Dirty Life #4

I walked in circles until I was walking between two walls. I have nothing to say and I can't shut up. It happens all by itself, like an obsession. A black hole in a ring of green fire is breathing its way towards me and just before it sucks me in, I see the next one growing out of the heart of the first. Is this my new life? A dream that believes I'm dead? I can't think with this shapeless fever in my head. I press the spot where I know my eyes and push with no hands through nothing. The flames lick me up. Dark eyes digest me. I descend into an organic system of living corridors. Rooms unfold and fall off again like dead leaves. All of them empty. No people. No furniture. Faster, down the stairs. Into the core of the building. Past large windows where no sound comes through. I see men fighting in a red river. A snake crawls over the rush basket. A woman with piss-colored hair is milking out her breast into a screaming head. Further down. Into the deepest cellar. There's a hole in the ceiling where burning hoops are luring down the sunlight. I look up and scorch my eyes. Colors whistle past my head. I'm running through the forest. One breath behind me the hunters whimper and bark their thirst. My blood is wet with tears. Here, drink my flesh. I stand still and turn around and look into their faces. They raise their heads and howl. Who am I this time, I ask myself and look upon my body as if inspecting a new costume. Time is mute and hides in the dark. No ground underneath. When I set my foot down, it simply meets a point of support exactly fitting the sole. Sound becomes matter. Together you and I hang on a thread of mucous glue and our elastic bodies slither around one another. Entwine and fill my hollows, beloved, overflow into me, open up and I'll empty my pulse in you, wherever you open I come in, look into me, not too close or our eyes will shrink back in, later on when we're stuffed with seed, you my mirror, my once and only other I, filled with each other we'll fall to the ground. I carry your soul in my gut and you carry mine. Tomorrow I won't recognize you anymore. But now it's still dark and the night is long. My knees are bleeding and still I crawl on. Nothing grows here. Nothing but the stairs. When I get up there, when at last I will be up there, high in the tower, in the tower chamber where he lives, I'll submit my question and his answer will drop down upon me. He sits high, that's why he knows all. I know nothing. I'm a hole begging for fill. The beasts behind his door sound the alarm. The threshold is worn down deep. I peer through the slit under the door. A shaft of sunlight falls upon his pale feet. Will I recognize him? The door falls open. He stands straight in front of me, looking down like he knows me. His lips and eyelids pinched as if to seal him off. Without warning he kicks me hard in the middle of the chest. I fall backwards. There's nothing behind me but the stairwell, nothing to catch me, nothing that embraces me. "Go back to your hell," he bites from above, "you're not looking for me at all." White noise breaks into my head. I stretch out my eyes and see nothing else than myself, repeated endlessly around me. We all grind out of the sea onto the beach. Our armors scrape across the pulverized shells of lost generations. When the red heaven drips on the horizon, the urge drives us to dry land. A landscape of long thin feelers and tentacle eyes gropes its way forward to only the urge knows where. A suitor many moltings older than myself stops and turns, claws swinging, feelers tasting the air. Out of countless identical pairs of eyes he chooses mine and stares into me blinded, a gaze stirring up memories that don't exist. He edges upon me and anchors himself to my back. My armor groans like crunching snow. His hind body grows a shoot of devotion seeking deep into my weak matter. A high thin sound sings loose from my jaws. Then I hear his song, lower and louder than mine. Under the ground there's a great reservoir with liquid grass that streams through centrifugal force out of the leaking holes in the soil and clots as it touches the air.

All words and images copyright 2008 by Vanita & Johanna Monk