Excision
This is the only way to cure it. Would you trust someone who’s never been? Now listen: you need to get yourself a rope. Coarse preferably. Tie it as close as you can to the wound. Make it tight enough to starve it of its origin. Isolate the damage. Let the abrasion as you move distract its cause for you. Let it twist and spark and scrape away the rust into a clean flame. Take the flame and douse your fingertips as deep as you can, then deeper every time. Work your way up to the knuckle. If it scalds, good. Let it erase the infected nest from the forefront of your mind. The problem is self-constructed; unnatural, not organic on
“Velocitas eradico.”
Breakneck – the traceur hurtling – cut from the stream, broke from the rank – blending all the shrapnel primed – reactive answers giving traction – throwing him from any height – incendiary force – shoving him against the wall – defiant, but he needs it like a trigger – one after next it chambers and pulls – when it fires he goes crashing through the soundproof wave – like acid-rain on asphalt – it thrums and jumps and talks like one – but there’s no time – it’s behind him now: circling, serrating – caught up
Diagnosis
I was asked to write this down, in case someone needs to know how it felt. “Evidence,” I think she called it; tangible proof that I’m sick. Like a doctor’s note as a prose poem I guess. I doubted it would prove anything, but she insisted. Let me begin.
I told the doctor I hadn't gotten any sleep. We were standing outside her classroom and she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Has anybody?" and for a split second I felt smaller than I am.
The doctor once told me a theory exists that questions whether our souls could survive in a vacuum. She said that all we truly have is a single charcoal portrait,
Snowblind
Here, I’ll describe it for you:
It’s deep winter and you’re lost. The sky is ruptured overhead. The myth of progress stains you. The muted road is all that’s left (you’ve no choice but to take it). Almost solemn, but not enough to make you turn back; it’s at once an anomaly and a godsend. The indents in this bleach-white wasteland propel you further, deeper towards that howling rift. You cannot see (it doesn’t matter); the whole of it is frozen and that should be enough. But it’s not enough, is it? You still hold that question (that unanswered) inside you, close to the skin, in the v
Ghost Stories
My earliest memory is of Mom crying over me, and of you lurking above her. It's an extrasensory kind of fear: both profane and sublime. You can't exactly see it, and you can't pin it down; that’s how it surrounds and suffocates you. Man versus nature, man versus fate, man versus sire; call it what you will. Patient and bitter, you're a spider waiting in a blackened forest. You stalk behind our dreams with anxious hooks; always watching, baiting us, hating us, dragging us apart slowly and cautiously, bisecting us with your subtle scalpel-smiles. One-by-one you turn us away, forcing us to face you and the grotesque truth of
Surrealia
Thick ash fills the dreaming jungle. The scalding rivers rise up to greet your neck with their steam. You are capable of standing silent, of the long slow inhale; anything to take the taste from off your tongue into the air.
The room is clouded, sun filtered in the dim smoke of this early day. Your head rolls back with the heavy wave, the subtle push and flow. You are here but you are gone, just as well, you might be floating further out over submerged walls and sunken cities without name.
The next hit is stronger, slower; the depth changes as you drift. Deny it, but you are as malleable as the summer months to dawn. And should y
Lo-fi
An honest confrontation the other day—one without conclusion. She asked me what was off, how to fix it, why I didn’t answer. I couldn’t find the words just then, but here they are for you: I want to have an effect. To be counted off in metrics. Corporeal: tangible shine or tangible rust. I want to write the stone and watch the ripple. I want others to measure it, engage it, feel it, taste it, scrap it, forget it, uncover it. I want to be inhaled in warm, smoky basements and exhaled in brisk winter night. I want to be the final thing they muse about before sleep drags them off.
The thing is that I know it’s all
Machine-Part Sincerity by Sigma-Echo-Seven, literature
Literature
Machine-Part Sincerity
She once said to me,
"Come. You be a gear right here,
and I'll be a pulley over there.
Together, we'll both obey
the lever's dream."
I lied to her when I said,
"I want nothing more."