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.