A bird in the hand. It's supposed to be worth something. The train that traverses the neurons crawls slowly to a sudden halt. That's where the recollection ends. Listen to the cables crack and whip through the nervous system. Forward.
If you've paid to be this wasted you might as well take the fucking chair and sit down. Who? I can't sense anything past the sockets of his eyes, but his mind snakes its way under the cushion of my epidermis. I feel like crossing my thumbs over his Adam's apple and constricting the passage of audacity through his windpipe. Even Bartimaeus could see what was incised into me. Maybe something scoured away my scripture. Turned inside out into the big wide world.
Drop to your knees and answer the call of the asphalt. Yell for your retribution. Lightning might strike you down. The bite of gravel in your shins tells you that you hold the centrifugal force of the storm, bearing down from overhead. Hanging on the beam of a headlight without a source and not an inch of cloth to stop the wind from tearing you apart.
Have you ever felt
terror so corporeal desperation so cellular isolation with such a cold heartbeat confusion so masterful that you
Drop to your knees and answer the call of the asphalt.
Beg to die. It could just happen. I've followed my swallow to grace.
I found my way into a church, and it seemed somehow he'd got his wish.
Nobody could sense my being there in two places. An absent spectator at my own funeral. I've been here before. So small and powerless under God's great ceiling. Certainly, I've sat in these pews before.
I wonder if anyone is watching at home. Everything is filmed here. And the vicar stood up to a microphone and began talking. He says there are people watching at home. Somehow I know it's a lie. I can feel the abstract dread of the empty chat bar.
He looks distant. I could see my own body behind him in a brown wooden casket. Sleeping beauty came to be filled with cavity fluid. Tread the ground between perversion and release. I can't really see my face - fracture. The experience continued with a deep sense of discomfort that began even before anyone started speaking. To be buried in a casket is to witness eternity. My final dalliance is with the six surfaces of a jumped-up shoebox.
Teleshopping purgatory at 2am. Divine power has imbued this clergyman with the authority to advertise wares. I can't think of what he was trying to flog. Maybe air fryers.
Absolve your sins with a set of knives.
It went on for some long, slow, endless time. Vik stood up behind my right shoulder. I'd shifted myself to the other side of the church without noticing how I got there. He yells out, stop it I have a dead brother lying there.
Hand thrown out with an accusatory gesture and his face twisted in such a strange and pure state of distress that omnipresence had never seen. Wet and ugly and red. I can feel him close on the back of my neck. He was never angry like that. He held everything in quietly. That's where we differed in life.
I saw him throw paper into there with the body. A disembodied voice that can't find its place in memory. I can't see who said it, because no longer can I turn my eyes away from the altar. Catatonia's vigour. All energy must be transferred somewhere. The audience begins to be yanked onto their feet by a collective compelling restlessness and I see their bodies pulling and pushing and shouting out damnation such blasphemous abhorrence in the periphery of the Lord and even in death
I can't hold respect.
I think about how I will have to kill myself to retain the dignity of an animal.