Through a window in the house that looked out onto the backyard the son watched the buzzing father rouse himself (the son). The son felt amused. He fixed his hair in the reflection. He tried to speak but made a mess.
And then the son was outside the house there with the father and the father’s arms were wet and kind of mushy and the son tried to sit up and felt something hold him and felt something moving through his lungs, new words wanting out and worming, clustered in his bulb. The father could not see the bulb was see-through, made of days.
And then the son was in the house again looking out and the air was fully solid and the son stood encased inside the air and through the window there was light.
LIGHT OF YEARS LIGHT OF WINDOWS LIGHT OF GROWING LIGHT OF NEED
And then the son stood at the kitchen table eating waffles watching TV laughing, sneezing, and all the pressure in his knees, and there were all these people all around him and they were pushing up against his back, they cawed, and they knocked the table to the left and right and they lifted the table off the ground, and the light inside the drink inside the son’s stomach from the girl’s house began to chew into his chest, and he laughed harder, and everyone was laughing too, all around him bodies laughing, and his teeth began to turn inside his head and he could not see and he could not remember and he was so hungry the ceiling wobbled up and down.
And then the son was being carried through the massive lawn with all the mud splashing up around them, and the sky or ceiling stretching overhead and coming closer down and closer down, and the son could feel his cheeks all puffy and the son could feel his and his father’s heartbeats both together through his own chest, the visor of the father’s helmet banging back and forth against the son’s skull’s hardened soft spot in the rhythm of their fumbling run.
And then the son was in the son’s room looking at all the clear gel spilling from the closet, the closet where the son had spent so many hours typing still unknown, and the son saw what he made, he saw the texture of the ejection, of the words burped from several selves he’d held in hives, layers wished and crushed and in him, and he felt the words spread through the room expanding, felt the words burst back into him and through and through and of the room, words worn on paper, wet and endless, a flooding ocean at his knees, at his chest, his neck, his head, gel gumming up his nostrils and in the air vents, in the air itself—and then the son again could not breathe—and the words slushed and slammed around the son as massive slivers, blubbing up, and the son rose off the floor inside the rising, and the son tried to swim and kick as best he could, the language welling in his head and stomach, stretching his legs and muscles, and therein the son gushed on, and the son slid down through the hallway, wide as ever, and the son warbled down the stairs, down through the house where all was runny and one color, and the son gushed on through the front door—
and then the son opened his mouth and shut his eyes and then the son slid backward through where he’d been and the son saw seas and rooms and constellations and the son grew very large and he grew small—
and then the son was in the father’s arms gel-covered, and the son was the father’s arms themselves and they were standing there beside the mother at a hole large as the house, a hole with many holes inside it, concentric rings of endless holes inside the hole, and the mother’s head was wound with bees and birds and gel and she had a shovel and she was digging in the rip, and she was digging and she was digging, begging in the holes—she was saying something about the father or the son or both together, and the mother ripped and bent her long nails on the hard dirt—the dirt that had built up around the house high as the house and ever higher at the hole’s edge and yet had not yet found a way to touch the sky—and the father tried to make the mother put the shovel down and come away from the half-assed hole she’d hardly dug inside the hole, among all the other holes there all around her, and she there screaming on and on into the grass about insects and sand and windows and the houses and the light—
and her warm body—
and her rubbed insides—
and all her wanting, measured in flume—
and all the rooms she’d never seen, and the rooms those other rooms contained—
and her need for forgiveness—
and her life—
and then the mother turned and turned, around in nothing, swinging the shovel at the father—
and the yard was smushed around them burned and buzzing—and the sky was smacked and stretched with mold and slip—and the trees were splotched with sores and raining color— and the son could not see the father could not see the mother could not see—