I remember waking in a field. The sun is above me. It has a face but not like mine. Its eyes are closed.
I’m wearing a gown made of the hair we’d never grown. The gown stretches behind me as I walk, winding and clinging against the landscape as if to wed me to it. It pulls the roots of my scalp so wide and far apart you can see straight into my brain, the mounds and nubs there, holes and powder.
Beneath the dirt, the blood is dry. Enmassed dreams of the dead hold up the lattice of the unnamed landscape. Where I’d already walked I knew I could not walk back.
The light of day is near and thin with no one waiting.
I remember coming to the house. The house had awaited my return through all our lives. It had watched me move toward it in the waves of seasons spanning all the air like leather.
The house appears slick black from a distance, like a night sea, though up close it is transparent, barely there.
Each other house surrounding matches exactly. Miles of homes along the land all same as ours, each disappearing when not watched. Nowhere I could go would not end up here.
Our house has more doors than I can count—so many there’s no part of the exterior that’s not an entrance.
Where I touch the house, my fingers stick. My skin and the house’s skin mesh. I sense a screeching sound beyond the paint—lobes of damaged language waxing and refracting in a familiar lilt that holds the house together.
Each instant seems to scrape around behind my face, as if probing for a way out.
I remember inside the house the walls are mirrored. Once closed, the doors could not be opened from inside. The tiles along the floor beneath my feet have symbols etched into their faces, though when I try to read them, they go blurred.
In the mirrors, there are no symbols; the floor is white, unmarked. Nor do I appear there where I’m standing. Instead of me there, I see Gravey, wholly naked. The light around him is so severe the house no longer appears to have border.
I remember his name had been Gravey in some eras, though in others he took on other names, now in their mass erasing all.
Gravey regards me smiling with countless mouths. His nails are long and gold, his face and arms covered with a thin hair whiter than I remember hair could be.
At Gravey’s feet, there is a woman. The blood on the floor and air is hers, I know. I know it smells like blood does. It’s on both sides of her face, outside and in, and on Gravey’s face and arms, and on mine. The light is shining off the blood so loud.
As the shape inside my brain adjusts, many men appear there standing in the white surrounding Gravey, their breath among them knotted as if to one field, which flows in through the vents and circuits from the expanse beyond the house flush with unleavened breath made melting in the wake of all of us beneath the sun now turning seven suns and then seven hundred and then and then.
My features feeding, the days collecting underneath. No way back beyond this instant, I remember, though in knowing so, the instant too is split apart. I can watch myself there watch myself there watch the men among the men. Gravey with his arms raised; all our arms raised.
I stand above the body of the woman on the floor.
The woman looks like me, as did all women, cradled there among the many men and boys and girls brandishing knives, or holding pocket mirrors or small bulbs between them to bring the house around them closer. I watch them clench my jowls and stretch them out, looking for pockets. I watch them cut the ears off of my face and wing them. I watch them smear parts of the reflecting room with my dark blood, obscuring what repeated. They take turns feeding off the torso. The bite-mark lesions on her face interrupt my face from being who I’d been before the house had risen, the gouge marks taking putty from my jaw. My teeth are removed and chewed in other mouths or hot glued to the ceiling in chandeliers, or worn as jewels on the boys’ fingers, marking with molars down their arms. Blue of a bruise milking to muddish rouge again around the elbows where I sat propped and pulled along the wood grain banged with nails to jut the feet of those who passed so they’d remember any instant among the instant, holding time down where it caught and held warm to the house and cooled and let us know. The scalp shorn back to bring the hair up with it, showing the evening underneath the ridge of pulp I’d squeezed myself in underneath, the matte of sleeprooms and remembered bodies and the idea of a way to stumble through old doors; the symbol he or they or I would cut into the surface of me soft where hair had hid me palest to match my surface there with theirs; how the symbol seemed to shine, collecting human dust along the clot of light that hung around it in connection to the prior symbol in the prior body, and the symbol in the body yet to listen. All of them mine.
I can read the instant in me like mirages. I can stand behind the arms and take the arms up and be the arms as they would cut and hold the torso, aping it a puppet or a mummy or a mother or her child. The words I felt lodged in my chest came out through the man as whatever words he wanted, and they had always been. My goldish mounds. The pyramids my cheeks mimed as I stood unseen in the muddle of all the air of the house surrounded at the center of the hair, broke in such love, while from its fold the field grows growing.
I remember how the light inside me fried. I remember the texture of my shape inside the body of the woman as they undid her, clammed surrounding my own mind, framed in such bright motion-tinsel there is no home. Each cut into her flesh creates a sentence of the widest kind. Books of the trees. The windows slide one by one out of me firm. The tapes spool and lather around my aggregating outline. I do not need to think at all to see the years the woman had held there at my center full of the belief that we had been and always would, that no time could erase the white walls out of the sense of being born. The long shade of the woman’s mother in her like a mother. Stairwells that bend into an ocean all pink and gray, wrapped in the softest mouths and brightest holidays, the kneecaps cracked on gravel and father-kissed and mended, flesh again.
I remember the one dry body of the chorus of the boys. I remember threading through the boys at once, all of the body of me, and they are muscle and they are bone, they have tongues gouged from the parents in them who I had already been before pilled to speak the scripture of their lives, the laughter they threw out to pull to the moon, the tattoos their skin rejects and wears in squirming radiation. Their ring fingers burning where barns had been before them full of pigs and calling rakes to change the nature of the lawns where they would stand among a coming storm on clearest days and throw a ball so hard and high into the sky they might knock out the sheath of glass we’d named our heavens. All the boys with all the mouths. All the ash flexed in the testicles and ovum caked up like televisions blinking back and forth between the edited breasts and the call for ground beef pillows every dream, wept from pubic carpets unto wanting more and asking more inside the mirror of my blood where the day turns into day again to day again to day again today.
I close my eyes and open my eyes and I am in another woman’s body, any of them. I remember the brush of blades along my cheek, the inner friction matched with something pearled along the chaw outside my head. Someone was speaking, yes, in through a wedge of soft between my bone, yes, my only bone, knitted from silt. I’d heard the words before: each night of my life carried in secret in the black above my bed, crammed in between the rafters and insulation holding out the mask of their ideas; how in that space sealed under sleep and all wide open I had eaten of the black, had spoken in tongues to no one there, confessing every crime committed in the history of my home and country as all mine. Then, like any child, I’d woke, drunk on saliva and that false language through the whole span of waking day. This was worn along the lids, carried in acid I would use to break down what came inside me. In each word I could read the hours as they were. And with the words, a breath of clenching winds or someone’s fingers, a narrowing enormous hall rendered in time, from where along the distance there was a singing not like the voices of the surrounding men, no chords or hymnals or holy organs, but sound like a negated human mass. Music, yes, once, that woke me up and held me hard against myself inside a pocket of another person, a woman, too; there the blood that rushed beyond my skin had been contained, enmassed in slim packets vast enough to curl me from them, crushed enough that they must break. Within the cram of night the skull contains, in any hour. This is the space for which I’d tried to live, licking back the blacker centimeters of my memory to wake the mirror, slip myself again into the game of self where before me I had been. As in the sealed space surrounding every life the black of the unseen flips up in spasm, and splays on the walls a negative light made of my division, where above me there the boys again are slaving, staring through me, as if my skin is not a surface but a tear. The house around them glows with something not like fire, a digital convulsion split between a universe of glassless screens. The whole length of the split of the way I’d meant to walk along the circumference of my head here clasping and collapsing beyond the instant to keep the instant where it waits to split unsealed.
Here in the room the boys are chanting. The words make gaseous glint around the skulls they were. The speech is all the same. It pills and pills the weight around me, holds me up. I can sense beneath me where I should be able to feel them lifting my thighs wide on the carpet, spreading tendons tight along the legs I know were mine: mine and mine again where old milk reaches. My clitoris is hard and slunk back up in my cavity of man, throbbing through the flesh walls with its sightless tip alive and never dying. The space beneath me where the babies would be birthed from squirms and spreads, lapping wet warmth something from my center like a zapped lamp. The faces of the boys are enormous. They grow small pustules that against the cream of the air of me burst into a color once that had been called silver, then had been gray, then is no different than any.
I feel something in me becoming unremembered, moving from the flesh framed in the face along the center of this current body full of currents in reverse. It appears then in my bank of mind rawing, deformed in sticky sacs unframed, one to another, the gash behind the gashing coming open, catching in cluster where I’m not. The transfer burns; I cannot read it; it is in me like the space I’d go along in through all our lives; I feel the whole rest of me around me want to pull into the instant, to become gored into the forgotten nodule of any woman’s brain, to suck the whole rest of all the lives of our lives in the eyes of what a life was into one cell; then just as quickly, it is nothing; flat black matter, each small destruction eaten into its own center as if to seal off from all else ever awake. It wipes me out. It loves and loves me until I can’t believe I am no void, and all I want hard is to stay inside this body in this instant all forever and I know I cannot hold this and I’m only anywhere.
I watch though cannot feel as the boys slip the slimy lanyard of my intestines from my bellows, the meat-lengths I’d used inside this version of who I was to push the feces from me, to pillow the child I never bore, the soft mass of it unwound and unraveled, ticker-taping anywhere, wholly emblazoned. It has a pinky stench, the coils on coils do, a little knotted meal, what sound. The pump of where the stuff of me had gone along my organs to fill the bulk of the meat vein seems to go on pumping crud off into the arena. The glimpse of the gap between where I’d been before I was there and the shape of the space that knitted me from ash has come apart and cannot breathe. The gunk is up between my teeth and I am growing. I can count along the room where each of me already has split again into another, the mink of the air arranging itself around my vision to fill up with what I couldn’t, there in the faces of the men and women, there in the reflections of the faces of the men and women, in the revision of no day becoming all. I go to close my eyes again but they are already closed. The black-space where I had enmasked my mind before inside no hour stirs on the air like any vow. All our men have peeled it from me with my veinwork, my silent putty, their hopes not buried in what I am not now, but between.
They take my ribs and lids. They take the foam around my spirit. I am wider than the room. The house is rising.
They take my hands.
I sat up from the dark into more dark. I felt my wife beside me. I knew her body like my own. She was very slim. We were in a room I did not recognize, though I could see only outlines.
I touched my wife’s face. Where I touched her face her face touched my fingers and remained. I didn’t need to say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. The world held on around us. No sound.
I wanted to go on like this the rest of my life. Now that I had found it I could not remember any other feeling.
As if to mark this thought, the dark around us began to move. It peeled the room back, covered my recognition over, filled the space. And just as quickly she was disappeared again into anything. And the dark was not a room again but just the endless shapelessness. I could not stop it.
It did not wish to be stopped.
I open my eyes and I am my wife. I am standing at a mirror.
The reflection is all there is—every inch of the world covered over with the flat smooth surface, endless miles. Mirrors line the faces of the buildings, of the ground, the sun and planets, the sky itself, the light itself.
My wife is wearing the dress I buried her in, the same dress she was wearing when we were wed. Her face is covered.
I feel her breathe. I feel her body spread throughout the edgeless reflection coursing.
I try to think inside her mind; to feel there what had been in her always; what she believed in, what she remembered of herself, of us, of the rooms she walked in while I wasn’t with her, of the feeling of the darkness of the dirt as it was filled in over her head by men in daylight paler than any I remember.
And where her memory was is now only more mirrors. The glass encased every inch of those mnemonic miles as well, the rooms and light she wore within her covered over in it, white forever, no dream, no face remained. More nothing but the idea of her carried in me disappearing.
To feel her even this way is enough. Even having nothing left in all of it, it is warm and close, a wide white landscape beyond the necessity of feeling or understanding. Even erased, her reflection fills my mind, coats it open without image, eye, or word.
I don’t want it to ever end—this grace, ageless and shapeless—and so, immediately, it does.
The mirrors fall away onto the space behind them, revealing nothing.
The space behind the reflection wore so wide I couldn’t see it or feel it. I couldn’t remember it. It grew in around me and became me. In hidden instants then the heat I could not remember filled the day with light, inside which I could become anything; I was the trees the dirt had birthed out from our mess; I was the egg inside a bird earning its color in noiseless; I was all the human hair that had not grown; the shoulder blades and the ring fingers; I was the ring around each wish. Each body I became I had been always and inside it there it felt like land, a mutual darkness laid awaiting under skin, days beginning as they ended, all terrain blank; I was the bulbs left on to burn out in no terror; I was the wires; I was the absence of all language following our last words as the breath was pulled out from us; I was the trachea and pelvis turned to mud, the silent days in counting lost as what had always filled us sloshed to flood and crest and crash against the face of what we’d been under the eras screwed and screwing.
I could suddenly then feel people crowding around me, dragging at me, tugging at me, hoisting me up. All directions were the same direction. The light surrounding filled with sound: sirens and buzzsaws and gunfire; tanks and shrieking, massive flames. In every voice I heard among the thrall I heard every other word I knew at once also repeated at the same time. I could no longer tell if my eyes and mouth were closed or open, my skin the ground’s skin or yours or ours, what reflected or reflecting, a razing light or one that flourished. Where we had begun this field of fact and error to come alive in death and fill our lives inside the space then I could not feel anything; where even having understood flesh as singular and smeared the order of the bodies into cream around a wish, there was still in this eternity a window, a worm in me wishing for no way out, the make of where each place ends touching the next one even just as being full of all our lives, formed to be because it is. Our dream pressed and pressed unending between the nothing against all.
I close my eyes and open my eyes and I am standing in the room again, above the woman, who I no longer recognize from anyone. There is no one else but me and her there in the room. I appear reflected in the mirrors now and no one else. I look like me as I remember me.
I gather the remainders of the woman. I carry her and place her in a closet. I wash the blood off the floor and off my hands. I wash the mirrors.
There are many more rooms in the house than I remember. The halls go on longer than they should considering the size I remember the house as. There are several floors, each of different lengths and widths of rooms and often windows looking out onto nothing. Most of the rooms are removed of what stuff I can remember having been there or would imagine being there in the room now to dress it as a room would often be in my home or others’ homes. I do not feel disoriented. I feel no time.
In one room, I find a screen wired into a black box. It could have been any of the rooms but it is this one.
The screen is about as big as the face of the bed in the bedroom I grew up in.
The screen is on. It glows a low white. On the floor beneath it, there is a plastic container full of more tapes than I can count, each black along its spine and hand-labeled with unique numbers.
Fixed to the wall beside the TV is a phone. The phone is the same white as the screen.
I pick one tape up and shake it and hear nothing; I feed the tape into the black box; it doesn’t need me to press play.
On the tape I see the image of a woman seated wearing white inside a room; she is staring head on into another TV with the screen all white. She’s not moving; neither am I. It continues like this until the tape ends without occurrence, and the tape ejects itself, and the screen goes dark.
I take the tape out. The casing is warm, as if it wishes to release smoke.
I try again to open my eyes to see if my eyes had been closed all this time and didn’t realize, but my eyes remain the same.
The number printed on the tape’s face resembles my handwriting, I think, though my script is childish, and could be anybody’s.
I lift the receiver of the phone. There is no tone. The buttons burn my fingers. I press the buttons hard.
The phone doesn’t ring. I stand and wait and look along the white of the walls of the room. I love the silence. I smile and wait and hold the phone and hold the tape against my chest, thinking the number over and over. There is no breathing.
This is a process.
After several minutes waiting I hear a soft voice say my name. It is unclear if the voice is a woman or a man, young or old, someone I knew or whose. I know the name is mine but I can’t answer. I mean my mouth won’t, nor will my mind. I mean while I am on the phone I can’t remember seeing anything about the house or room or air there all around me, as if my vision is required to do the hearing. I try to think of how I’d ever moved my mouth or made sound or gesture ever.
The other end hangs up. Or rather: they won’t talk again, no matter what I say after that, but the phone is there against my face.
I hang up myself and try to call the number back but there’s no answer.
I turn around and face the screen. I take another tape; I put the tape inside the machine; it doesn’t need me to press play.
This new tape shows the image of a man who looks like me watching a tape of a woman watching a tape of endless white. It shows me watch the woman, take the tape out, dial the number into a phone set into the wall, as I just had, though in the recording now the phone is the color of my flesh. My face looks sore, different from what I remember. I notice there’s a dark symbol cut into the back side of my head, under the hair there, tender but healing; the shape of the bruise is too obscured to make out. I touch the back of my head inside the room where I am here and I feel nothing. My time on the phone on the tape seems to go on much longer than I remember, as it happened. When the tape ends, it ejects.
On this tape’s case, there’s another number, different from the first. I reach and take the phone again and dial the number; again the line doesn’t ring.
Hello, I say, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to not say anything the last time. I know there are things I meant to say and would now if I weren’t saying what I’m saying now instead.
I only hear the words inside me, and having heard them, they disappear. Where the words were, in me instead then is a feeling, unlike any feeling I remember being able to remember.
This is a process.
Nothing.
The other end hangs up. I try to call the number back but I can’t. My hands won’t hold still enough to press the buttons. It’s like my hands want to be several hands at once; the cells in my fingernails are screaming words I could have said to the voice in the phone, but they all blend together with my flesh. I keep pressing buttons in a panic with my nails and knuckles all dialing numbers I don’t mean to, and I am shaking.
I bang the phone against my face until it hurts. I put the phone down.
I take another tape and put it in.
This tape shows the image of someone who looks like me watching a video of a man watching a tape of a video of me lying on the floor pouring blood out of my eyes and ears. I am holding the phone in my hands still, and blood is streaming from inside the receiver. The blood is rising in the room, already half-covering my facedown body. The blood is so dense it’s black.
I realize I can’t remember anything before now. The first me in the tape, watching the woman, looks twice as old as I do. Where the phone should be in the image on the tape in relation to where I’m standing, there is a framed print of a map of the world. On the map all of the land has been replaced with gleaming glass and all the water replaced with more blood like mine rising under a matching monochrome sky.
I look down at my arms. I don’t recognize them. I look back at the tape of me bleeding and see the blood has filled the screen completely.
I take the tape out, read its number. I decide I don’t want to dial it. There were other things I’d meant to do inside the house today. That I do remember; I do remember; I do; yes.
I have to find the woman’s body. I have to carry the body to the police and confess what we have done. I will tell them everything, and what I can’t remember, I will make up.
Everything I say I do feels like it’s been done already. Like I don’t even have to move. Like if I did begin to move there would be nothing to move through and nothing moving.
The phone inside the house begins to ring. It rings and rings inside my face. It is louder than hell here. It sounds like molecules being torn apart. Like every molecule there has ever been being torn apart by every other molecule. I go to grab the phone and there’s no phone. Where the phone had been on the wall it’s just the wall. Any wall forever.
There are no words left in me to say. The ringing won’t stop ringing in my blood and in my heart. Through all the rings on all my tingling fingers.
There’s nowhere else.
I remember how it’d felt to be a child. It’s the only thing I can remember.
The ringing everything I am.
I make a phone out of my hand against my head. I had been shown this. I had done this many times before so young.
I say into the phone of my hand my name and then my name again and then my other name, and then my other name and all my other names then, and I am screaming and it is easy. Where every name was disappears each as I say it. The sound bursts out of my mouth like any breath, then there is no sound.
I love the feeling of it coming out of me upon the air there and I am all around me and I’m nothing.
I remember nothing but the ringing all throughout my body at any age in all locations.
This is a process.
There is nothing left to think.
I go to take another tape and see there’s only one tape there.
The tape is white and bears no number.
I take the tape and put it in.
On the tape, I stand facing the screen.
There’s a room behind me but I can’t see where.
In my hands, where before there’d been a phone, I hold a pistol.
I watch my hand raise the pistol upward in one motion to aim into my face.
I see me smile.
I can see then as if I’m seeing from my perspective on the tape, inside it.
Down in the hole of the gun on the tape there is an eye.
It is an eye like my eye, only white without pupil, never blinking.
It doesn’t have to say a word.
I watch my hand put the hole in my mouth.
I feel the hole there.
I see the color.
I hear the sound.
1. The year my eyes turned grew fat around them without clear provocation to become impossible to see through for several weeks, days between which whole years seemed passing, and I grew older, and no one would look me in the face; the rings around my eyes soon grew so thick and wide that it was my whole head and my whole body and then I looked like anyone again; even my parents could not remember who I’d been before; they could not see the rings, but I could see the rings; I slept and slept; I felt my disease spread
2. The year the food placed on my plate at dinner seemed to pour smoke from where it’d been burned, as my mother was a lousy cook; slab of turkey spitting fire fission from its erupted cell holes; columns of diffuse tar rising from my grits; most nights I could not eat at all; some nights I closed my eyes and thought of cream; the food would burn in me forever, being burned, becoming my skin
3. The year my father lost his brain; his recognition of me and my mother and his brothers and whoever turning in his field of cells to mush; how he could walk around the year forever seeing other people, calling after, rendering their names onto the air; I would hold the names inside me; I would wrap my fists with wire; my father never tried to open any doors; his body shrinking
4. The year the house beside our house began to sink into the ground; only I could see this; when I pointed to my mother or went to the door and knocked and pointed the people looked upon me with arcane names; I tried to stop the house from going with my fingers and then with branches and then with prayer or spells and then with ideas but the house kept going; there were other houses in this way too
5. The year my house was the only house left on the block or down the street or as far as I could walk forever and yet there would be people in the streets; they would go around for hours as if nothing happened; where they went at night I do not know
6. The year I almost died from laughing in my sleep; that year I did not dream
7. 0
8. All this had happened at once to anybody
9. The year then where on the ground the houses had sunken fully down into the earth, and there were no houses; the houses made of other colors and with floors and walls and people in them all reversed; this was any year at all, forever, at last removed; inside here our house still seemed the same; and inside of each house to the people in the house their house still seemed the same too; the houses rose toward the darkness all above us
10. The year I died each day one after the other by saying the words I’d learned aloud; each time I died, I began again at the point at which I’d heard the word said; in this way life was like a recording of my life; in this way I went on
11. The year at once all before me in the midst of all the years beforehand the year seemed just fine; as if the years before this in my body had been not what happened but were ideas I wrote out for me alone, and really my eyes and skin and dad and neighbors and homes and hours could have been anybody else’s, and instead of what I was now it was a clear day in a nice mall walking with my mother to buy the suit I’d wear to church eleven times inside it before she died
12. I did not kill my mother; I did not kill your father or you; I did not kill anyone; I am not alive; I am not a person; I am not dead
13. The year my legs were replaced with someone else’s legs; I could tell this just by waking up; the surgery had been seamless, there were no scars, no weird tissue fissions, no stitches, but the legs were not my legs; I could tell from how I walked different, sometimes backward, sometimes side to side inside the house to find a door; I do not know who the legs belonged to before me but whoever it was they were much, much older and had smoked their whole life and smelled of terror; they would make me walk some days for hours into places I did not want to go, though these by now I don’t remember; I simply remember walking through the fields and the reams of birds and the house on the horizon and the word
14. I am you; I really am you; you wrote this
15. The year after becoming someone else like you I could not stop the wish inside me to move on to the next instance of a body in the mess of bodies on the earth surrounded by no walls and more walls and doors; how each time I saw another person through your eyes I moved into him and was then them from then on until I saw another person and moved into him again; each person I moved into was you and me and he or she again thereafter, and each of us as well would be then in the next and who before; in this way, god stopped growing, slowed the orbits; in this way there was no center to the earth, and no center to the space around us, cities, planets, ever
16. The year the face of god appeared inside our music; the song we were not singing, and within then stopped aging, and had never aged and never would again, and our translucent flesh would rain inside the endless night resizing where around us we were going to be not there anymore so soon that we could smell the burning of the shrinking in our lungs, in fear of which we ate or drank or heard jokes or wrote jokes or wrote or lied or lived
17. The endlessly repeating night that would not end and so kept gazing and in gazing learned the hole, each body up against the best mirror of their remaining house, ejaculating into the image of themselves
18. Through the hole the tunnel through the center of this dimension, to the mirror, where the machine will not desist, seeing it again begin again without ever actually beginning
19. The year we forgot about the sun; where what had been a sun up till then became replaced with what the sun is now and this would become how to us it had always been; the prior instance of the sun then disappeared, leaving where it had been all these words in all this white forever, a bank of prisms in the sky replacing sky where sky was to reflect the thing back at itself so the thing could see itself and so go on in going on
20. The year the words learned to move into one another as had we before them, unresolving; one word without an eye or face or feeling shitting up against the word against it pressed against it welling down; we would move into this too, the space between where the word had been before and where the word was now inside the word beside it; god would move into this, and the houses, and the prisons, and the bodies, and the blood; the word remained inside the word only forever, returning to the beginning, in my life, which was our lives, which was dry as light inside of light
21. 00:00:00:00
I close my eyes and try to open my eyes again and in the dark I can’t get out. The skin won’t come back open. I can’t move. When I am not moving it is as if I am free and could do anything, though when I try to actually do anything, nothing happens. The air holds in down around me. It shapes the air and light I breathe.
I do not remember where my face is, what my vision feeds through to. I know it is older than me and wider than me and had always been waiting in me to be lifted.
I don’t know why I can know what I do not know or how I could ever name what is not mine.
I remember I’d been younger. I’d bitten into apples and felt the flesh become a part of what I was. How strange to hold something in your hand then and know that it would knit into you or otherwise come out as shit, that you could select the elements that built your body and with that body make your way. My parents were beautiful people. They were kind people. In the backyard we had a building where I was allowed to play with animals and machines, and though I certainly enjoyed those also I had real other human friends, and I smiled more than the average and went to places where the music wrote along the inside of my face. All the days stretching my brain in ways I wanted whether I wanted it or not. Each day a series of infinite selections gathered in the only way it would ever be, no matter how many times the same space was writ and wrinkled, corkscrewed in its avenues unto the dust, beyond which what translucent shape my space had incubated would beyond its image now become so open there was no word I could not burn. How anything at any instant could always happen.
Each time I try to speak I hear my body grinding, stone on stone. Where once I had a head it seems my whole head is imploding. I can’t remember what it is in me that lets me seem like I exist, what binds me and deforms me every instant, why it goes on.
I can’t remember why I can feel or think at all or why I’d want to. Time continues, though no one’s counting.
I remember there had been so many hours spent in wait. Other people went on in their homes through night on night never knowing most of what any others wanted or could be. Yet even in the dark so far apart we’d believed in living, I remember. The wish to want to touch and to be touched in some way formed the body, framed by the world. Even just the light of a bathroom in the far room as someone we’d loved prepared to sleep beside us and be there when we woke could be enough to feel actually alive. The soft brush of air from a door opened toward one’s own chest to open space before it could be wider than the room.
It seems impossible for anything I remember to have ever happened, just as it seems impossible now that I can’t seem to do anything but be. To go on in any instant as I was now was to walk through every gesture, dream, and vision, every curl of grunt for sustenance, for warmth, for life forever, though worn in sleeves and curtains called a day, an atmosphere of calm encased in ageless frenzy, cages made of shapes, shapes saving their blue and red and white and white and black and black and black into a waking like the sun brings burning endlessly on a thing that cannot move.
My tongue of every taste of food we’d ever eaten. My eyes of every sight. My lungs of the air we passed between us endlessly for centuries. My fingers of ash. My skin of everything that never happened, surrounded by the absence of the feeling of having been surrounded all our lives.
I remember how in me anybody could have been you. You could have said anything, been anything, made anything. You could have removed the skin off of my face, and with the same will walked into the ocean, written this sentence.
And so you have. Everything has always been exactly as you wished it would be, only now it has no end. You do not remember the difference between what happened and what did not happen. You do not remember where I became you and was always. Nameless, mapless.
Inside the dark, I turn and wait and press at my eyes and feel inside me the blind in all our minds there held forever as each remembers each, all so smeared into the present what is created could no longer have an end or a beginning.
Let there be light, I say, and nothing changes.
I sat up in another dark again and I was wired. I could see through this dark as if it were daytime. There were mirrored walls on the horizon reflecting miles of more mirrors on beyond all definition. The mirrors were absorbing all the air around me, taking the air there and pulling it down into their flesh. There were no edges to the world here, though in that freedom it was unnecessary to even think. Every pixel of me was so filled with everything already. It didn’t matter if I felt content or false, dead or alive, loved or alone. Each instant stretched so long it no longer had a surface. It was so loud I couldn’t do anything. It made me calm. I lay back in the light and closed my eyes. Behind my eyes my eyes were open, flooding, throbbing, without face.
I close my eyes and open my eyes and I am Flood. I mean I am me again, as I had been, though my experience of myself occurs now once removed, as if I’m watching me perform me.
I am surprised to not feel any relief in reappearing in the world. Inside what would be my skull the meat of the head’s periphery seems to stretch further back and in the more the eye is crimped to peer against it, looking back into the space the self makes as if there in the wake of it might form some window or apparatus by which the self inside the space may retain form. There are no arms there, no torso beneath the space of head from which where I peer down, though the taste in the mouth of the head is something blown apart and silent.
I don’t think about Flood’s life. I don’t need to. It is mine. Above, the sky has turned entirely opaque, shutting out the ream of color holding beyond us anywhere the night might stretch forever. The sheen of the lip of it remains reflective; each glint shows the earth back at itself. There is no moon or starlight in the dead resonance, but the pulp of day remains visible beneath, the glow of sun sucked into the ground radiating through all coils, the heat hungry for more meat to disintegrate on stage, more skins unpeeled against the faces, torsos, limbs to expose the meat from and let simmer, desist, until underneath that too, the private lattices of bone and thrall, which as well has rubbed and split and uncompressed to ash and silt and blown away, sucked into wherever, sexless, lipless, nowhere.
Among the vast terrain remains what junk. The haunted veins of buildings stand up uneroded, their matched glass eyes seeing the seer where the glint of the contained light does not obstruct the vision head on into the building, through which the hallways cross and come to doors, catacombs of air locked in unto itself beyond all disintegrated organs. There are the statues and the lamps, the birdhouses and gravestones and quilts and gravel stacked as high as what the air was. The lists of what remains remain unmade. Wires hang taut in arteries to where buildings had been indexed on the mud, beaming nothing back and forth between the husks where in the absence of larger motion hive cells have begun to cluster up over long fields absorbing the leavings of our people into its chest, now spun defunct and clogging nothing.
I feel Flood’s body’s organs flay and tangle. Its blood is screaming for itself. I raise Flood’s right arm where it would have been and have him touch his face and where I want to feel the finger between my eyes there nudging at the space where flesh had held him caged, the texture of my vision warps white around the presence, any color turned to gyres. His shape is no longer contained in him alone, but made as if with coordinates that change as the lens shifts to change the framing: every instance of him rendered long and wide and senseless. Wishless, and so full of every wish. Cold folds like little hills of newer land where we could walk and tell our daze and have a fall. On the land is so much room there, space that opens up around us more the harder that I make him press, miles of it contained in him at any instant, requiring only to be forced up into birth by feel. This could be true of any vision, I remember, in any being.
Why was I me. What have I done. What fields of rooms of people have gone on hidden in them, the blipping lights, so many breadths in any inch. There could never be a reason.
Where I have no organs I am eggs. Or I am in awe. Along the perimeters of holes: not the hole itself but not not the hole there either. What am I feeding.
Beyond day. Smoke flows from where the light was, like old locks. An oceanic box of blue more soft than sky and neater, nearer. It could be any blue, I know, set to pupils or dog collars or the whole tone of a life. A fragment of an instance in a version where even I am not a she or he or me but floors, or money, or a thing like color, here kissed from lips to lips like blood that hadn’t pooled, knives of the hours between all desire left unlisted from the trees allowed inside the evening to deform, to crawl over the highways or the plots before the plot of any text turned all yards into the way of graves. All our worlds up before us, mulched and sharper than any tool used to cut the dinner down, the blood in colors like a person aging in an instant from the sperm back to the sac, microphones in any mind catching the sound of all that living in a width quicker than every square of every square dividing.
I close my eyes and see the blood alone. In the blood the rooms are there too, through all the houses held there to connect. I walk into the blood and feel the film of it surround me. I feel the film fold down against the white. Within the white I close my eyes too and find another film held within it, in which again my eyes are open wide, where then again I then close them, and there again there is the white. And now I cannot remember who I’ve been talking to this whole time.
I can no longer remember where I am. Each room around me as I went seemed to hold voices on the far side of the chamber, a human sound of moaning that lighted through with the idea there would be someone left still in this shape, but I could find no end point to the walls. Each new room along the chain of rooms there seeming to partition off another impossible place, a language always on the far side of where I was.
No matter how long it went on, I loved this house. I loved the screaming and the beats between the screaming. I loved the grain of the wood of the floor beneath me like never-ending skin I might have meant to wear myself. At each inch of the wall I touched I felt someone on the far side touching back, and though they would not answer me, I loved their future. As I moved away, they moved away.
Sometimes I would find windows in the walls through which I could see out into the sky. Its face was full with smoke or milk in big blown sac clouds in packets bumping up against each other desperate for rain, and beyond that, a kind of wall there dark as my closed eyes had been when I could close them, only now all above us, waiting to burst.
I remember the red curtains in our bedroom. I remember the bookshelf set into the wall. I remember how hard it was to button the neck on my work shirt. I remember waking up before the alarm. I remember the cursor blinking. I remember sensing I was being watched. I remember the blue key that started my first car and where I wrecked the car and how my posture never seemed the same again. I remember trying to teach myself to paint landscapes. I remember swallowing the first tooth I lost. I remember making eye contact with passing people and knowing I’d never be this near to them again. I remember the frozen food aisle at night alone. I remember never being able to remember certain names no matter how many times they were repeated. I remember a recurring dream of a large white church without doors. I remember wanting to remember things I’d dreamt and repeating them in my mind until I forgot. I remember lighting candles just to have them blown out. I remember cold glass on warm days. I remember the brightness of a bulb turned on near the bed in darkness. I remember believing I’d die drowning. I remember feeling guilty having never donated blood. I remember the click of the handle when the gas completed pumping. I remember changing my opinion of a color. I remember waiting to be told I was free to go. I remember biting into fruit that’d turned brown on the inside. I remember the color of the grass of our front lawn weeks after it caught fire. I remember looking into my eyes shaving my face. I remember checking to see if my wife had returned home. I remember the long dark hair on my forearm that grew back no matter how many times I plucked it. I remember the way snow looked landing on a sweater. I remember wishing I could remove one of my arms to sleep better on my side. I remember feeling discomfort and trying to remember to feel gratitude for the absence of that discomfort after it subsided. I remember imagining there was a secret room inside my grandparents’ basement. I remember laughing at the unfunny jokes of strangers. I remember waking myself up laughing. I remember wiping the dust off the screen of the TV with my palm. I remember lying in rented beds and imagining who had been in them before me. I remember the stretch of the skin around my smile. I remember knowing what I should say to someone and never saying it. I remember playing the same song over and over until I no longer needed to play the song to hear it. I remember watching my father talk to men of business. I remember wondering what lava felt like. I remember saying goodbye several times before I left. I remember being asked for directions and not knowing and still giving the directions. I remember taking the strings off a guitar and saving them. I remember writing down what I hoped would happen one day. I remember believing I already knew what would happen. I remember checking to see the door was locked. I remember trying to understand what it would be like to hear other people’s prayers. I remember keys I couldn’t remember what they went to. I remember not being able to remember the password. I remember trying on new clothes that didn’t fit. I remember not wanting to close my eyes yet. I remember waiting for the rain to pass. I remember a voice I recognized muffled through walls late and in darkness. I remember the water at my knees then at my waist then at my neck. I remember knots in the hair that held the comb from combing. I remember a light shined down my throat. I remember selecting one ring from many rings available for purchase. I remember peeling. I remember the different kinds of blue a bruise could be. I remember searching for the sentence I loved in the book I loved. I remember breathing into my hands to make them warm. I remember being unable to lift myself and finding another person there to lift me. I remember feeling like the day would never come. I remember knowing I wouldn’t know when I no longer remember what I remembered. I remember not liking how I looked for years. I remember metal in my mouth. I remember the wind against my face. I remember empty cages and colored wires. I remember diving. I remember opening the blinds at night. I remember believing I’d been going where I meant to go. I remember saying my name until it no longer felt like anything. I remember fearing what I’d said aloud would become true. I remember the scabs on my fingers. I remember gold robes. I remember holding someone’s hands in mine. I remember being scanned for parasites. I remember panes of glass. I remember cutting the words out of the paper without purpose. I remember standing in line for something I didn’t want. I remember the fear of my teeth being removed. I remember my tongue against my teeth. I remember pressing pause and it not pausing. I remember how the surface would get so hot. I remember the room we weren’t supposed to go in and therefore wished to more than ever. I remember spreading out in green. I remember the eclipse and what it meant to me. I remember the bathwater. I remember no moon. I remember believing bodies were hollow on the inside. I remember counting days down to one day. I remember chords I had not played. I remember seeing myself in a crowd across a large room. I remember stairwells that never seemed to end. I remember the skin of horses. I remember patterns. I remember whole rooms full of flowers. I remember games we played pretending we were wolves. I remember where the mountain disappeared. I remember trying not to wake the baby. I remember sand in the bed we never planned to leave. I remember drawing a picture of my face that resembled no one I knew. I remember the dials on our oven. I remember my mother’s pins. I remember asking someone else to choose. I remember leaving the lens cap on the camera. I remember chisels. I remember rooms that seemed a different size each time. I remember the darkness in the container. I remember wiping the grease off the meat. I remember the blood on my shirt in the sunlight. I remember spinning and stopping. I remember endless alternate endings. I remember inhaling between lines sung in the song. I remember asking someone to come nearer.
I come into the house and there is snow. Beyond the house it’s snowing, too. The snow is cinder and skin. It rains forever and has rained forever.
I close my eyes and open my eyes and the man I was once is there before me, not anyone I know by name but someone crushed between the sum. His body is made of all the bodies having been consumed into a single flesh. He is translucent. He stands craned with his arms above his head and eyes wide open, so much skin he has no features. The mass of his body is wet with blood pouring through his openings.
The blood runs off of his body into the ground, caking layers that lick beneath my feet and hide the world. I realize I am bleeding too, gore from each pore of me erupting off to match the other man. I see my arms are raised like his; our skins are knitting, while beneath them congregate the rub of days I can’t remember living.
The world breathes with us. And the days. The screws and bolts turn in their sleeves. Blood pours in from the window and the sockets. It pours in from the speakers in the walls also, through any gap it can imagine.
Today above us all the stars are bleeding, and the sun’s face, and the planets. Birds raining blood and the idea of god. And the corridors removed of destination. The age of the earth gathers packed in and still pouring hot and on inside itself all at once and never-ending.
I close my eyes and at the same time feel the eyes of all the bodies around me open and behind the skin there is no lens.
I fear I am not ending or beginning, but that I am.
I remember believing you could remember things about the days that surrounded your whole life and became carried in the place where you were meant to live forever in you.
I remember how the teeth fell from my mouth. They were beaten from me, or I lost them growing older. What’s the difference. I remember how where the teeth fell out more teeth came in behind them. And behind those teeth, more blood, and behind that, any memory.
I remember remembering I folded up a forest and I ate it. I’d chewed the dirt out from between the roots and felt it grow out in the long locks of my hair.
I come into the house and who is there. I ask the question and the sound goes bang along the back side of my face and ricochets inside me and redoubles and makes splitting, the words raining back through me down in mirror-sound, beating out my shape from the inside. Each time I ask again I’ve become older and the words have gone slipped in what they mean, no world of what they were remaining.
I remember a watch I found burnt in some dirt that had no hands. I carried the watch thereafter faceup in my palm, never releasing or relaxing, never using the little strap. The leather of the watch’s band was so bright in direct sun you could hardly stand to look anywhere else, even to read the time.
I remember there are more things I cannot remember than things I can remember, though I can’t remember any of those now, or what about me makes me think that what I’ve just said now is true or ever could be.
I come into the house and it is full of every instrument, the guitars and the pianos, cymbals, amps; all the chords and their strings unstrung at one end from their tuning pegs and tied to something at the center of my mind, underneath which awaits something I have never seen and will never see.
I know I can’t remember how inside this house to get from room to room; or I can’t remember where the next room is, even seeing me go there ahead of me before I get into it; or I can’t remember what the room is for, why there are walls between this room and this last one as the condition is the same; or I don’t want to move; or I am already there before I’m there even ahead of me already in my bloated body; or I have never moved at all, at any point in all the time I felt me moving.
I can’t remember I do not remember typing that last sentence and then deleting it from there and then retyping it again without the memory of having typed it or realizing ever before that all of this was going on. I can’t remember how I fear this may be the case with everything I’ve ever said here, and what of it.
I’m saying this so it can be erased.
I remember corridors and chambers, buried in my finger.
I remember every ever eaten bite of food, how it spanned the cells between the cells, the space of light slowly made gathered, the eyes of the man or woman who placed the food before me on the table. I remember the voracity with which I took it all down against my teeth and holes to make more of me as if in the world forever I had been the only one.
I can’t remember how I would wake up with so much in my mouth I was no longer breathing and there was no longer any way to speak or write, though I still am, and how is that. I can’t remember to take what I just said seriously and erase everything, burn the buttons, accept fate.
I remember wallowing in bodies, sucking their fingers, humping their knees, starved as hell for death and never dying, even in dying. And then, now.
I remember the way a hand might come against me and I’d shudder and then feel happy to have been touched and feel myself more in being touched and turn around to try to face the touching person and find nothing there but night.
I remember you there, then I don’t.
I can’t remember sound.
I can’t remember where on the silent light we floated, language leaking back and forth between the countless holes where we had leaked out our innards. The meat of the earth stuck to my lids and to yours and wished me open and you open and soon we were wide as we had ever been.
I remember the remaining span of days on earth of those beyond the length of fabric where the reverberation of the holes sung forth, passed for those who wished to see it as a lifetime as all of time forever, while in us it passed as now, all instants and instances passing through a single focus, spreading out in each span with their own whorl.
I remember you as pixels in the mask I wear to stand before the mirror and see beyond the shape of us.
I do not remember what a face is or a hand is or how to not believe in anything.
I remember a box inside a room. Both the room and the box could have held anything, before or after. It was a black box with a black lid. There were no tapes. I stood there above the box and thought about the shape of the box and the frame of the box and its space inside it held. I thought about the cells of the box and the cells inside the box and the burning in my hands. I thought about the walls around the box and the walls around me. The box just sat there. I watched the box sit. I watched the box until there was nothing left that I had not imagined had been inside the box forever, every inch and every hour, and then I went on watching. I watched the box until the night arrived and the box was still there and nothing about the box had changed and then I left the room and locked the door behind. The box did nothing to stop me. I walked along the hall and went downstairs and the house was just the same. I found my mother at the kitchen table writing a letter she would never mail. Her hair was white and she was thin. She had lived a whole life since I saw her last. I sat down at the table with my mother and we spoke. Whatever the words were that went between us made the air there in the house feel clean and calm, and ours. I can’t remember what else then happened. I never thought about the box again.
I remember each room is the room where you are born, the room where you are killed, the room where you make skin and speak in someone else’s code. As no one knows when they are dead, it doesn’t matter. They are carried and carried on in vast precision in the image of what had been, each world both old and made eternal, under a sky that needed nothing beyond itself.
I can’t remember how no book was a book. How no one had lived and none had passed. No flesh was a body. Whatever was said was said by all people or was not said and the word was just the word and I had needed you so long.
I remember how I tried to copy my own wish inside your head and then could hear it continually thereafter shaking where it didn’t fit, no matter how I turned your head and pushed you oblong through a place like home or under sleep into grand halls and fields of light. How in my own body still I can feel you also in my image always and forever.
I can’t remember how you are the only person who can read this.
I come into the house draped in all gowns.
I come into the house and find no house here.
I come into the house and it’s a sea. The level of the water rises with my presence in the volume, spreading quick to lap along the drywall, and behind each wall another wall in its same image.
I remember how we’d drowned. What had come from water must return to water. The house from inside larger than the earth itself, the water sagging up and overrunning, up to my chest already, creamed with pearling cream and pattered ash. It slaps against me in even repetition, one long fat strobe that hits me squarely in the breasts, though I can’t remember I have breasts. The water wants my milk. It sucks my glands, though I am sand there, the nipples sore from being had by someone I can’t remember in the silent purr of ageless language up my arms and down my back, curtains spurting layered in all air I can’t remember.
I remember the water did not exist.
I remember how I grew; how I had been the child and then grown through my own life into the man who finally killed every other living person and consumed them; how then that person disappeared; though as I try to tell you now again I can’t remember which or how I knew to tell you.
I am in the home and in the home. I turn inside the mass of heavy nothing to look and wade back into the stretch I’d just come through, though as I turn I see the house is not the house there but every human liquid: blood, eggs, semen, saliva, sweat. The wet goes on in every way, white and shining, depth erupting warm and clean and fast into wherever I cannot, depths deeper than there need to be as I will never know them.
I remember my mother wiping my face with a cold washcloth on the morning I learned I would not remember dying.
I remember waking up three hundred million times. How I had been some mornings as a blind woman, as an actor, as a masseuse, though even in the knowing of this knowing I can’t return to any of them, as if my idea of even this is another old disease where I must come to and rub and mutter, be again speaking words that mean nothing to anyone, an image waiting to live the remainder of his or my life out tick by tick unfunny, recorded over.
I remember what it felt like to feel my body fill with fire. Or with nostalgia.
I can’t remember why I’m soft.
I remember the strange feeling of wandering through the dark with arms extended, looking for a wall, or someone’s arm, another me there anywhere.
I come into the house and everyone is still alive. They are all there, all our people. They wear the frame of face and dress they’d felt the most themselves as, at whatever age. They have children and are children. It is a celebration. There are candles and white balloons. There is a cake white as my mind, shaped like a cone. The eyes all watch me enter without recognition. They blink and smile all gapless and no words, while beneath the skins awaits an expectation of coming song, though there is no breath left to lift.
I can’t remember how in every instant I was the lips of any person; I was the color of all birth, the canals the bodies had been sent through from blood into a common light; I was the hair that had not grown; I was the hair that had been shorn from the heads of the living and the dead and laid upon the ground to hide it through crucial minutes in which the eye inside that ground must rise for air; no one else was coming; this was our iteration; a wider milk rose in the seas; from even feet away no one could see this; the tables carved initials in themselves; I was the shoulder blades and the manes of ice over the homes’ roofs and the ring fingers; I was the ring around each hope; each body I became I had been always and inside it there it felt the same, a mutual darkness lay awaiting when the skin rolled down over our eyes, the days beginning as they ended, waking mirrors all around the beds; the mirrors then must be walked into; I was the organ of the totality of glass; every inch of what we’d eaten; ornaments held on the shelves in rooms where no one moved; bulbs left on to burn out, dreaming wire; I was the words following our last words on the lungs; I was the trachea and pelvis; I was the grinding of the teeth.
I can’t remember how I felt myself falling in around us, pinched in the patient way of every instant’s instant seize as it passed in and on around all bodies to hold its shape forever as it had been and all remembered in the eye of what would grow, which was nothing, which did not stop it; the color blazing; where in the face of all this you could not remember anything about me besides how there was nothing left where I was not. I was the lip of the land where all we’d called ours went under water to stay hidden from the eye of god in fear of no longer having organs, each zilch becoming collapsed in proper sequence, its absence raised like humans packed in bleachers doing the wave; I was the larger wave our blood had begged to form at our whole ending as among the days in counting lost we sloshed, to rise and crest and crash and kiss against the idea of a home inside no home, to be holy, to go on.
I remember a silver necklace that when I put it on, the room went upside down and inside out, and I was sitting where you are sitting, awaiting anyone but me.
I remember the dream of living skin filling all possible space, all edges of all worlds, the dream replacing all other memory, without end.
I can’t remember that I remember nothing.
I come into the room and find the child. The child has no arms or legs or face or chest or hair or teeth or eyes. The child is lying on the bed, on the floor inside the house devoid of mirrors, as all the glass of them has lurched, become rooms there beyond the pane where before the house had ended.
I can no longer tell the difference between what the child remembers and what I remember, how we’d ever been apart. His presence burns me where I no longer have a body beyond the many millions no longer living, the hordes within them each.
I take the child and lift him to me. I cup the head inside my palm and speak: You will believe we are alive and well, for real, together, and everyone has found their love, that nothing could end our lives but life itself, no matter how it feels. No word ever of death again as yet but all this light and all this color in the ground and spots worn on our faces and the hours crushed with sleep with eyes closed on beds beside bodies recounting nothing of the mirrors underneath our skulls which when removed replace themselves with new skulls; and so here I am again and will be again all crushed forever.
The child says nothing. Its mouth is open, toothless.
I hold the child and was the child. I have the child inside me and I’m inside it. I sleep without sleeping and do not grow older and some time later I wake and rise. I stand in a cold darkness on the edge of somewhere else, seeing no mirror, beyond sun.
I remember standing with my eyes closed at a thin, warm window in the beginning.
I come into the house and the house is all one room.
There is a door in the room but the door is locked.
The walls are white.
On the far wall is a mirror. It is the same mirror I remember my wife brought into our marriage, inherited from her mother, which had hung on the wall across from our shared bed all our nights.
The mirror has no frame. Where the edges of the reflection end, the walls begin.
I close my eyes and touch the mirror.
The door inside the mirror is not locked.
The door leads out into the front yard where I find the sun is out and sky is pale. The trees are reaching out with arms I never knew. The house is whatever color I remember it having, which is no color.
There are no dead behind my eyes. No bells or hymns for the dead along the heavens.
The ground is soft. Or what seems like the ground is soft. Or what beneath it. Or all of what I am. And I am laughing. And what is laughter.
The light seems to close in and on down, blurred with its luster.
It is a quiet day.
I do not remember walking from the light.
I do not remember the shape of the world around me falling out around me and the warm grade of where I had fallen there into the wake of what I’d been as someone wider in a space beyond destroyed. There was some glass then there was something not glass then there became a different kind of texture altogether.
I do not feel where the wreck of what had been absorbed clings around whoever had been quaking, forming the aging of our skin: the cut of it collecting in one stride to sing a surface, and the paper, and the dust. Where no fire laps, the field turns over, and turns over, and there it is.
It is, regardless of what remains here or does not remain here. Something yearns, the way the mass of my body grows gold with old nameless layers. The space clocked between the lost organism of all our years in its own absence becomes more firm, and firming fast again against itself again and through itself again, squashing the pockets held in shelves among their collision. The air condensing what it is with what it has been and where it hopes to be again and who will let it.
Who is who to remember anything about any of us; each instant clicking in its own mind with each around it in no word; the body of anybody and all regardless glowing obese with old intention, with the want the words could not hold down, what desire could not beat the sense out of so eyes could see it in our houses, and so grew on babbling up in packets like a flagellum in all our fantasies combined. The gift of births born burst and eaten up wedged into cement or buried wide open on some paper, or vibrated brief through singing sacs; tapes untaped and white residing in the action slaughtered in a wake of all the music slaved by music.
Endlessly blood funnels through the years all nonexistent. I remember not to bear in mind the slurring rooms where we had been in crush; where the years were not here in the world; where I could see ahead a growing light wanting some little inch to rise upon; where I hear me let me know inside me where I was before I showed up here; and so I am late for my own presence, caught where my hair comes growing where the glass inside the house around the maze of making turns against what would have been my wishes; until at last I came aware inside me in my skin of an indention in the ageless perforation, some presence not a wall or air but nothing. I feel with my fingers there cursor shaped up like I am, of no era, ending any other instance all instantaneous, hitting hot and turning hard and strumming shut against my pretend sternum thick as what a dog is where he learns commands. Strobes of wakeless sound in which he learns to love the owner, needing no reason.
Inside the sound I am confounded in the history of any gesture. Against the silence of the graph of evening I knock hard with both hands this time against the absence of us again, where when I feel it touch against the space of any of me in the instant I feel my formation wanting bursting through the instant, my lengths inside me needing permission to separate from the memory of our bones deflecting light.
In you I know I knew I needed, I remember, though I cannot remember who I mean by you or I. I know I knew I needed the wash of sound to color through my gut, needed the blood of all our damage flooding from endpoints of my fingers and the cells around my head, where each time I blinked or asked to quit the hour my skin awoke and burned me so thick I could not stand, though I could float, and the pain made me come so hard I sprayed my face and could no longer remember who I was or what pleasure had brought me here again.
Here when I press my head against the voice here there comes the sound of my skin becoming ripped apart, the chime of convalescing mechanisms rubbing their frames against the land and when I pull back my mind at long last from its own intrusion, I found I had lived out in one instant every life. I found along my arms my hands were open, and on my palms vast sores all healed full over, and our blood had fit all back into me, and I knew at last which way was ours; and so inside the house I rose and walked again, and went unto the want again and forgot the voiceless voice there like I had all else. I went on through what I’d wished and wanted until the beginning of this same impression came again, finding again inside the shrieking prisms of night no one to sleep and wake with, and no one to poke or fist a hole though, slick in my skin to let the mass out again when I was full of all this air.
Then just as quickly this again was over. No idea at all about forever in this instance of us but the house made of more floor and floor made to begin again at every measure. What had just happened had just happened and was not yet set for happening the next, though I knew it would or knew it would not and knew I would not remember either way, and so could never at all tell, and either way was gone as ever and as always.
When where what now I am again. So sized there is no sun and not a longing. No lap of tongue where blubber fills the space of action named unmade, the pillow of a rind around a fissure. Each instant clapped as old fat gathered through its mirror-instants strung with our skinned knees and all our teeth, the space burnt out alive inside its last remaining color, pulled through its own center like a dot. All through the abused membranes of finite years in popping intersections of transitory ornaments, beyond soil or water, blood or bone. Each inch where we had unwound at last locking full into whatever could not be. Each syllable and pixel past repeating where it wore against us on every tongue as bright as light beyond mirage, over the whole blank of whose conception, breadth filling up what it could not.
I remember that the light here is and was the only thing not missing. It is and was an old glow, opened and curving without core, alive there where it is and only there. Above me and above you, prismatic rooms where absent bodies lay and lavished prostrate upon the whitened tables of countless sheeted altars hardened with the sweat of uttered worlds turned back and in against themselves, absent of age. Death hid and hidden in the shape and strobed so deep enough it could not etch the lungs of any recollection, and yet still must and never would, could not but never become gathered in the make along our flat gyrating ancient fate. We in laughing dens where any of us all lay chained and fat as old kids, awaiting freedom, no, not that word; awaiting a simple lick of trance to swim in with the smoke shattered from our eye, the single singing glassy eye of eyes so small and so surrounded by more film than sight could hold together in any all, throughout the exploded light of our conception, where the end is what we are.