Glow
Dark, twisted spires, pulverising and piercing clean ventricles. Blackened, hollowed out veins, blue from lack of oxygen, loosely falling through a vessel.
It’s set to become a vessel.
6 foot. 6 and 1/2 stone. At least it will be soon.
It is curious that a height is maintained, a presence. As it withers it will become more like the shadow it once cast and the shadow will wane but its height will prevail, steadfast. Wiry frame, languishing, idle in the wind. Hair, flaccid and brittle, clinging to a sodden forehead. Every inch of a body feels every pulse of the heart now close enough to the surface of the skin to burst forth…
A breach within the vessel. Out of this breach pours the life, vital, but this breach itself lives to drain. In charge, moving from carriage to carriage, room to room, organ to organ.
Heavy flow. Blood like tar. Overwhelming the chalice. Overwhelming.
This is the path of one. All else is flattery and fault.
If you could see the damage to this vessel you would see life rending a hole in itself. It has been growing, but not warming. It has been collapsing and pulling and ripping and tearing.
Or at least it could have been.
The glow came with the morning and the nightmare was tragically averted. It makes no apology only that with relief of the breach comes a new kind of agony. A new damage… but manageable.
Forgiving itself the body works only fleetingly but it will work, tethered to the plough…
…it will work.
…and again the glow will make amends, at least momentarily. For the breach leaves a scar even if the breach never existed and the organ that rules them all will not allow the breach to be forgotten.
…and the trudging, meticulous banality of the body will be twisted and born with the standard reply of “…what if?”
What if what was could still be what wasn’t?
Forgive the body.
Daggers to set pulses racing but none like that first morning when the body was set to become a vessel. Nothing like the sodden sheets the sodden arms, legs, head, hair, chest and back.
Forgive the body. Forgive the mind.
A hand to help the vessel but not the help the body. It carries nothing but what it has always carried. There is no passenger, not within this body and so it maintains its path.
No breach.
No hole.
Nothing to fear?
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Prison
I lack the sense to change.
I lack the drive to change.
I lack the desire to change.
I will not change.
But you will change me.
Vast realm. Vast oceans. Vast skies. Vast chasms.
Casting their lines to the wash, plunging their faces into sodden earth. Dragging feet. Dragging hair. Dragging the waters.
I collapse, inwardly and outwardly. Weight. A wall. Several days pass with my face against the wall. With my cheek learning the imprint of a single brick.
Vulgar, putrid, damp domicile.
Heaven in here. Haven in here. Hell out there.
Because I have for so long deprived myself of everything I wanted when I was without, now I am within and it is like a known embrace.
I can’t want, I can’t need, because I can’t dream. I can’t aspire. I can’t love. I can’t hate. I can only be. In here. In here is where the only me I can abide is present for all to see.
It suits me. They say it suits me. They say I carry it well.
Crooked, bent double. Crooked. Crocked. Broken nails. Yellow nails. Nails driven into the palms of my hands.
I would never try to break out of here. They say my release is pending. They say soon I will begin to grow again. They say soon I will be “free”.
…but I know I’ll be back. These four walls.
Existence made me a promise. Teachers made me a promise, parents, peers, psychologists, psychiatrists. A promise.
Only within this chamber am I revered. I am not starving, I am nourished.
I have hung myself from the bars in here. Neck straining, bruised, veins twitching, eyeballs red and full to bursting.
I was offered the key to life. I declined. I snapped it in the lock… now I know I’m here forever.
