'Like he said you get small and you can see yourself and you tell yourself he needs to go to sleep yeah he needs to go to sleep he needs to shut his eyes and relax before he can feel how small he is and how big his pulse is, creeping like spiders across his psyche, his unconscious world pulled tight like babyskin, shaking him awake under the sting of panic over phantoms that were never there.

shit he's awake. Shit he's awake. Oh shit the whole bed feels like forever, under and inside at the same time, a whole safari of void, of anxiety, of shrinking, expanding fear flipping inside out

 

And next to you, laying there, breaths so still and serene

is an impossibly inert nothing.

you see thru her. You see thru everything. everything tastes like half a ground up fever capsule on a spoon with jam that your mom used to feed you when you were sick, but it never quite quelled that quiet hell of being sick with soothing wrath and rancor. '

 

manslaughter

 

and I got lost 

 

Oh fuck

 

I got lost 

 

Oh fuck

 

I 

 

Got

 

Lost 

 

.

 

in a flow, an omniflux 

of a sky described by the first upright apes 

a mirror shattered against the unyielding wall of history 

writing like a glacier moves :

(we tried to hold it back 

but our flesh is feeble

our numbers too few 

only in mere billions 

bowed green against the ebb 

of everything 

 

we have no choice 

( 

Our machines whirring, clicking, stamping away in organized pleasure 

an atoms breadth away from total shaking destruction 

from complete well-oiled annihilation 

too much momentum, it's 

too much momentum, it's 

too much momentum 

and I can't feel my way in this world anymore 

( 

 

writhing youth 

gossiping by a fire, crackling tin adjaescent to 

hot coals 

 

she was always sitting so much closer to him 

this guy she told me was her brother [is she her step brother or was that a lie? who is she lying to?]

Who is she lying to? 

 

he pretends to smith a red hot bolt 

 

they laugh

 

and ive never tasted death so close

 

and it's never hurt this bad before 

 

and it never went away.

 

in 20 years when I tongue my teeth set so much straighter by plain-gummed men, i can still line my mind:

a clear core of molten quartz in a maelstrom buried in a maelstrom buried in a maelstrom buried in a 

 

I can still line my mind with this exact minute I'd been cleft by the collapse of truth, 

sliding down

 in wet ricochet

against the soft organs in my chest 

held stiff and swallowed 

fed for a decade of broiled, bitten tongues .

 

and the best i can come up with is only a question absorbed into damp, soundproof sponges 

hanging on a wall in an apartment somewhere 

'who were you lying to?' 

)

 

everything is flat from here on in.

everything is small 

;