-cutter angel silhouette, caresses the coffin with a black gloved hand. It traces the four of blades, curved and rigid and glistening with stoic enumeration. No dust collects. No spores plume in a slice of sun. The sun is low over the valley the hills squeezed together. Golden hairs protrude from the back of the figure's hand, through the glove, and chime with the ray the curtains allow through. A rough bag of skin hangs from below its belt, swaying and heavy with leaden mysteries coursing inside it.

The figure is not death, but a Groom for the body. The body, rotting, breaking, running, might be confused for a horse if it were seen. It could be ridden if the lid happened to fly open. It would rear up and whinny and flash in a bowling shock, sending the tenants of the room into panic. But the Groom is the one being ridden. The Groom is the one being ridden by an unseen rider filling the space between shade and shape like an overlaid skeleton. Like a glove of animated light. The groom traces the four with elongating claws. Spines pierce the silhouette like spears of stiff, laminated hairs, punching into the walls, knocking curios off the dresser, fracturing the mirror. The mirror shows a hundred horses, all a-dance in disarray. The Groom whirls, ragged, pushed and pulled by the anchored spikes. It is cast to every corner of the room in neck-breaking, whipping violence. The TV gasps, vomits static. The curtains fly open and the computerized buzzer caws with a carrion-bird's dry cackle, having snuffed its target scent. The phone jitters to the floor and tumbles onto its back. On its screen there is an image of a black flower blooming in night. A darkling bloom against a dark background. The room withers. The Groom is ejected through the window, still connected to the puppet spines, that drain out as it falls, twisting and thinning, like an inverted parachute. One by one the anchors fail, snatching chunks of wall and wood out the mouth of the window. There is no more sound.

The room recedes toward a vanishing point. The coffin remains shut. Like the epiglottis covers the trachea. Like the back of the throat, when a head swallows something down.

BEACON

Against a wall of yellow like sunlit wheat, neurosis cartwheels in jack tumbles, snatched up and spun time and again, larking in the likely lunar histories within each hour as it passes. It is a plucked strand, root and all; a shelled nut; a dried clove in the palm, kicked away by flicking fingers into molten sand to cook there and stink, even as thick, rainbow-shimmering black tar and asphalt clot and roll over the dunes-- even as the tough, lacerating grasses are pasted down with fossil mucus-- they too become the road, the holographic car-park.

Everything gets smeared underneath a dark horizon, the terminal sweeping-under-the-rug. Hands are dusted off and discarded spices and naphthene volatiles mingle in oozing perfumes of a dying, contrapunctal erogenesis with the lavender, roasting meat-- the people smells delivered by faint-hearted breezes from far away.

Divorced to life then, in non-memory; in blackout, it grows like a child of the skull, replete with nervous roots, probing the flaming, choked sands for water; replete with the skull's all-experience, and caving about, hidden and encrypted in a tar-slow dance of shorn-batwing hemorrhage. To ascertain it there, below, is to create it as an untruth. To breathe this seed into life again is to indulge in vicious fiction. Let it hang in earlier memory as an almost-star; a sun that, having the choice, chooses to die against the veil, staining its fabric with hydrogen light as it slumps to the bottom of gravity's bottle.

Wise one.

As soon as there is no sign of stopping within a thing, that thing itself is in its death throes. The worst thing possible-- to realize potential, triggers an acute stress response-- cutting, plucking, breaking hands with hammers-- pummeling a ribcage into submission-- insurance that the heart inside will not fuse; will not transmute iron into gold, least of all in its death.

How shall we then live?

It becomes necessary to manufacture idolatry from its precursors, in the furnace of the Cartesian burlesque, once the colding, deeping flows exsanguinate in the fullness of entropy.

Oh, would that Hedetet had taken up discarded, mammalian wings to match her innoculating, bejeweled breasts! Such a fine pair-- a dilemma-- a trilemma for self-exaltation in fondling-- for self-stinging-- the third leg between her legs, not a leg but the entire sojourn of women-- the ascending, pyramidal flightplan.

She casts about in late panic at blood she could not have lost, yet still lost-- not menstruation, but transpiration-- the roots of travel; temporal paradox shuttering alien realities.

Now she is a robed, trudging figure like so yawning many others, doomed to interlaced slices of possible worlds, possible selves; branches of acausal reality snarling and ensnaring and fickle.

Now a Baltic woman, married, with kerchief and brooches and shawl, digging with a wooden slat into a nest of wood ants and dumping the hole full of gasoline.

Now a molecular biologist, sabotaging the ATP cycle in the bodies of brown mice by day and retiring with a bottle of Shiraz and Thomas Friedman by night.

Now an Inuit grandmother and granddaughter both, rapidly fluttering, shifting with one another, flipping in indeterminable positions-- one in the snow, one carried by that one; one on the lap, one on the sealskin floor, providing the lap; one just beginning life, one at its end-- and both of them toothless and grinning in wrinkled, rank Love's whale oil light.

At last, covered in black and mute, she waits as all the babies of the desert attend their ears and moan as the scorpion responds, chittering, to the heartbeat of the world-- where is our goddess, they cry; where Inanna our protectrix; where might Nehushtan appear in the low sun of the valley, for we are envenomated by lies, colloidal with neurotoxic machines-- militarized by syringes full of little black fictions like little black books-- little black ink marks of pulverized ash and sheepfat-- the killing salve pumped into us by martyrs. Oh would that she who might have saved us all been able to reform her excised wings, not to have left us in this clandestine, final war with the ashamed and their material alacrity.

In this sweet time, the sweetness of nothing. The sweetness of not speaking, of not being spoken to, the sweetness of no foot on the stair, no clink of key or snarl of motor. Death is always rubbing her nipples against the ear of the poet, teasing in velvety silences a billion shades deep.

Death takes Hedetet in all her guises away, having been written out on the tongue of the dark road. The scorpion responds by becoming plush, stuffed, squeaky-- a toy tossed on a child's bed. The rise, turn, and rasp of happenstance, of clothing-- urinary reminders of the body; the smile of the stomach-- holes never empty and never filled-- a perfection state. No wants, except for the words to come close, but never arrive-- never unify with the murk of the real underground rivers from which all roots must drink; all stingers poison.

How self-satisfied.

How smirking is the poet.

That he becomes the savior goddess by pretending with words-- is only diminished by its reality; the reality of his transubstantiation. That he puts her away without a care, for later use maybe. It's as easy as jerking off to closed-eye visions. Cocks and tits and pussies, mouths and hands and fingers and asses, bat wings and historical garb-- all splattered with red honey, honey.

That's how Religion comes into the world-- by means of a nervous beacon, buried under the roadway, waiting for the signal to explode.

Always end everything with a lie.

Always.

SIDEREAL

The floor is sparsely littered with hairs, cut or plucked-- the silver ones stand out against the dark background of the rough stone. Some surface charge coils them into whorls-- cochlear convolutions glinting in moonlight channelled in through slick, dewy fossae-- shafts for slow, seeping exchange with the distant out and up. Beetles on their backs rasp the air, gently adding their precious moisture to the hot, swollen tick of atmosphere buried like a yolk under a mountain of egg-bleached rock-- the lens of ablutions; kettles cut from the stone floor, linked by channels; cold, waiting baths, condensing, condensing. The beetles are boats too, cartoon backstrokes striking little V's onto the scriptural surface of each pool, until vector becomes noise. We let them clamber against the droplets they find-- the dry ones we crush out like cigarettes, our filthy toes too tough for their broken bodies to cut.

Our own flailing, against each other; against ourselves, might be the final spasms of our dreams, drying out in shock, one more time. This might be the end of passion, this passion. Why else the finishing brushstrokes of butchery, slathered like vandal dye on marble perfection? Why the patina on new copper? From whence did our ancience peel itself raw and rabid? We are so much worse in our sobriety-- leering horrors, woman and man, drunk with fatal purpose-- chapter by chapter conceiving and birthing an eternally disrobing harlot; frills and gills and hearts and cords, gristle and raw anatomy, stomach contents and jawbone marrow-- a goosey gore pile; a fetid baby, stinking with the gum chomp of ultimate time, ultimate space.

Night, the ultimate magus-- cleric of the beastchurch we mime and shadow with our bodies and senses, with our autonomic recitations and dusky homeostases. We are lapping the link in a recursion-- a figure 8 of flesh, joined at the fingers, infusion through the crotch-- a disembodied clitoral structure flexing like a cosmic string, but always, always bloody. Blooded in the teeth. Blooded through spongiform viscera. Blooded in enforced, gnashing transfusion, membranes weeping into one another like murder sheets, leaking and pouring into billions of waiting, cellular mouths-- both of us bitten by God and unable to cure his hemorrhagic piss infection-- we filter it through our bodies in symbiostasis, shrieking chelation.

Smoke chugs from my belly. My meat sizzles as you blow the fire bright. You've brought sweetgrass, milkweed, yarrow, datura, animal fats. Your cut hair is clumped and matted with these in a torched nest as you nurse at my groin, sleeping and suckling. My fats ignite and hollow out my chest. Black flame tongues penetrate from my mouth and eyes. My body dissolves like a whale on the shore. The beetles etch verses in the collecting soot. It's not our place to give them as recitation in this holiest of caves, we being anatheme to deliverance, to revelation; we are no dictating angels.

PSYCHOACCESSION

Prisoner, test the bonds. Alchemist, test the bonds.

I am linking into your skull view. The surroundings, the landscape, hurt your skull in ways I feel. Your skull is unprotected by your flesh. I watch you smile and your skull smiles through, louder than you are. I watch the radiation blow through your skull like it isn't there. Like birds through trees. I watch your death unfold like a peony of heavy lead. A walkside head, hanged, under a limp sky trying to thunder, pregnant with lipids. Your skull is a glass house for my scrying. Your mouth a curved field of haptic control. I hack my way in, curious day and night, co-opting your piloting. I can see all around you in a kind of wasp vision. Everything is blue or red-shifted. There are only a few colors time machines know how to display. Blue veins or red veins, approach or recession; hyper, hypo-- black, brown, blue, red-- till white. A dog's mouth.

A dog's body, rotting there. You sneer at the fetid, brute wreck on the shore of your spiced air. Spiced dust rotting into your skull, through your glass nostrils. Test the bonds. A little grey cat hides in shadow under blue plastered stone stairs. A busy street with lots of idle men. You don't notice him today, but I do. You notice him tomorrow, when I'm asleep inside you, elsewhere in your body.

Your brows are funiculate awnings for the shops of sight. Commerce is raping your skull. You must cut the bonds against the sharpness of your brow. Do it when you clear the sweat from your face. You must see with your skull. This is my prophecy: Decomposition produces alcohol. Al. Co. Hol. A dog's body decomposing in partial ash. Half burned by shrieking children with knives. Its tongue is cut out. Babies crawl on glass, green, brown, blue, and smoked. The sharp sine whistle of polymer chains shriek suppertime under canopy; under billow, under sock and flag and flap. Test the bonds. Pull the cord tighter. Make me shudder. Make me cry. Watch my death unfold like a wasp in a pitcher plant. Your inner walls slick and sickly sweet. I keep smashing up and inside, choking you deeper.

I'm bigger now. Big as clouds. Your skull is a beacon I'm leaving behind. Sorcery is impermanence. It is acting within-as-if. You weren't watching the clouds. You weren't on your back long enough for them to show you. They blow ten ways at once, up here. Ten winds, I attend to their tillage like a rural estate. Permanent decline; exquisite declension. We ferment the tropopause like the rind on a dead dog's eyeball. We are the thrush and pink eye of warming syrup night prayers, doves gushing from robes in prickle heat, flash fire, flash flood, flash of genitals, now wide owl-eyed-- a lone "courrucou!" as dove becomes owl in scattered stovepipe trees, scattered legs, fly, fly! Wither the mental; wither the body, sail solar in the phallic boughs of blooded sight-- the skull's globe becomes cerulean, becomes gloved and gowned, planetary, and shatters into wings. Watch our death unfold as the cyclones proselytize the mountains. Test the bounds, the bonds, the binding!

None of the evidence of our deaths will survive. No bodies-- we carry our bodies away from our lovecrimes, accomplices of unwavering loyalty. Your skull is carrying your body through another cyclonic animation-- nested chains of tasks, terminal larvae. Root, tuber, tap, tumor, hive-- the skull feeds the heart its dramatized infection through a rubber chain, hollow in the middle. Terminal proboscis of genital inversion. I fade back into your fat; pack your skin like a roasting duck-- invader, warm and drooling, tossing in honeyed lymph dreams-- I fade back in to your bones and compile my findings. I look down at my hands during my report-- my ring finger is crooked like yours.

BOUSTROPHE

I read the spread palms of the oaks that will outlast me, summer beyond summer. Golden light strikes through emerald type, eliminating it from the transcription of the day, and I feel someone curl alive, ice cold, through some hidden vent, just behind my shoulder. Ice cold and blowing blue into my veins. I feel the spear of my Fall impale my body in this smothered annum-- precursor and kiss-promise of a sap-sweet decline into glacial pools-- the mutual erosion of love and the loved.

Do I bear down and prosecute each difficult moment, full of the blinds and traps of each mewling dullard's obtuse insistences, or should I continue my inversion-- I'll continue Castaneda's fraud-- let the gleaming dog have my arm, then-- frothed mouth of bloody black gums drags me to the places I scattered the bones of my tensegrity harem, lovers true and faithful. "Look. See what you've done. Remember." He glares at me, Dog-Judge. For this I will hang by my neck from strange eclipses, strange crescents, strange gravitational pins-- an executioner troupe of moon-mothers, sickles sharpened by starlight; encandled by grim butchery I'll light their way through the desert. "An it harm none..." Oh but harm me. Harm me so completely, such that nothing remains but some little smoke and ash.

The traitor flips the script on you so quick-- just there, off the road, a pathway into dark-body bushes, where everything cleaves at once to good and evil-- the step off the ledge into ruin; the tires spinning off the crumbling cliff; inertial invective of scorched corpse malignance-- impact-- mudsplash spraying the features of the Enemy, leering in window-mirror reverse-- to wake up from this dream of life and face the Judgment of the Lord, oh woe and calamity, such remorse-- imagine it with me-- such remorse but too, too late. How trivial it is to imagine, after all, don't you think? Everyone always gets what they deserve in the end. Except, they don't.

I'm a spectre, unwelcome in the world in which you exist. One of us should not be here. One of us is wrong-- unnatural. Notice the endless procession of, again, traplike fiends in the shape of persons you know-- have known forever; automata. Machine code, being followed on the tape, backwards and forwards, always. Always playing for attention-- see? See? Dragged along by black dogs and white dogs and forced to howl in unison. This is the only really dangerous thing out there. The rest is just being unlucky, or not. Fatal, terminal, or not.

I'm lonely. I miss you. I miss me.

SPORES

Worms have eaten through me. There are holes in my culture of emotion, where entire polities of burgeoning life have been redacted. They left tunnels for ghost trains, bound together, forming twisted cabling-- they invented a braided kind of self-erasure to strangle me at night, sucking away my vision. It goes somewhere. Where? Are you having my dream now that it was just getting good? Won't you tell me what happens next? I'm soft. I've become gentle, slumped against the chaos gate, with no memory. All I can hear is the muffled thump of Dionysus' darts as he buries them in my picture on the other side of the door.

Long black braids loll out of my empty eye sockets like snake tongues. They lick each other, just out of reach of my tongue. Their ends unravel and re-knit, forming a chain in front of my mouth, blunting my whimpers; catching my tongue in clever eyelets and binding it in vicious ligatures of wound strands. Sometimes the braided tongues of hair force their way into my mouth, down my trachea, into my lungs, branching into my alveoli, disintegrating into their nanobe components-- billions of black crosses, infiltrating my blood like asbestos snow. I rupture from the inside, on the cellular level; bleed cytoplasmic tears as my mitochondria begins its sad diaspora.

My skin produces the brown fungal gel again. You shave it off with your knife. You are not careful. Underneath is a ragged blush. Red on freckle-white, like black on brown-- junta uniform palette for another African coup. You open my chest like a curio cupboard and take what you want. I am hidden nowhere and can never be found. Am I inside the collectible sets of glass angels with their pewter swords, with their cadmium hearts and eyes? Didn't you hear me? I said I am hidden nowhere, and can never be found. You trowel my mycotoxin mud for your masonry, paving a road with silicate bricks-- a bridge to Andalusia. I might go with you, most of the way.

In the midnight of summer, the infant june bugs are late for iftar. They scrabble like drunken mountaineers in the dark I fucked them over with. Their false moon, snuffed out. Temporary nerve lumps in temporary chitin, they will grow huge in the heat tomorrow. They will chew into the tunnels in my back and slowly replace my kidneys with buzzing, useless wings. Lucky I am so used to being reborn-- this time as a crosseyed godlet with a big gold rail spike, ready to hammer home the doctrinal moratorium on the gnostic's cream dream.

They are crawling on me now, in my shirt pockets. They hide in the chaos of my skin. They try to turn me brown-- a big brown X marks the spot for the black hammer of the sky to thunder down and rupture like I rupture their bodies with my shoes. I'm such a gentle killer. Look how I let them flood my shoes. Little machines, finding their purpose as a surrogate goodness in my redacted sections. Bland little Rommels, going most of the way, just to die in the desert.

NO LIGHT

I look in the mirror. I can't believe what happened to my eyes. I'm not there. They look flipped upside down. All I can do is leak, leak, leak-- the sink catches them; nothing else. A pillow catches them, nothing else. I pretend there is any detachment long enough to run away from it. But there isn't.

I saw my devil today, in the parking lot. He was not well hidden. Half-crouch, slow, hands splayed crabwalk back around the carport brick, back to the waiting side of the dumpster. Blue hood pulled tight around peanut brittle face. He lets me know the arrangements have been made, and now it's just the wait. And I need to give the tailor my measurements.

How is evil born into the world, many ask. With blink the word in the heart. With the word in blink the heart and a backward shuffle, I answer.

DECLARATION

The seed of Paradise is a prescient bullet lodged in the heads of a secret Elect-- sculpted, emerald ammunition fired from a long, smooth gun, but touched off the wrong way in time. Can't you see Eden up there, hanging away from the sun, hiding in the moon's brown face 'til she blinks-- the bold brows of her vacuum desert flashing green once a few bare, aching years? Some of us stare, necks crooked; arches numb in the dirt, just for once to see her flash under that jewelled light-- never even knew how long we had waited for the seminal arc-- now with pens held erect and ready like well-ordered ashigaru, awaiting the collective suck of breath; daring a desperate ecstasy; awaiting the blow of a hard breeze and the wave of shoulders slumped in retreat as she buries herself in the sea, unloving. The ink leaks out of us and spreads in clouds. Everything we are denied becomes scripture; becomes law.

There is a zebra crossing between the land and the sky-- a static ferry for the surrogate Garden, with clods of clutching saints mangling the duality of stripe itself, up there. Don't you swear you see it? Orbital Heaven. But irradiated pilgrims never survive the chicken strut jaunt across the street-- they explode like little pot pies and bleed; bleed out in the pedwalk to the stars. Extra-vehicular homicide, choking the upladder with hunks of mystery meat and depressurized fluidic foam, forming a fog of mutilated, motile occlusion. One day we will see a ring forming-- a halo born against the sky-- a sigh-- a just-slight reflection sometimes in chalkmark blue on royal blue-- the frozen pulp of the trudging, stumbling sages hung up like a neck; hung up like a thumbnail pressed cruelly into skin, and not only a few of their earnest tears. We've all got to cry sometime in the absence of God.

We, like them, want our holy pilgrimage too-- but there is no here to be there from. Why no summit, cloaked in panhead thunder or sheathed in shame with seraphim executioners stalking the pathways up? Our world is rather like some grande dame's guest bed-- we've got to sleep to get anything right during salon, even if we'll abandon every film halfway through. We know how each one ends. Yet through the walls, we are awoken by the woofing of perhaps more sensible apes. They bluster and yelp about some foreign mercy, some safe currency, metrics ever threatening to welcome us home, so that we might do some beast's bidding before the last. But we've settled in so snugly, heads uncovered, to honor the coming years of quiet blame.

Ahh, but the emerald eye; her emerald flash-blush; her blazing emerald bush-- a glint within a glint within crackling fiction-- films finished after all! FIN-- a hidden function, burgeoning with nested nests-- crimson birds against the slate-green, cupped hands of the junipers; recursion with a terminal sigma-- see its bounds? A rounded square of a sagging formality bent toward love, both hammer-dull and scaplel-sharp, with no silent Father subpoenaing the pinioned lovers to the pinnacle of his lap! I walk by mistake on emerald feathers, crozzing zebras of Turkey Street, Robin Row, Cardinal Circle, Crow Place-- they're backhand birds down there, sick of this age and sick of me, always prodding at their eggs. I might break them, like every thing else I touch.

They know that, in fact, I am the Big Liar presiding over their air. I'm the one up here in this bullshit Garden, watching all the sin spread like urine. I piss upon them influences, watering the lawn from high above. My couch is that spun mausoleum of huge, cool leaves, dripping stones from which to drink sweet water, aromatics in the bleedproof air a balm for breathing in. I'm the sole occupant of this jungle-gem-globe-- a preaching, telepresent sham. I project my simulacra around the pisscrack mudball below, laughing and pranking and spooking the fools to try, oh blessed ones, just try to climb high... high. I've mined Jacob's Ladder with X-ray lasers, fragmentation submunitions, chaff charges, and bladed, geo-synchronous catapult traps, all too matte to make out when I switch on the night.

I'm the five-fold whiplash as knotted serpents in me uncoil-- a shrapnel bomb cored with fissile vertebrae. I'm the final flash, neutrino green through shut up eyes-- climax scream of the shuddering moon--

I've been a long time coming.

VEIL

We've pierced the membrane of sleep with our knives. We've climbed in, careful not to tear it too far. It's hot in here, like a berry about to burst. Grievously hot and sickeningly sweet. Our facial bones pulse, pregnant with a forming, inner mask of sweat, about to bloom on us, on our cheeks to fracture the sky and make the moon run along slickened ridges-- glints of unconnected letters, like a babbling transliteration of an organ leaking in runaway crisis, wringing out its dreams as a dark, oxidizing serum.

Like a dual recession of fetal twins, slowly disassembled back into an encompassing, spongiform engorgement, we've managed to adjust our spectral signatures to that of the background; melting in; hidden; invisible; uniform against the heartbeat gloom of morning-- grey games made blood-fled white, like flesh pressed hard-- to the collapse of radiance and the eviction of street wolves from sublevel and machine-level; fast garden with crisscrossed daemons catalyzing function-- surveilled panes shunted into glandular displays, unpausing into bunched, charging, maniac motions-- a smile pools like a bruise, eclipsing the pan-faces of our precessional discs, veins thickening and sex-blue on dull dusk, orbit after orbit, dance upon dance.

To hell with the halos, driving the tubby flocks of bleating killers on patrol. At last the final Mother comes, stuck and bristling with medical knives. Our abortion, her crown, with flowers gathered in her roadside haze, covered from hair to feet in a painted, gauze delirium-- her murder shroud fucked on and fucked open, scouted and probed and groped, pinched and pinned and splattered and stabbed; a traumatic insemenation zombie, pregnant with shock force. We watch our Mother die, there in the lilac bushes, still bleeding out.

Dancers on a dark horizon, we harmonize in sympathy-- in the intimate, mutual dismemberment, procedural forms echoing the black bodies blotting out the chains of stars with curved blades; extensions of the limbic will. We are entropic surgeons. The first sutures, beginning to tug shut the purse lips of artifact freedom-- to conceal ourselves from the chugging maul of the great wheel, ache with life.

TEST FLIGHT

Numb becomes discontent some mornings; ones washed out by snored-over night storms-- walking outside, everywhere there's evidence of the air having wept itself dry, ignored like a broken-hearted lover in the next room; little rivulets have deposited yesterday's pollen in saffron oxbows, or leering Masonic eyes, clumped tentatively to all the parked cars' more protected geometries, the places too tough to rinse out. Clinically speaking there was, then, a process-distribution overnight, owing to process engineering-- one technological and one natural, like two fantasies slowly colliding, their edges actually becoming each other's in spun Lorenz trajectories, convolving desire with the numb-- discontent with the networked birdsong, weaving the chance thrown blanket that mutes the silent sob in the throat of everything.

I'm just calculating my cold way forward, yawning like a fatal avulsion.

I'm the digital firebird, snuffling out the bushes of the nominally pious; one palsied winglet flopping in tipsied earnest at the heat, fanning the quivering jelly of waxing age, beginning to run like mascara tears in long black blots down my hookbill as I caw and scope the energetic body of the electronic weald.

Look there-- a rise in the gravel lot like a pubic hump; cool blue stools of cut trunks-- a ritual site encircling a charcoal brazier-- censer! Glans! Tip of the pinnacle of hot, hidden structures, deeping somewhere dark inside the mons.

Scoop by orbital scoop I will describe this planet in bands of infrared and radar-- find a face to tag and section-- a cove of mouth there, eyes in shadow-dappled mesa here; artificial rings set against the desert's visage, a surety of metal-bright, xenotypic intelligence. Ridged brows like midnight caterpillars about to meet in inching delight, but turning away to dance instead some diacritic semiosis. Their spawn hatches and a new alphabet is born. Infant phonemes stream about the topological face-- they seek some mechanism, some process by which to actuate-- there, a tongue meets the roof of the cavern mouth, about to speak. Predator, I, snatch the holiest ones in my beak, and gobble them down.

To come softly to final synchrone, and fly the glide-stroke back to order, back to patience-- even to have cast some pain out into space as waste heat, is the artist's mark upon the work of love. Yet no one who speaks so loosely ought to be trusted. In the lyrics of Alastair Parker:

We're on a planet together, but that doesn't mean we are together.

EMBOLA

The tiny screen prompts me to "post content," missing the irony. In a post-content society, an anti-culture, it only remains to be seen what will fossilize and what will just melt into the background hiss. Perhaps some bird-beaked, visored rogue techno-archaeologue will fall in love with me, like Cohen's Catherine, eons from now. Poor thing.

Days in which any signifier protrudes into awareness are days worth living through, if only to catalogue those holographic, occult ruses-- invent a naming convention to describe the effects of a strained-for convolution as it shines through forlorn orgasms and the transparent protocols of the current info-mentalism. Like Lieber's, our paramentals blit into our telescope eyes; blit into cumming storms of ghost paper and SMS; insecure channels blooding thick through the belly; an enforced garden for ensorcelled bullets to impregnate; a constant slice and digging into the brute shoulder of security as it barrells through the doorways.

Always I feel the scuttle of the black roaches of norm troops-- flashbang and capsicum, suppression fire; the stumble of the gutted grandmother-- moral and elemental dismemberment hoovered away by Reuters and AP wasp eyes-- film like a candy roll; like a tongue shunned in favor of video's French kiss; analogic artifact snake that balked at the ungranulated display of contemporary brutality.

Perhaps there will be a whiff of powdered gypsum, just before the shutters slam everything dark. Perhaps we'll have a million more tomorrows, all ionized and dreaming.

BLACKSITE

I keep imagining that one day I'll wake up and not be me.

I've found that life tends to consist of insult after betrayal after disappointment.

To live in the year 2016-- especially to be unable to escape American society-- is not worth living. No better argument for nihilism could have been created intentionally. From the very beginning, our society was founded on a great lie, and nothing, really has changed. Children to this day are taught the rhyme of Columbus; that the American Revolution was a tea party over taxes, and that black people are now equal.

If I could, I would take a giant literary shit on all of it, but it would be nothing compared to the painstaking efforts of unfathomable heroes like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

I'm just a divorced loser whose body is ripping itself apart. I pay money I don't have for X-rays, physical therapy, and Gabapentin. I like to write because I love to hear myself talk, just like every other retarded fuckface in the universe. It's just about all I can do anymore.

I'm supposed to think about how other people have it worse than me, and they do. Hell knows they do. There are people who probably have the same kind of nerve pain that I do, and they're in jail, or being Tronald Dumped in a CIA black site in Qatar, or a sex slave somewhere there aren't many network-ready cameras. There are people right now having their vaginas or assholes ripped apart, or their dicks cut off and fed to them. There are babies and toddlers being smashed against walls. There are heads coming apart in the street. There is rape beyond what any filmmaker could imagine. Rape of life itself, by people who share an ancestor with apes, but who have convinced themselves of some kind of divine origin.

I'm just throwing my hat in the ring of also being fucked while strangers watch.

If I'm lucky, I'll wake up tomorrow, and we'll all be debriefed that the simulation is over; or at least, I'll wake up and be someone else.  Someone with rich parents, and I can just take some better, more powerful pill, and roll back over, and go back to sleep.

If you have rich parents, you can do whatever you want. It's completely meaningless, but at least you don't have to suffer in pain while the world you've helped murder spasms in agony.

I truly hate all of us and I can't wait for our extinction.

A scare is a not-so-secret wish.

CENTRALIZATION

Once we admit we're living in the bad universe, does it even make sense to continue on?

Let's not get into politics here, but the mere fact that Ronald Cump is a player in the final presidential showdown prettymuch proves that we've ended up in the universe where the cat dies. There is no need to open the box anymore-- not for me. I hate what's happening to us. We're going grey at the edges; losing the synapses between one another; swamped by the mere struggle of the calendar roll. Somehow we have to set a fire, or the damp will kill us.

What are you wearing, in your dreams? Hints come through the serially chained frames of illusion known as reality. Light comes through not a keyhole, but between the links. Signal light. You've got to care what happens to yourself in worse universes than even this one; got to make the distribution fall on kinder hills; climb out of these local minima; nucleate a religious resurrection-- the cat is only sleeping. Pet him and he wakes up. What is bombarding us in bed at night? Is it nerve damage or DNA? The hot thrush of neutrinos? Autonomic ill-will from parallel worlds? We have to love the other instances of ourselves that are doing better; let luck bleed through the refresh cycles. Love comes in from somewhere-- look, Mom, I'm even praying desperately now. An acausal prayer; a hymn to Boltzmann, a blood sacrifice to Susskind-- Tycho Brahe as a girl; Susskind as a priest; Boltzmann a barista-- the moon, the matador; me.

Wrecked; the car torn nearly in two; the body recognized as my own; the spiderwebbed glass, showered with spinal fluid; the nerves, the dying of the light of thought; Spinoza as a bum, finding my wallet-- reaching through the refresh cycle, a nexus handshake with the seventy-eight dollars there, then dropping it back through the surface; the wallet winging open; the debit card; the purple star winking through daylight; camera beam through an alien dell, third-eye chiming in revenant combat Christ; the Fool in a Burzum shirt; the hawk at the typewriter.  Silbergeld; Heiliger Geist.

It's impossible to distinguish from a parody of itself-- this always signifies the end of something. Something has been lost, never to return. It's different now.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. Can u buzz me in?

TOPOLOGY

Sometime last night, the baby mouse died.  I found her clutching the paper towel in the rescue container I'd hastily made.  Maybe I'm at fault-- I shouldn't have intervened; should have just let her hop around franticly in the garage at work, confused and unable to find her way.  Maybe I let her get too cold, or maybe I should have got some Pedialyte-- should have used the dropper to nurse her, but I was unsure. She was the sweetest little creature.  A grey puff with a face on it.  A poor jitter with a tail stuck to it. A somebody.

I couldn't say when things went green. I had my head down all winter, and I never saw it coming.  There is a half-hearted garden outside the car window with a rogue's gallery of spiky grasses and chartreuse bunches of baby leaves.  Baby leaves. Miserable-looking elders huff up the road in some kind of marathon.  I just drive by, arm aching at the wheel.

I stare at the green lights to make sure it's safe. I'm afraid one of these times I'll lapse in attentiveness, and then SLAM-- never see it coming.  I was somewhere else for a moment.  Somewhere beautiful.  Still dreaming.  Everyone says that what you focus on, you attract. The thoughts you dwell on, you make them come true. It doesn't seem to work for me, because certain people haven't dropped dead yet. I guess I'm not straining hard enough at the wishing thing. Maybe wishing is like taking a shit. Wish in one hand... no difference, really.

The Game Genie suddenly plops into existence behind my car parked in the driveway. Jagged yellow pixellated lightning rotates and scales around a purple halo of intertwined dicks, pumped to full boners. They look like huge worms, choking and slurping, and slinking around one another-- a real writhing mass of fleshy jizzing thunder.  The Game Genie is all green, a musclebound wrestler floating the lotus above a gilded cusion-- you know, exactly how a genie is supposed to do.

"NAME THY CHEAT CODE, PATHETIC MORTAL," he bellows.

I dunno.  Maybe the ability to see through ppl's clothes. I realize this isn't an original idea, but I'm not really interested in changing reality all that much. You can never predict the outcome with much accuracy. Everything could go to shit, or decohere, causing some kind of spacetime domino cascade disruption, or split into crazily improbable thermodynamic configurations, like friction suddenly ceasing to be a property of matter.  Imagine that shit.

"YOU REALIZE THAT YOU WILL HAVE TO SEE EVERYONE NAKED, RIGHT.  EVERYONE..."  He leans forward a little and looks at me skeptically.

Ehh, yeah, that's a bad idea.  It's a good lesson. Examine your whims-- why do you want that thing on the shelf? That scarf, or that pair of headphones, when you know that getting what you want is the worst thing that can happen, because you never only get what you want, you get all the other problems associated with change. You can't just go around changing one thing at a time.  A whole network of connections shifts with that one instance of obtainment, and then the universe where the desire originated, well, it ceases to be the same universe.

"I would like to cheat death for my little mouse. I want her to have another chance to exist, out in a real prairie-- not in the city. Bring her back to life," I say.

The Game Genie howls, "THAT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN. BUT I WILL DO WHAT I CAN."

With a clap of his hands like a grenade blast, he nods his massive head, and is sucked back through the vortex of purple dick lightning, which puckers in the air for a second or two, then POP, is gone.

I'm looking at green lights. I'm through the intersection.  I was off, daydreaming again.  Neuronal patterns are like wet constellations in the dark sky of your head.  Remember Escher, remember Hofdstadter.  Remember the black and white fractal shapes of formally reachable and unreachable true statements. All at once, a shift in topology, a little squiggle goes dark.  Like a puff with a face on it.  A memory of Somebody; suddenly, as I press the gas, I'm drawing a blank.

QUORUM

Another grudging awakening-- another jaunt back to square one. No guarantee of relief in sight; just the cunning impalement of a javelin along the radial nerve, the weight having settled in the vicinity of the right middle thorax; the shaft of the weapon made of some jungle wood that oozes numb.

This was to be some kind of driver; some inspiration toward constructive action, yet even I have grown tired of its hackneyed vignettes. It is shameful to write anything at all. There is no space the awareness might find to rest upon in the first place, amid the vomiting catastrophe of human society. I can't even whimper without adding to the collective, idiot babble.

To act, then-- to commit the act of speech must be a crime. Perhaps it is like the Catholic notion of masturbation, of nocturnal emission-- the pollution of oneself. We just love the sounds of our own voices so much, we tell ourselves we-- us human beings-- represent some grand achievement wherein the cosmos may understand itself through the evolution of consciousness.

What a record-breaking crock of shit.

In fourteen billion years, we are what the universe managed to fart into being, because it needed content. Creators, makers, designers-- nevermind the greatest minds of the ages past-- this, right here is how we go out.

And we are going out. Like a switch being shut off. There is an actual singularity approaching-- a threshold beyond which we may not look-- and it isn't the fun one full of benevolent AI and wealth-distributing, ubiquitous nanoassemblers. No one in the White Wild West is even beginning to imagine what true scarcity will look like. We'll have plenty of guns, but no one to kill with them. And then we will turn them on ourselves.

You're gonna die. Probably before that happens, Mom and Dad will die, and you will watch it happen to them. Maybe it will give you some idea what is coming-- sort of prepare you for it.

But it will hurt you, and you will cry.

If I started crying now, I would never be able to stop.

SKIP IT

I found a patch of skin, not being fed. I'm tending it like a garden, digging out the weeds, the infected soil. I've breached an aquifer and had to manage the co-mingled grey and red ooze several times. I wonder; would it be repulsive if I was digging inside someone else? I think I would enjoy administering injections, probing inside, cleaning; cutting out the bad things, letting the blood escape clean in volume; stitching the skin together; sewing the hole shut. I would enjoy it.  But I never said it would make me happy.

I have never been truly happy. I don't often think about what it might be like. It must be very shallow, like a kiddie pool in the park-- filled with toys and laughter and light physical play. My big head always dragged me down, under a softness-- I guess the place they poured the concrete is still not set. I've got my injuries now for good-- they've proven themselves to me and become Real, like in the Velveteen Rabbit. I've done everything for the sake of some temporary little relief, and that is a game for losers. Losers like me never truly reach for success; never grab it and twist it like the handle of a knife in a lover's back. I'm unequivocally okay with being a loser in a garbage world like this one. This world can suck my fucking dick, basically. I do not give a shit anymore. I never really did. My head always led the way. I've got my extra tissue-equals-weight, like the Elephant Man.  A giant brain case slowly breaking my neck; slowly dragging me down. I've always gone down whether it was allowed or not. I've always gone deep, deep down inside. Then, when I wake up again, I'm always me.  I'm always still me-- just a worse version.

How many more times can this realistically happen?

I was already so tired when I started.

NO FUCKS

Neuromechanics-- a body in revolt; a numbness at last encroaching upon lands long fatly settled into-- an array of profligate minima; and, aping the storybook corpse, an uprising from death like lecher-liches-- a cold, bony ass-grab upon our tutor, pain-- the Constant Governor.

The first lesson is that action is not possible. I've inherited this prairie fanned out to the horizons in undifferentiated, stultifying basicness. I prop myself up with what's in reach; reluctantly acknowledge the slump of my sluggish blood, buzzing as it squeezes through too-narrow vessels like specific instances of pedestrian particle flow, nicotine-thick as it bustles by the freaking spasms-- the hostile javelins of other fucking people and whatever they are trying to tell me. But what does the landlady really mean when she strains, ejecting her hard totems of impacted shit out her blabbing cloaca?

Anyway, I can't move-- I can't even stretch. I'm a useless thing now. A wasted tool. All gestures-- all pretenses have been peeled back, laying bare the glistening network like global investment capital flow.

The second lesson is that there is no one else. Solipsism is the one true philosophy. Blessed are those who comfort the widows of loved lost ones. Blessed are all others, orphans of thought-- from the sable minxes tugging the awareness backwards in time-- bunched comforter eyes, staring and reforming and staring-- to the genius of "Only You," crooned by red-eyed towers in everyone's sky, in my sky, the grinding of the sky into every unquiet night. Maybe just knowing I could still be satisfied is comfort enough, even if satisfaction never comes. And why would it. No one else ever shuts the fuck up for long enough.

I've come out of the latest round of divorce curses like an abortion slurry, each clot and clump a bit of baby, shimmering in a wet blue surface sheen at each static discharge-- each blob briefly flaring epileptic as it's dumped into plastic and sealed away.

Don't be discouraged. There were only ever two lessons.