A track plays in my mind, this horrid echo that screams back “LISTEN, damn you, and follow the details this time”.
Waiting, whistling. Watching. The horrid mass curling, writhing, waiting for me to come back, return. We whittled the world down in the wee hours of the morning, the last rinsing traces whisking all those worries away. Wandering in the stillness that always came after, wishing all this coping was actually helping.
Now, we can’t lie. I can’t lie. We used to be me and the devil we knew – but now, I can see it, I know it, I fucking am it. Its fucking in me, it is me, it haunts me. Its night again – the stillness sings – I don’t fear the dark I fear the silence.
It pervades.
Lingers, 100 ways to die,
I’m chasing escape and he/she/they/me sits ever on the other side of something synthetic, the antiseptic sepsis of clinical bloodied bartering. So, lets put it aside, right? You’re here now, you’re listening, you’re in this for the duration so come on down the stairs, and let me show you where the root cellar goes.
Its ancient in here, and fucking smells like it. Twined organic vines wrapping around my wrists like veins, throbbing and weeping, the dirt and the mulch sings my sins, my song, my veil. Further down I hold your hand, guiding your fingers along the stacked stone walls. sliding through the wet slits (sorry, CRACKS) between. warm. Hoping I’m not scaring you, at least not yet.
I think you can hear it now.
that track. listen
The spinning stairs are circling the drain – THE drain – and the leathery feathers flap against the battered windows of midnight. I had the faith of a dog but in between breaths I just couldn’t stop LYING. The gaping gasping mouth of a dying fish coward screaming for attention, PLEASE help me.
There’s a hall here, at the bottom of the stairs. Its this or deeper into the drain, which I can’t see. Thus – the hall, come. I haven’t showed you that mass I was telling you about, the black court guarding my ancient tomes, I haven’t given them a name yet but that reckoning looms. I think some time ago I died in the halls of that home.
That great grey beast of east coast winter mornings, blood on the grass crinkles like fibers of glass, a thousand pin pricks of death – I had no idea who I’d become, the sad unknown child wanting for a home dying to be understood.
Look, I’m sorry, I know this is a lot. But its a lot for me too. The hundred lies on my lips stained them black, trickling out of the corners of my mouth like so much wasted self love.
I can’t see you any more.
and down here, in the root cellar of my prison, I chew on the hearts of all my beautiful constructs, the abstract imaginations that used to prop me up. My writhing beast is wrapped around me, the coils of my failures virtue signaling for thoughts and prayers.
There’s hope, but hope isn’t an emotion. Its a place, and this GPS is fucked.
The Bacchanalian 