Chewing Wolf's Bane
Every face is the face of God
I watch with fourteen pairs of eyes a body cross an open space. The body's "me" is centerposed, center-deposed. I can't tell where my center is.
Don't look down and walk, but everywhere's a sharp reflection, as God's eyes each face and surface pierces with awareness of one's self-unself. Far away's an open door. Because it's far I can't get out. And then inside there's nothing far because the walls are in the way.
Small things I can't disown get filed, boxed or hung around my neck and lost. I'm grateful. Bleeding for myself the way a crowd would weep. Crowdface, me. Nowhere to or from, body's centered self-unseen.
We let the numbers chant and bodies joint and listen, knowing nothing can escape a simple giving in. Concrete elasticity compels them up the stairs. The body's place is not withheld; these bodies, places overwhelm.
The bodies aren't sure itself should go, and yet inclining spaces leak concern for growth. Do you know there's something in the air? Mousey disregard and situated speeches. Drink it in. Don't leave yet eye mist. Fill, my ears are hearing through the cover, frigid technicality. Enraptured, shivering, disembodied trembling. I can taste myself dissembling.
Look away
The task erupts with patient repetition, given names for which ensoulment rigid plaster spreads behind your face. Which categories risk another scratch is focal, animosity enfolded by a rage. Tender, but mistakes were made, and clinical disaster gave me something to forget. The folds, enough. Regret.
Never better, trying to correct myself inside alone. Please hear: a whistle. Puncture terror. Terminology prepared unspeaking rituals beneath the skin. Fragments watching from behind. Loosen something or you'll die. We've all been there, telling stories just to stay awake. I didn't cry.
Disparate exertions closing in. Losing nothing. Every quiet interstitial zealotry exposes truth. Hello friends. Kindred errors. Touch this part and everything resounds. Just keep saying it. You make yourself by acting like disturbance stands without foundation. He expects.
I paid for it. It's clearer when we're all the same. Look in one direction, nowhere else. Start and stop. A mass dispersed and reified, advantage turns interior. Pleroma digits. Hand grenade. There's something new involved.
Collapsing diatropic, difference reconfigured. I'm singing in the hall and losing space between the parts. Harmonize insurgency, relinquish something vital to become a soul. They tell me things I can't believe. I walk through hunger, mortifying checkered bleaching spinning shouting. Eyes ahead. It's over now.
Something's gotten in
Lightning-powered order, bleak distortion: lower ground is safe unless it rains. Imposing face, you trust beyond. There's more than one of everything. I fold myself reflected, twist myself around the earth. Becoming is impossible. The pieces in my hand remind me everything is part of something else, always incomplete.
Ignorance is welcome, but interrogation stalks around the mechanism. It's what is seen. If there was hope, tactility would clamber over camouflage. But knowledge disempowers for the moment singled out.
Claustrophobic spectacles, entangled. Thirsty doppelganger. Timing everything so I don't have to be alive. I'm not as honest as I seem. Too many times I didn't get to ask if I was wrong again.
I'm standing here, a hundred feet upon the ground. Stampede of me. But no, I'm falling out. My arms are mine at least when crumbling beneath. It's time to take a breath and die. I'm only dying when I breathe and when I yell or when I speak. A lesson in dissension. Contestation, otherwise.
Bitter everything relief. Can't you see? It isn't actually contained. And in that absence it continues processes upon itself. I know the truth. You make yourself by looking at the sky.
You can't get it back out
When days are numbered, life becomes suspension. Hanging there, I move like someone struggling to see. The armor doesn't help. It makes me vulnerable to recognition. Without it I'm not real, I can't be seen. It's not fair I put me here. I give silence and take solitude, for which I am undone. I always think I could be better. At least I know now what I am to them: a vessel for inscription and restraint.
By now I've noticed how the world has changed. Assassination target Crowdface. What remains? I think the spectacle of consternation doubles as a veil. Whatever really happened has been willfully disguised by language games, and there won't be an opportunity to fully disentangle them before eight years have passed. It's the only way this works without catastrophe. Just make it to the end.
Everything is older than me. And I've known it all along, but now I'm forced to deal with it. The cycles governing my life are mere continuations of dramatic flourishes from long ago. Around me, crowd particulate. I am of course a part of it. Assembling, complicit.
There's something to be savored in the friction of assimilation. Bodies made subordinate to higher things. This one is mine. And now it wants me dead. Letting go of things has been my pattern from the start, but here it ends. I'm making something real this time. The many ways I've been let down have only been enlisting me for this. A life I've never wanted.
Something's strange. But I refuse to think about the ways it's getting worse. Ensnared by emptiness, I know myself.
No matter how deep you dig
I've made my choices, wound up where I am. It's not like what I thought. The world is sad and brutal, but that's just the way it is. We'll make it better when it's gone.
Time passes and I go about my life. I'm doing everything I've ever wanted, drinking way too much. Nothing feels impossible. This may be what I needed, even if it hurts along the way.
I keep a journal to forget. I never remember what I write. It's probably for the best, it can leave itself behind without distress.
Eventually, I'll read what I've forgotten. Then I'll have to take the armor off, and without it everything will fall apart. It's hiding in the corpse of what I was, waiting to come back.
There's deeper things than what was buried in my words. I'm not myself. Some things are made by turning inside out.