CHEETAH

Ch a pte r. 3

My vision fades in and I find myself at the gaping, red mouth of a flesh cave. I must be dreaming. This is the mouth of a dead fish. Lately, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to tell real life from my dreams. The eyes of the fish are glassy and faded reddish-orange. Does it make a difference? I don’t know anymore. I decide to step inside. I move forward and run my hand along the lips, which pulse and shudder, shutting behind me with a wet thump. This place is humid and smells like rotting anchovies pissed on by drunken fishermen. I continue walking. The floor gives in a little with each step; It feels soft and supple against the soles of my bare feet, like latex viscera, coated with a thin layer of crusty pus that cracks with each step and then lets out a dark gooey tar that bulges out slightly and oozes into the crevices between my toes. This place is wet with blood. Thick veins run along every surface, pumping viscous black sludge. The walls slowly widen and move further and further apart, giving way to a dusty desert of sharp and craggy rock that looks more like a seaside town's scrap metal left out at shore to rust. This desert of nightmares is a canyon. Walking forwards, I reach a cliff. At its edge, I see a homeless man lying on his side. He sees me approaching him and he stumbles trying to prop himself up on his left elbow. I am near him. He looks up at me. His eyes are sunken and his eyelids are caked with greenish-yellow mucus and almost completely sealed shut. Straining to open them, he parts his cracked bleeding lips and slurs - “Wake up man, do you know what mud feels like? Like mud? Are you listening to me? Wake up man! Are you listening?” I can hear him fine, but I choose to ignore him. He continues unfazed and blabbering incoherently, drooling onto himself with every word he spits out. I avoid eye contact and continue walking along the cliffside. I walk away. I walk for what feels like hours. Maybe it’s just minutes. The horizon never changes. An organic, rusty hellscape that’s dying from within itself. Dry as a smoker’s lung, dusty as a bed of nails. I walk, and I notice a wall of flesh growing upwards from the ground to my right. It climbs high, eventually forming the facade of a 12-story prison. It stretches out forever, but remains only as wide as a single cell. Its face - a simple single row of cells, each with thick, blistered rods of iron worn down by centuries of white-knuckled clutches, and calcified walls scratched in by years of desperate clawing, scabby with haemorrhagic spots of mold. Each cell, dark and damp and soaked with excrement and decades of terrible memories, houses a single prisoner. All of them, staring off into the distance, are dressed in rags made of rough cloth and stand stunned, stunted and slouching in stunned silence like sacks of jute. Their skin looks thin, thin enough for the lightest tug to tear it apart, thin enough to barely veil the flame of a candle held close, close enough to singe it red, then black, then white. They stare right through me. Am I still here? I walk along the length of the jailhouse and then, I reach the very last cell. I see the very last prisoner. She’s weaving a mesh of dark red jute and has tied bits of it to replace all the broken bars of her cell. “Been working all day long?” I ask. She turns to face me and replies softly, “Oh, but there was no morn.” Mourning? This is not a dream. This is scorn. I’m not awake. You decide that I need to retreat back into the rust. This flesh cage is my prison. This flesh cage is my home. Homeless, I am outside. I’m driving a car. I see traffic, a red light in the distance. A family. We hate the homeless as a society. But they’re the only ones really living. Really human. Surviving. What am I anymore?

Can you see the desperate longing in my eyes? I know it’s deep set and barely visible. Please tell me you can see it. I know it’s only barely there, but If you can’t see it then I know no one can. I need to know. My longing is yours. Everything I know is yours. Without you I am nothing. I am biased. I am my biases. I am this longing, for I am nothing without it. This is all I have. All I have is for you. I want to hold you. I want your weight on me. I want to feel real. I want to feel pain. I want to feel you. I know you can see it; the longing. You see it deep inside my pupil. I know you want to take it away. I know you want to plunge your blunt fingernails inside, past my cornea, slow, then sinking deep into that darkened abyss, shrouded until you finally reach it. But the prisoner knows this too. And she won’t let you take it away. She tells me to lay my head down on her lap. I can feel the bones of her thighs against the back of my head. She threads her needle with dark, red thread of jute. I close my eyes. Gently, she pierces the needle into my upper eyelid, then the lower one. She repeats - delicate, poetic, stout, resolute. I trust her. I trust her, but I won't trust you. You know this, don’t you?

Music blasts from the tiny speakers inside my earphones and crashes painfully onto my eardrums. I raise the volume loud enough to drown out everything around me. To drown out everything inside me. This is my armour. My very own malformed dragon helm that seals airtight. It stings me like a scorpion dancing to the words to your licorice song. I have nothing left to live for anymore. The only things I own are the music I listen to, that familiar sense of discomfort that rattles like wind-up teeth deep inside my abdomen, and my name. My name is the cheapest of all my possessions because I’m the only one who ever uses it. Non-existent to others who step all over it. Non-existent to those who choose to acknowledge its harrowing yet distant presence just as they would a passed-out fentanyl addict. What gives it value in my eyes? I’m not sure. I’d throw it away if I could, but no matter how hard I try, it seems to always drag itself back to me. It haunts me, bathing me in molasses, ensuring I can never escape it. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s nice, sometimes. Companionship. But companionship holds no value. That niceness? It doesn’t add value to companionship. Companionship is a coping mechanism; to avoid inconsiderate truths that graze by, soft like shrapnel from a hand-grenade. Sometimes my name argues with me. It says that my music is the cheapest of my belongings because other people use it as they please. It calls my music a whore. It says this because it knows they can’t do this with my name. But I refuse to listen. I grab it by the neck and squeeze hard until it turns blue, until I feel it begin to lose strength and give in. The music I listen to is mine. No one else listens to it the way I do. My music is mine. I won’t let anyone steal it away from me. I’ll grip onto it tight, and dig my fingernails in deep, as far as they go. Thieves steal, and thieves are bad people, and bad people are hurt by worse people. Punishment holds value. Punishment is valuable because it meshes together the past and the future with present dissonance. Punishment enlivens because it draws from the soul. It is life. Music is punishment. And my music is my penance. I like when it hurts my ears because that’s when I’m really listening. Are you listening to me? Is this your punishment? Do you like being punished too? What value does it hold for you? Is it cheaper than mine? My music swallows me and spits me out as it pleases. It tells me I taste bitter because of my name. But a name is permanent. A name is a record. A name is scratched in by a needle, and it screams out a song. My song. My music. Perjury. My punishment. My penance.

4851 September minutes. A three minute track. That’s 1/480th of a day. Every day, that’s 1/480th that’s mine again. The other 479? A struggle that ends with me locked inside a barrel of oily black quicksand, with each track adding maybe minutes for my lungs to whine and squeal and suck in bits of grey soot into leaky pipes that trap it in sticky morass, slowly succumbing to the pressure that builds like an anvil against my diaphragm. I can’t really blame anyone but myself for how thick the quicksand is. My hourglass is upturned. Added time only delays the inevitable. Quick sand. I beat it, until it runs red and spotted. But it cheats me. 4851 September minutes I’ve clawed back and shoved deep inside my head. I clutch both my ears in hopes of trapping the 4851 flakes of 24 karat gold, praying they don’t slip out from the gaps between my fingers. Like pop rocks, they crackle and burst softly against my wet, swollen eardrum. Endless background noise driven by a midi controller with a faulty circuit. But I know it hides meaning. Like a wolf, stalking its prey in an industrial winter, walking between walls of brutalist grey, I find myself yearning for the release of its teeth sinking deep into my arm, the tension in its jaws effortlessly snapping ligaments and reaching bone, its saliva drawing stringy blood. A refusal to let go - and I can’t tell between the two of us anymore. This midas bite is truth. It is triumph. It is meaning. The bite is my escape into a paradise far beyond this rectory of false prophets. A departure that is truly permanent, one I can’t slip back from like all the other times I’ve been tricked into believing.

My days spill into each other uselessly like split milk. They ignore all the lines I’ve scratched into the ground and they drip, seeping into the cracks, staining, reeking, culturing rot. My lines have no respect. Like the lines that stretch across my palm without boundary or direction, they lack meaning. Every time I clutch my left palm with my right in prayer, I dig into the crevices around my knuckles with the tips of my fingernails until I feel the cartilage pushing back. Resistance. My own body protests against the lines I mutilate it with. Has this always just been about a power struggle? A deranged dictator whose subjects have long overthrown their parliament? No, it can’t be that simple, can it? This is about the lines I draw. My lines are sour and fuzzy. My lines mock me. They curl and twist like salt on leeches. They pull me deep into wet and suffocating mud, down below the roots, aggressively warping into barbed wire leashes that hook around the sides of my neck, and force their way into my mouth. Hot with friction, they thrust past my throat, bitter like iodine and rust. Cannibalistic parasites; they mock me because they know I can’t live without punishment. My punishment. They know that I’m no different from them. I have nothing else. I am a tapeworm. My lines, creased and withered, lacerate my skin, branding it like a pig sent to slaughter. I am lost to noise, drained by impedance, phasing between gluttony and hypocrisy. I am a tone-deaf pseudo-postulant succumbing to the harmonics of a higher calling. I dig into my skin and form burrows and valleys and trenches and hideouts, drawing lines that wrap around me and run ruthlessly to divide and discourage. I stretch and crawl and weep, stripping myself of all my lines, but they reappear because they’re deeper set than I imaged. I am in ecdysis.

I have power. Power inside my hands. To mutilate my body. To starve it until I see the bones stretching my skin translucent. To not care how I look. To not care how my body looks. To not care how my body looks to other people. To not care how this body looks at other people. I am not my body. I will claw my way out into the nothingness that blankets my consciousness. My body is gaunt. My body is drained. My body is dying and taking me with it. Taking me into the blackness that envelops my consciousness. There’s nothing out there. There’s no one out there. Everyone is encased in flesh. Encaged by ribs that stretch skin. I will not leak out into life decimated by choice, willing sacrifice, pseudoaltruism, so much for the greater good (or is it a greater God?) but ultimately tricking yourself into believing you can see wonders of scales unimaginable in a blackness that coats my consciousness menacingly thick. I think. My body thinks. This body reacts. I enact. My body trips. This body is false. I am nothing as long as I care about this body I possess. For as long as I care about your body, I am nothing but consciousness sealed within a tempest of nothingness. A tempest of nothingness. This is no realization. This is no discovery. What did your body expect? I am nothing without my body. My thought is a lie. Your thought is too. I am greed. I am gluttony. I am no different. I am a hypocrite. I won’t let you inside my cage. A dome of ivory white, plastered over and over and over, layered to conceal, to hide what’s always been beneath, yellowed and cracking and yet pure and continuously endless. This constrictive claustrophobic dome is an echo chamber, an echo chamber into whose floor is gashed an angled entrance that's barely wide enough and I stand hunched over with my back against the wall in eternal paranoia, armed with a sharp stick forever pointed at that unknown intruder for it must enter from below. I will not leave this dome because the dome is my home, the singular constant, and I am this dome, this singular constant, a constant that at times is a reminder of comfort so intensely longed for but never here because I stand within, trembling. My arms lacking muscle lost from years of strain, my stick remains clenched, making naught of what remains of my dwindling urge to survive, this dome will collapse onto itself, leaving me nonexistent and shattered, a million little pieces strewn with intention, careless. Lost in blitzkrieg, I wander the vast and endless plains within this dome and I sway constantly, unsteady and with unease, awaiting a singular bullet, one that never arrives, my body suspended with crimson droplets dripping down my forehead and running so gracefully into my eyes, staining them a deep ruby-red that won’t wash out.

I am a cold, dull blade. I am the pain that pierces deep inside my abdomen. I am a dark alleyway at night on a November Tuesday. I am the cold night rain that drizzles down, shimmering softly in the street lights. I am the gentle breeze that stirs the tree leaves awake in a hush of white noise. I trap myself in the strangest of places that are yet familiar. Do you recognize me? Do you remember where I am? What makes you read these words? Why are you here? Does peering into my state of mind make you feel better about yourself? Do you enjoy playing a voyeur, some twisted fetish in this broken charade? Does this make me an exhibitionist? Do I entice you? We’re no better than each other. But that idea sickens me. It sickens me to my core, because I know I’m not like you. I take pride in my suffering. I’m a hypocrite. I am miserable. I am the list of all my burning bridges. I am the worst person I know. I am my numbingly intense hurt and loneliness. I am the constant dulling of my senses. I am the damp bitterness that lurks at the back of my mouth, right behind my molars, probing the length of my gums, licking the insides of my teeth with sulfurous fumes. There’ll come a time when I’ve written down enough here, on this indenture to God, for my existence and suffering to be borne weightless and translated entirely into a bunch of meaningless letters to no one. It will be, at this point, that I’d have no reason to live anymore. What would you do then? Would you end your own life too? Or would you find someone else just like me, to consume and digest and break down and shit out? I know who you are, reading this. Fuck you.

This is a transition from arbitrary to abstract concepts, a transition driven by greed and selfishness, one driven by pure restlessness and cold, agonizing envy. This is a transition that’s trapped within my horizons, framed by rolling hills of the everyday, the same, the predictable, the tasteless, the “sometimes” in my periphery. This transition is a lens that’s been sanded down to capture memories of moments smudged beyond recognition, smudged beyond perception, a perception of disdain that’s lost on everyone else but me. Because I’m so different. Ha ha. The hills roll away from me. What is this a transition to? I was hoping you’d have the answer to this. I’m sure you do, and I know it’s just that you’d rather not tell me. You keep things from me all the time. I know this. I’m never really present when I’m with you anyway. I’d rather be tossed aside, spending my time dreaming of foreign vistas, swept away by trains of wonderful intoxication to tantalizing scenarios I make up in my head, some of them even involving you, but they all inevitably end with me drifting back down to solid surfaces, reminding me that that’s all they are - fantasies that remain wrapped up within themselves - and that that’s all they’ll ever be - fantasies that trip and fall and shatter into a million little pieces too small to tell apart. And I bend down trying to pick these shards of maladaptive daydreams back up but they prick my fingertips, sending jolts of current up to my elbow and all I feel is pain. Yet, I try again, and like an idiot, I try again, and I try again, making the same mistake over and over and over again. I learn nothing. I’m really mad at you this time, and it hurts. I just hope you understand that.

I am such a fucking fake. I live only to be seen by other people. I’ll never really open myself up to you. Every shattered fragment of myself that I put out into the world before you is an advertisement meticulously designed and crafted to influence the way you see (through) me, the way you read (over) me. I am a block of opaqueness. I am a sellout. I am entrenched in valleys of suffering and self pity and loathing, valleys I have designed (and redesigned) with nauseating intricacy, zig-zagging into disorienting oblivion, created as a byproduct of wishful thinking but in whose image? I barricade myself against the very last corner of my everchanging labyrinth, sending my infantry out to capture and contain your careless intrusion into my walled palace of pestilence, barbed wire, and muck. I have been digging a hole for several years now. I make decent progress. I am consistent in the efforts I put in. And remarkably, every few dozen months or so, I dig to end up at grass. I’ve somehow hit surface beneath the soil. How can that be? I find that I’m back up at ground level and I’ve lost everything I’ve worked towards. I must have started digging horizontally, and upwards, I guess. I see things clearly now. I can’t believe I’ve been so fucking stupid. I’ve been in free fall, deluding myself with promises of redemption and escape so sweet it tastes bitter. I can see everything I’ve done now. I need to refocus. I cannot let this happen again. I will punish myself, learning a lesson I’ve learnt a million times over. “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.” I hate myself for leaving the gates to my gutters open to you. I’ve been careless. But my feelings for you are hard to place, morphing into shapes with boundaries that feel absent when I trace them with my fingers. You’re an ugly person, but that idea remains severed from you as a shape, distinct and separate. I hate myself for admitting that my feelings for you toss and turn, tumultuous and restlessly binary. But I’m lying to myself. They aren’t really in motion or undecided or uncertain. They’re frozen in place. They’re frigid and lifeless. They’re preserved in epoxy resin. I am divided into two equally worthless halves, both equally obsessed with you. Two halves, unsymmetrical and separated by one miserable mirror that reflects each half onto the other blown out of proportion and form. I’ll slice these feelings thinner and thinner and thinner until there’s nothing left of them, and one day I’ll finally forget all about you, a day that I will never remember, lost in blissful ignorance. My aggression is palpable, and I’ll make sure to keep it burning, prodding at it every couple of minutes to receive in response a growl, sometimes a yelp, and I’ll make sure I remember that I am unwilling to settle on mediocrity because I am not you.

There’s a soft fuzzy hum of electronic crackling in the back of my head. It’s those flecks of gold dust again. But they’re louder this time - loud enough to drown everything else out in the noise. I’m at the bar of a sweaty, blacked-out concrete nightclub, standing next to an even sweatier dance floor. The air is stagnant and humid with bodies pressed up and pushing against each other to the meditative drone that’s blaring out the speakers and thumping against my chest. There’s something lodged deep inside me and I’ve been trying to flush it out with alcohol. It’s been a while. The sound rushes back in and the speakers are so loud that I’m having trouble thinking. Things would be a lot easier not having to deal with whatever’s inside. I gulp down the last of whatever’s left in my glass and grab a bottle of Absolut as I walk away. I’m drifting in and out of the present. It comes and goes in waves and I’m barely escaping drowning in the tide. I’ll blame the tides on the moon. I’ll blame the moon on you. What’s your sign? What kind of music do you listen to? What kind of money do you make? Hold on, how old are you? I’m taking control of my life again and I’ll prove it by ruining everything I hold onto with white-knuckled desperation. I’ll never be caught off guard. I am vigilant. I look over my shoulder every fourth step. My lips remain sealed shut. I look both ways before entering my house. I double-check my locks. I trust the weight of metal. I keep watch in my concrete outpost, from within my coliseum of ash encased in glass. I laugh at the notion of paranoia. This is warfare explicit. This is a channel of pure white hatred and blood-red rage. This is the rebirth of undead ego. This is my Alexander Wang Adidas Originals Q1 Jacket. This is the nicotine that drifts off my cigarette, so nubile, deep down into the winding passageways of my lungs and lifts me off my feet and up above the angelic swirls of smoke, to the heavens with graceful and innocent spirit. I’m washed out; I’m baptised and reborn in the church of my new faith. Did you fall for it again? Did you really believe in my operation of pretense?

 C h  a  pt       e            r 4

I’ve been hiding again, veiled by this horrible labyrinth that weaves endlessly in and out of phase. I saw you again today. I wish I could blind myself to your sight, to your aleatory presence, because once you’re inside, you show no interest in leaving. You are my very own personal loiasis infection. I’m obsessed and I can’t tear myself away from watching you. But you’re really nobody. You’re nothing special. You’re just an idea. A construct that I created. I see you, and I watch the details of your face, its shape, your hair. I catch myself staring at your lips, and they’re always pert and perfectly still. I’ve never heard them speak. Will you make me hate you with your words when they someday fall mistakenly heard? How easy will it be for me to find faults with your tone, your accent, your intonation, your emphasis, your opinion, your interests, your points-of-view, your obsessions, your addictions, your vices, your fetishes, your voice, your flaws? Maybe I stare at your lips hoping that they’d open mine up to play softly with my tongue. God I wish I could stop thinking about you. I saw you again today, walking away from me and I pretended not to care. You turned around and I averted my eyes in adagio, shifting my line of sight from your ass to the vacant horizon, but I still watched you out the corner of my eye, hoping you’d try and steal glances back at me but I couldn’t make out the details so I’m left to assume that you didn’t. You make me question myself, my worth, my presence, my vanity. You nudge me off the roof of a very tall building, soft like a feather and gentle as a lie, to float down adagissimo to a slowly growing pool of blood; to go quietly. I am possessed by this idea of you that I made up. A self-inflicted disease. A voiceless idea. An idea that is so self-centred and narcissistic it makes me sick. I will never speak to your lips because they, like mine, remain pursed and seemingly sullen. I really hope that whatever lives inside you is what I have pictured inside my head. You make me so possessive. I’d like to strip you someday - of your clothes, spending hours carefully undressing you, poring over every little detail and imperfection that brands your skin distinctly yours, then peel through your personality, and finally your skin, tracing along every inch of your outline, feeling your texture against mine, tasting your scent, inhaling you, until my fingertips are stained sticky with blood that tastes sweetly metallic. But you’re just so pretty.

I’m not trying to say anything because when I say things, they become real. You’re being too much. You are the dust that I find in all the places I’ve brushed over. You bleed all over the hardwood floor after I’ve cleaned my house. This is over now. I’ll remember this time. I’ll go back to grunts and snores. My head is spinning, I’m dizzy. I touch the metal. I am one with soil. I am pure. I am full of shit. My fingers are numb. My skin is clean. This is over now. Why do you hurt me like this?

I don’t understand why this has to be so complicated. I don’t do well with sigils and unspoken signals. Won’t you wear your corsage of eyeworts and delicate nigella? Maybe you know they take me far away. I’ve stumbled into a strangely foreign meadow of wildflowers, tucked-away somehow, somewhere within this landscape of rot, beyond a lake of dark twisting shadows filled with strange fish that gleam and flicker like the stars on a moonless night. I know these grounds, but this is new. Is this your work? Maybe. You hand me flowers everyday, with that ever-stoic expression, frigid and neutral, leaving me trembling with uncertain dread, and I drop to my knees and hold my hands out in anticipation. On Monday, I find them holding cherubine trumpets of lophospermum. On Tuesday, they clutch Queen Anne’s Lace. On Wednesday, I find in them your elegant thorn-apples. On days like these, I wish I could look into your eyes and not feel disdain. I look for you everywhere only to shirk from presumptive potential. But I can only lie to myself so much. On Thursday, a tiny eyebright graces my palms. On Friday, the white hyacinth and crimson hibiscus. On Saturday, your junipers and humble pansies. And on Sunday, a solitary burgundy rose. I crawl around helpless, with scratched knuckles and bleeding elbows, in service to you. I want a world where a flower speaks for me. My pathetic existence culminates in handing you a flower, born from my blood and perfectly yours. And to this end, I spend years growing flowers, and spend even longer choosing only the unblemished and very best for you because I won’t settle for anything less. I look at my rosemaries, my pincushions, my daisies - my truth, dissembled. My pining, for you, my anemone flowers, my buttercup. But I can never decide on any of them. I am surrounded by flowers in full bloom - posies of clovenlip toadflax, small bunches of white clover and corncockle, and the peach blossom. This valley engulfs me, with its sprays of golden cowslip and daffodils. The flowers wrap around me, break me down, and fuse with me. I am the ever pensive Dame’s violet, the black mulberry. I am teased by the diphylleia and the frigid ox-eye daisy that always seem to side with you. I am the pale moonflower, the white egret orchid, and for you, I grow my fingers into wild germanium and purple hydrangea. I’ve been dreaming of the prairie phlox, the humble vervain, and they turn to slowly reveal visions of you as a pretty, little arbutus; you spin me round-and-round, like the charming aspen. You are the balsam, the bellflower, the mauve carnation, my catchfly. We pass by each other sometimes, and these moments blossom as heaps of the Dutchman's pipe cactus and yellow rue flowers that grow like weeds at the banks of the lake. I know this lake will drown me one day, and I’d be happy if I were consumed by these flowers all to return to you.

How am I so fucked up by this idea of you? One bad day one bad day one bad day one bad day one bad day and I continue mashing my keyboard, pushing my buttons in as far deep as they go. Shame on me. Shame on me for letting myself go like this. Shame on me for falling for it all again. Shame on me for believing. Shame on me for being such a bitch. I’ll end up drowning in my tears. If it has to happen, it will. You make me so unhappy, which means I make myself so unhappy. I get lost in the folds of your skin. You can tell what you’re supposed to be in life, like the role you’re meant to play by some arbitrary attribute assigned to you arbitrarily - like your name, or the shape of your face. I can’t really place you, which means I can’t really place myself which means I don’t recognize these attributes and I can’t place them which means they’re out of place which means they’re just not meant to go together, which means we just aren’t meant to be together. Does this make sense to you? Sure it does, because it makes perfect sense to me. Is this the truth of a run-on sentence? A sentence to what? As I said before, this is my penance. You are no one. I feel waves of calming indifference wash over me. Maybe I’ve been too harsh, too stubborn, too volatile; I lose everything the moment I’m confronted by the pitch black silence punctuated only by the absence of that incessant crackling hum of 765 kV power lines.

C    ha p—te r5

I can idealize anyone. I can sanctify you and build you up to immeasurable proportions. But I don’t want to see you anymore. I’ve had enough. I’m going to burst into tears. My tears will drown everything out. I don’t care about you anymore. I don’t want to think about these things. I’ve had enough. I’m tired of searching for it. I’m willing to accept that it doesn’t exist. But then why do I still see you? If cigarettes wear my body down, what burns through my psyche? I know what does. In the end, I know I’m going to die alone. This is not a truth that frightens me. Like a rock that’s fractured open to reveal nothing remarkable, it’s been here since the beginning, waiting patiently. There have been three creatures of habit that have prowled the streets of my city. These three creatures have owned them. They reside in the forest that borders this city, stalking its borders. My city has been long abandoned, cleansed of the contagion of social dependency, a chimera of shame. My city now only houses the harrowing and lifeless shadows of these three creatures, my ceaseless discharge. I piss out straight unadulterated diesel. My piss begins to pool, then runs down in elegant streams, along the winding streets of my city. I can raze this city, bring it all down to the ground, back to peaceful grey. With eyes that are paired mirrors, I judge this city. I judge everything. I am the screen and the projector. I am the slides of film being obliterated with violently sterile light. I am everything you see. I am cyanotypic; I am exposed, I am useless. I drop a match into the sprawling streams of froth and ammonia. It’s wondrous how easily my bridges burn themselves and I realize, as they burn, that they were all useless to begin with. So much time and so much effort spent forming connections of brutal proportions that now leave me feeling conned and defiled, so much time that could have been used in so many better ways. These bridges have never once supported weights other than their own and the strain they yet bear still sustained - an unbearable strain that finds itself released with squeals of smouldering delight as they collapse into frigid waters, heaving with bellows of thick black smoke - looks me in the eyes and echoes the question of how much I am willing to let slip. How much am I willing to let go? What if I recede from participation? I make my own currency. My own time. I abstain from the eternal.

It’s shocking to see how much of myself you see. This is dangerous chirality. It’s not loud enough. I’ve grown tolerant to my addiction, as a slave and it shreds through me, but it’s still too delicate. My life is over now. I saw you again today, and I imagined you seeing me. I’ll stare down at the concrete that’s chipped along its edge and riddled with plastic scabs drilled down into flesh that’s alive and breathing and fills my lungs with lead until my body sinks down to the bottom of the deep end of your pool and you drag me out and pull the pack of Marlboro Reds out my back pocket and it’s just as wet as the lighter and you tilt it and the water drips out like sparks off of propylene fusion sealing my lips shut around it and breathing in and my chest is heavy and congested but you grab my hand it yours and hold it tight and for a moment I’m brought back to the moment but that moment passes unremarkably and I lose you again and you never looked at me but I still turned away to look down at my feet planted on the ground and it’s cold earth frozen over but that’s your gaze but that doesn’t exist and I drag my feet and I run running fall down scrape my knees blood scab rust clot lovers sine wave saw down 50 hertz 60 hertz 119 hertz at 90 breaths a minute of cold congested films of sweat and ecstatic and unreal and I fall down scrape the skin off my knees and shove rocks underneath and it seals over leaving you inside me under my skin crawling towards nothing towards indiscriminate air thick my bruise hidden unseen veiled in nothingness but I think you see me and it’s loud and it’s a lie drags you closer to noise to sound to fucked over this line that divides criss-crossing and runs falls scrapes my skin and blood bleed clot scab peel flashbang faded I reach but I can’t feel because you neever say anything I havent heard your voice and this riptide i drown these phrases subdivided i lose timing trampoline knead money won’t but you never see me do you and i’m left wondering dreaming at the back of the house over chipped cement yellow sunset faded childhood memories pitch shifting doppler hesitating fall sibilance fall syncope fall scrape my knees letting it out for the last time because you never see me through the glass you stare through frosted in the weather and i speed up running fast i cant make this up anymore this feeling of reason and purpose and meaning and i’m the stranger here because i’ve lived everywhere a migrant unwelcome and unnoticed yet disapproved of with bated breath let out for the last time fogging the window up never frosted but your gaze is cold clear never seen this ends here before i fall scrape bleed clot scab break shift pitch break holding your hand never touched in air cold your voice frozen over chipped concrete blood clot scab.

I will write words about better places. I will bruise wounds that are better placed. I am backed up against this wall and I am bound by vast emptiness on either side and I am nauseous and claustrophobic. This is my prison. My grave of shit. I can feel my interest in you grow soft and pull away, shriveling up dry and withered, fluttering away, pretty like a Monarch butterfly, with the same weightless grace with which it first arrived, with a simplicity that scares me. This melancholy melody. This dawn chorus, ruined by so many unknowns that it becomes absolutely pointless. Every Monday, I’m looking forward to that Friday evening cigarette, and she anticipates her Saturday morning sister. Envious of others’ imperfections, I will die a lonely man. My hair is thinning and falls out in clumps. I’m brought back down to my knees, swallowed by that same lukewarm question. My obsession is pointless. It is futile and it is raucously disappointing. But you won’t know this. I feel dirty in this skin. I don’t want to find out I’ve been seeing things like when I stare out at a liquor store signboard with another galloping horse on it. I never wanted you to feel the way you might. Things have happened, things that I wish hadn’t and I know they never will but I wonder because I know thinking of things can rewrite and so history is rewritten, yes in your head, but that frightens me because things have happened that I never intended and that’ll be the way you end up seeing this. I would leave. I really would. I never want to see you again.