little demon bubbles up until i can exorcise him on to paper.
you say, what about without the demon? how does it happen then?
but then there is no need for exorcisms. there is no devil to cast out.
i suppose you could say the demon gives me the words.
it's a tenuous balance.
i'm going to retch.
i really can't get the hang of thursdays. being awake is acutely painful. can't sleep without the demon out.
why can't i explain the shadows behind my eyes?
the only safe place is inside a myth. predictable outcome. demon made flesh.
we fight to the death.
but you do not live ephemerally inside my skull. we know who slays whom. the rules are clear.
we know who is dead.
we can touch each other's blood.
i see how i need you. you need me. i need you.
or else there is no story here. and both of us are dead. we are nothing, we are nothing, we are dead.
i feel the weight of ten thousand atmospheres. trying to rise my chest. i don't understand why others don't feel it. they seem to breathe without crushing.
am i singular in that i have problems with gravity?
my limbs stick to the earth. supine in the grass. ants can crawl on me i can't move. just feed me raspberries and let me look up at the trees.
the cat sleeps with his head shoved into the corner of his box.
i understand the sentiment.
do we all avoid the world in different ways?
am i the only one with significant problems with gravity, inertia?
physics made an exception for me. have the gravity of a thousand jupiters, it said. only newton's 1st for you. let's see what happens.
what happens is nothing. which is the only thing that can happen.
was that your hypothesis?
what a dull experiment.
lab rat.
i'm white as one here. i'm white as death. exsanguination. maybe i haven't enough blood to stand up in this gravity. the dizziness, anyway, is a certain.
white sun, white rat, white skin.
the world is losing its color. i only see green in the rain anymore. conversion color blindness disorder. probably not a thing.
my lower eyelids are heavy now. face will slide off soon. maybe it will take its pain with it.
i keep wanting to take off my face. pain and all. set it aside. like the classic android reveal, only i suppose there's a skull underneath there, not machinery. or they would've fixed me decades ago.
do you think the gravity will pull me down through the bed through the floor into the core of the earth? it's made partly of nickel, i hear. maybe i'll see magma in its rightful color, maybe then.
it's an under-the-duvet kind of day thanks to you, dear m.
there's no explanation for the amount of confusion you shoved into me.
i was only very small, after all. and then i was bigger. and further bigger
and no less confused.
one eye sees the trees, one eye sees cement. i wear a prism now. wish there were one for my brain,
the parasite you let crawl into my ear once
it eats synapses. it sucks up blood.
fat leech in my brain.
it shits confusion.
your own perspective is inside out so i suppose
i really shouldn't be surprised
and his, so insular
oh, together you're quite a pair.
it's enough to spin a brain to chaos.
should've stuck with the trepanning and let the brain drip out my nose
and have done with it. sent me on my way with the Book of the Dead
and my heart in a jar,
my guts in another.
let me die in the desert, oh please, oh please
i want to see the sky and the sand
each eye surprised at different types of brightness
i've never known here under your swirling, muddled meddled tar pitched world
everything tastes too much.
i cannot hold myself upright.
tremors under my skin, in my jaw, old hands. i am paler than i have ever been. white ghost. disappearing into bones
i don't necessarily want.
it's just inertia. it's just this white weak sun. i'm wilting as the croci pop up vivid purple in the rain.
but the world is still dead.
it's dead in my head. it's soft and still and quiet in here.
for once.
is that why the inertia keeps the food from my lips, overwhelms the sense of smell, cuts off access to--
well, everything?
i want to be home. yellow sun-soaked eyes.
skin the color of life. of movement and thoughts and freedom.
i am, essentially, caught in the nexus of my distress. i suppose i have given up the thrashing, flopped over as if dead. maybe i won't be dead that way.
but
it's true that i don't breathe here.
am i dead and not know it? is it that my body is slowly coming to terms with already being dead? is Death, the Grand End of Things, far different from what we thought?
a slow cool down into nothingness, a hand wrapped around your heart, squeezing it slowly away?
necrosis of the hands, next? blackness, scooching upward
until i cannot feel where my body ends
and the universe begins?
that hug is a viper, it bites and it feeds
it comes four times in fifteen minutes and i have to push out to let you let me go
do you still think i'm yours?
after all this time, all this growing up i had to do
to separate from you
conversion touch disorder, could i not have had that with a poison frog skin
bright colors to warn you
would that have worked if i knew what you do?
you don't know you don't know you don't know what you do
it all comes so naturally to you
my skin is not bright but still you find me
i turn to paper
i fold into a cardboard box
please, will you, just throw me away?
you made that dark thing in me that roils around,
those brain blocks that compartmental box
you taught me to make them with tender viper hands
you aren't made of bright colors,
i wasn't to know
you smiled and laughed and i said more mummy more
and so there was more
we had fun
i loved you tremendously, i did, i did
past tense there, Brown's morpheme Stage IV
i learned it by three but not when to use it,
not where it applied,
not that your type of viper has teeth,
it's only when prey pulls away
my mind is haunting me
it's leaking out in the tremors in my hands. i can't hold the tea that calms me.
i'm pregnant with ghosts.
my head is not big enough, my fingers turn black. i can't carry this fullness any more.
i don't even know what's in there. the ghosts are sworn to silence.
that doesn't mean they can't terrify because they do, they do
and my body is wracked with fear
these tremors, these dents in my head,
stabbing face,
what are you?
am i dying?
would you kindly let me know?
i am too full i am too full, please, a shunt for the skull? let the everything drip out. i've always been in favor of trepanning. twist up those ghosts a bit, i want them to squirm.
do you know, i wish for cobwebs? i wish for cotton.
help me carry it,
portage to the next river, and no i don't know how many miles or how much is muck
just, please?
and no, i don't know the way. that's your job, isn't it? making the torches,
disengaging the ghosts?
i think i'll go walk the dog in the sun now.
you can't see ghosts in daylight, right?
what lies they do tell.
my brain fell out of words. wait, words fell out of my brain. grad school time is not in alignment with your time. i have reached a whole new level of numbness.
nothing worth it. sleep, my beloved, has come to me regularly.
i am encapsulated in this glacial plane of time. i will miss your birthday your anniversary baby cousins being born, it just doesn't happen in here because we are stuffed fat with phonemes and clusters and blends. it is quite quiet in here, though. my globe is made of thick glass, so the light will shine in.
brain weighs more than the body. mostly, i've given up spelling. really, correct spelling was never a thing until some tightwad decided to regulate it. my fingers type things without consultation from brain. usually brain is informed on these things but brain is an absent parent right now, with more important things to do, apparently.
body is yelling; it is weak. face hurts. stuffed-down creative bit of brain is pregnant with adjectives, metaphors, life. beginning to atrophy. i have to search for you. you are a sad timid creature now. they are all yelling and yelling but absent parent chooses selective deafness.
i can't live like this.
not here.
not in this place of horrors where angry ghosts are real and do my laundry on saturdays.
oh, Mother.
let's define 'wrong' by the number of scars
the number of stars--
wouldn't you touch the constellations if you could?
inky black soft velvet sky. places of brilliance. trace them into patterns you find. such softness.
connect the dots, each pattern a private picture, each brilliance a burst of joy.
there are, you know, reasons we can't touch.
you don't yet know when you're young, when it's fun
oh, oh mum,
what have you done?
