The roadside is lined with old dead men, dessicated limbs splayed to the sky
and soil past their noses. Black clouds split open and spray themselves at the
world. Clots of bioluminescent gore bounce off the frozen mud.

These walls and windows come
and go, drifting out of sight
between long blinks. There are
morning where my ceiling is the
sky, singing with wind and the
ghost of an old train whistle,
desolate moan stretched along

Stains hiding in the fold where heaven is supposed to be.

The white dome bubbling off the bottom-front of my face like a blister ready to
puke itself into the open air. Bile that rolls across the ceiling and drips

off the
top of the doorjamb. Sick light swims through the glisten.

The waves lapping the shore erode the world, ocean spilling over the stems rooting
this place to the dirt.

Throbbing gray whole, wet and concave, lip bejeweled in a half-crescent of calcific
protrusions. A well of nothing, parturient with a small pink lump, goosefleshed
sinuous oyster. A tale distilled to its base, retching that whispers a cold window down
the empty hallway.

I fall, blind, uncapped, spilling over the walls, absorbed into the porous
labyrinth of hallways and boxes; a brick tower blooming upside down—a
stalactite on the sky—waves of grey reflected on the bottom of clouds—slow
red lightning that cracks the surface of the ocean like shattering glass.

Overhead is the choppy surface of the sea. The remnants of shipwrecks and
oil rigs paint the horizon like a hanged city skyline. Below, roiling grey clouds
and long rolls of thunder. Shadows that could be the backs of ancient
leviathan that carved that great valley in the world and in time.

The moment loops in the porous mortar disintegrating between the bricks—boxes of different lives glued together—a scream upon deaf ears—radios playing in empty rooms—whispering a breeze of static electricity down the hallway.

The gun is in the drawer of my desk. The bubble of infection in the earth splits and wafts a blizzard of
sporous disease into the campsite. Noxious fumes stir the fire into a frenzy that scorches the detritus on
the ground. Bodies thrown together as the ground tilts—flesh melding on contact—a pile of thrashing
limbs and gnashing maws and rolling eyes—dissociated personalities—memories smashed to a
paste—mixed together—smeared across the underside of the forest canopy—catching
evaporation—raining grey mildew onto the red brick ruins.

*

The film grain captured in the still image wraps around me like a mesh of static electricity—picked apart by nervous nails snapping at my skin like pins and needles—blood flowing home, passing heat to their tunnels—exploding from the iron ring at the end of the barrel—pale mollusks that splatter underfoot.

The forest will be shorn away. Nowhere left to hide but under the soil. Trees sent
down river, blanched like the heaped corpses of death camp victims—algae flowing
along the rivers surface, shredded by currents—foaming white rapids—on the living
room floor vomiting—collecting bricks from the ruined building—slashing my wrists
in a bathtub—swallowing a fistful of Xanax.

We exist in footsteps. Shadows rippling like water. Colorless light caught in your
eyes. A storm brewing between stones. Hunting whispers in the mortar. Wet red
dripping from the fingers on your cross-brace.

Flakes of memory drift past the backs of my eyes. The world is born in pale gray light. Shadows bloom from the horizon. Candlelight quivering against the darkness like oil in water.

Your skin doesn’t fit right and there are too many teeth in your mouth.

Moving white specks like storm-blown snow swirl in the air over his head. He doesn’t
look up from the page that is filling with ink. Black lines bleed as they cross and wave
and fall over the paper. Flakes getting caught in his gore matted hair.

I’m still breathing in the spaces you can’t see.