I don't function like you do. I have tangled wires for brains, floating in thick black blood inside this skull of mine. Everything is connected with little silver twist ties, and tiny pieces of rusted metal stick to the smooth interior of my head. And if you go further, traveling along the ridged length of my spine, you will see that each separate vertebrae is wrapped in plastic and sealed shut with golden staples. My muscles are kept in form-fitting glass cases and they are filled with a shimmery blue fluid that smells of ashes and cloves. My heart is a useless thing. With little silver pins sticking in it and instead of blood pumping through each artery, it sends long threads of yellowed lace coursing through my veins.

I am filled with misery. All these broken little parts that somehow work to make me whole. I can float. I can fly. I fall deep down into the dark recesses of the morning as she wakes up and blinds me. Thick solid pain courses into my eyes, tearing a long elaborate path through my pupils into the soup that is my brain, clawing, slipping, falling down into my body. Running its rough tongue along the glass cases of my liver, my spleen, my stomach. I lie on the floor, bathed in sunlight. Naked and crucified by the creature inside me. I don't think while it licks me clean. This pain that is alive and living in me, it is my torment. Each breath it takes is one less that I take and the longer it is inside of me the less of me it will have to consume.

Consume me. It takes me into its body slowly. Licking my organs, sucking the blue fluid from their cases and twisting my lace-blood around its translucent fingers. The morning is gone now. My skin stings from the lack of heat and the pale dusty moonlight filters in. Crawling all through the room. A great hulking shadow creature, with stars in its hair and galaxies littering the great black expanse of its spreading body. It is my protection from myself. It sleeps with me, sliding its languid fingers along the smooth interior of my thighs, up along my stomach, traces serpentine patterns up my neck and whispers words that have no meaning into the vacuum of my head. This darkness puts the pain to sleep. That writhing monster that has become my insides, that petulant creature that licks and sucks and rubs my veins and tendons and all the wet pumping organs inside of me. The darkness is my lover. The darkness is my sanity.

And then the morning comes again. And I am alone with it. Alone again with the thick throbbing pain-creature that eats me alive. I feel as if I give off little sparks of light. Electrified. Crisp. They pop up from my glistening warm skin and are devoured by the sunlight that feeds the evil inside of me. They are all that is left of me. The only part of me left that is beautiful. Like tiny shards of glass, each exploding violently, silently, in the blinding light that envelops me. Hours and hours of this. Feeling my life crystallizing in the humid air. Feeling that tongue, those fingers devouring me, sucking me, licking me to death. Hours and hours of this. I sense no end to it all. For there is no transition between the morning and the evening. But then...it comes. My darkness. And it is the womb in which I can sleep. A sweet fluid tasting of honey, milk, wine.

This is when I sleep. This is when I am human again.


8/9/01
An exercise in morbid exaggeration.

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