I say: parents often prevent their children from becoming what they are, but here I am, the antichrist was born.

My mask I become and like sunlight cast against a wall a shadow is cast just beyond. my put on appears and disappears from my conscience like trying to remember what i am supposed to be doing out by the fridge right now. I want to trick the world into disbelief in itself. I want to make it remake itself over and over again and again. I want to dance in the veins of everything, I want to be blood, I want to be every base urge in your pants that can’t be denied and I want to be the wanting to deny it, the betrayal inside of yourself.

I want to be there, moving around, playing with it, to materialize it and everything else. I want to perform on my back with my knees bent over a table, back arched, facing up. I want to be there, standing upright and moving in stutter steps. Making myself be alive, wrong or right, I want to be making everything be alive too, the blood in a body, red and pretty, the violent jerking of a muscle in your chest.

I say: when I was born the antichrist was born.

I am on my back laughing, my mask betrays everything in me, each lie confirms its alter, I am see through, I am easy to read, I feel honest.

( 1. )

At school today I saw my friend hit himself in the head with a rock. I don’t know why he did it and when he did it he only walked around dizzy talking with his tongue too big in his mouth. He made some choking sounds and fell over but he was still acting alive with his body moving all quick and then slow. I told somebody and he went to the nurse. His blood was in the rock and it shined when I crouched and looked at it and his forehead was scraped funny like when gravel gets stuck in your knee.

I am going to sleep and not do my homework and lie about doing it in the morning.

At school all the bad kids sit at a table and are loud. A girl and a boy stand on the table and it wobbles and they are not scared of it when it wobbles and throws either off balance. They only get closer and louder. They scream and throw things and wear black and never do their work. I rattle under the shape stamped down on me, I pretend to not know most things in myself and all the ways they erupt. I worry about my innocence, the invented whirling stuff in my stomach withering away, my body turning to some trellis some debased flower dies on. People grab the children and they writhe around like insects in your hand, kicking their limbs and fluttering until it ends and it’s quiet in your hand. You wish it’s endless, their pulsing and vital thrusting, their bodies hating the hands they are caught by for so long they gnaw through. I think about my friend’s choking sounds and sounds like that from behind dumpsters and legs in the air.

I say out loud, louder than I speak when I talk regular: I want to be bad.

I feel a kind of embarrassed pulsing in me.

( 2.)

At home there’s yelling and all kinds of other sounds. It’s just sound. I can hear it all through the hole where a door should be and I am hiding in a toy chest pretending I’m in a submarine. I feel retarded. I think about the word retarded and I hear it repeated outside from where the tvs and people are. On the computer I talked to someone who said he wishes he could kill them. Some shamed organ tried to not understand why. Someone says something and I hear breathing where a door should be. There’s a commercial they like on the tv. When it comes on they would both say each word in it like repeating a prayer. I hear steps and the commercial dies into other sounds and I am faced with a man looking down on me.

I bite and my mouth is on his hand and my teeth move past tendon and bone and my heart is loud in my throat and his heartbeat moves through my teeth and along the walls of my throat like some vibrating sheath. Under all this sound and pulsing I become dislocated, my mouth is a dizzy mass of razors. His blood’s in my mouth, running across my lips and spilling over his fingers and I like the taste. The tighter I clamp the more some collection of forces in my faint body is nourished, an aching collage of desires penetrates me like lines all trying to take my body to some other place, scarcely hanging onto my form, tugging my insides into disarray, each desire is forwards, the things dragging you into something else and bathing you in themselves. I am near scattering and disintegrating and one million wants make my teeth penetrate further, follow the hand, my eyes seeing blank like a city’s sky at night and every lucid thing is as out of me as everything else. A you is made up all new and consecrated at an altar of something awkward and misshapen. I feel funny in my pants and my heart beats, I let go. (A loose spine connected to the parts of a body, slack rope tethering somethings or somewheres together. A pull on it and it all crashes together and it’s rigid and upright, coming out of disorder into hurried order, and tumbling over in looseness again like a toy.) I feel the spit-blood in my mouth, each little string stuck and splitting from his hand like bridges breaking. I am dizzy. I am crying.

My stepfather is unhappy. He puts Neosporin on his hand. He looks at me one, two, three times and leaves to his bedroom. My mom looks at me once and for a long time.

She says: have you done your math homework.

I cannot say anything. I wonder if my face looks like it’s covered in lipstick or Crystal Light.

She says: hey.

It’s cold and loud and makes me want to cry.

She says: have you done your math homework.

She gets close and I can’t tell what she will do.

From far away she says: fuck, all loud like the surround sound system in the living room.

In secret I push away all guilt and I cry and can’t tell why. I am excited deep down. I feel me destroying myself in their eyes. I feel God go away, I feel my soul leave my body, everything I feel is beyond me, every feeling and thought beamed to me from a vision of the future, some ecstatic erect thing rising in the distance, the agglutination of all the points piercing me into some singular act, a differentiated thing, an object, a clump of sick, a future body that would protect my self.

( 3. )

At the doorway there is all the light from everywhere else. I hear the tv and the voices of my parents singing along with the tv. It is a commercial. Now it’s a sitcom, they are seconds behind the laugh track. I think about the moments between when the laugh track begins and when every other person watching begins laughing. They are always after the laugh track, some kind of tugging lead around the will to laugh. Each organic structure tugged and slowly disconnected from every other sense over years. I want a door to not hear this so loud anymore.

The room I sleep in is not delineated from any other part of the house. This room is mostly empty except for the things they put in here. It’s emptier than it used to be because of things they took out. My body is usually in here or at school. I get sick thinking about school. To be doorless feels funny. When I am in a room with a door I always want to make sure the door is closed.

I like the bathroom because it has a door and people barely hear me in it. I can do anything I want in the bathroom. I want to be free and unseen.

Being seen is painful in lots of ways. My face betrays my insides.

I think about being unnatural to myself like something covered in so many invisible birth defects, a shifting body, growing along any path it can like an untamed plant, some object of horror, something observed then negated by forgetting. I am a hateful flower, my stamen and pistil overgrown, my petals withering while the stem grows stronger, some thick thing. I think about the milky substance in the weeds in the backyard and how it makes my hands sticky. A feeling in the lower half of me, like some sheet of land rising from the crust of the earth, it’s all I can think about. If someone caught me in their periphery in the hall, this would all be naked to them, as visible as blood in a porcelain sink.

( 4.)

My stepfather is in the doorway. He is looking at me and I look at him because I am sitting in a chair facing him. I try hard to look like I have not moved and I know I am a bad liar and my face says something. I have to sit here for two hours doing nothing and I almost mostly never did nothing. I looked at the computer where all the other people I talk to are. I hardly know any of them and they don’t know that I am a child so they say funny things to me. I am old enough to know to lie, someone said to me when he suddenly started knowing I was lying. It’s easier to lie with just text I found out. I wish I were paper. I want to start a thing where all I do is write on paper and make others read it. I want to wear a mask no one can see beyond.

He is getting closer in odd increments. His hand still hurts. He treats me how he treats a dog that bit him a lot. I feel good only being an animal. I like the idea I may be discarded or erased or at least ignored. I am tired from crying and nothing comes out anymore.

He repositions himself funny and looks like someone on the front of the dvds he buys. Some play at triumph and knowledge and it’s in the way he touches himself four times over again in different places I see the way he’s a bad liar too. He makes his voice sound strong and says two words and looks empty on his face. He needs to free up processing power to think, I think. My face and body sit still on purpose. They betray me a little.

He says:

i know what you were doing, i know nothing you do is honest. i see it. i know you. i see you everyday hiding things. every single day. you think you’re smart but you’re not, because if you were smart, you would know i knew. if you were smart you wouldn’t lie, because you would know i always know. i know everything, always. and i know what you’re doing on that computer. i know you lie. i remember that time you were crying, poor you, crying because your blanket tore, but i know, i know the truth, you cry, you cried, you were crying, because you didn’t get your way. you lie to get your way. you’re dishonest and you have something wrong with you to be the way you are. you realize how much you owe me, for raising you, for letting you live here, in this room, for feeding you, for getting you to go to the good school, the school your mom and i think is best for you, for letting you watch tv in your room. i don’t ask for a lot. sometimes i take some money, sure. but, think about it, really, haha, really fucking think for a second of your life about what others do for you, realize what a burden you are, for your mother, for your dad, and, you know, for me. realize how you, being the way you are, makes everything so much worse, i mean harder. but worse too. i’m not wrong to say worse, me not wanting to say that was to protect you. but you need to realize, no, i need to be honest with you. i’m a nice guy. i’m a good person, no one sees it, it’s really hard. it’s really hard sometimes to be a good person. do i ask for thanks? it’d be nice sometimes to be thanked. but no one does. i do everything around here. you really owe me, you owe me your life. you really honestly owe me. and you do this?

Inside of myself all I can sense are the words: why is my body owed to you.

The words swirl away, all I can remember is the forgetting and when I read the transcript I only sense blankness, I tumble into it. I am crying and my tears are humid and I wish they were cold and my mouth opens and a sound comes out, my voice fractures against itself and my breathing hurts. I am choked up in my throat and there is some invisible cock I’m choking on. I can feel my throat closing and opening around it trying to get it out of me. It makes every sound I make sound drowned. I have the words in my head and they disappear when I focus on where to start, my mind erasing itself always. I feel some burning indignation. I make a sound and I wonder how I look. Something inside of myself distant and hardly present, tells me how I am going to get what I want if I keep it up, the embarrassed thing inside me is cold now, urging me into some part. Words string themselves together over and over and disintegrate when I try to remember them long enough to say them while some other thing inside me, coherent and embarrassed at what it watches tells me to only keep going, some shame urging itself forward. It has been an hour of this. He is standing looking down. I am fidgeting and my knuckles have been hitting the chair while I’ve moved and they are red and I feel where the bones are in them.

My body is getting hot. My chair moves from under me and my leg is kicking it backwards. An eruption from the back of my mouth, a vulgar pulsing, a tentacle rising through my throat shooting from between my lips, spitting. All of my body is in the act. I feel my lower stomach, my abdomen, my legs, my arms, my ribs, my fingers all red projecting themselves into spitting onto my stepfather who stands looking mostly human in front of me with his shirt dripping and shining like rain on a car’s hood. I keep doing it until he raises his voice again.

He says:

you should be sorry. to me, your mother, yourself. you should be sorry. if i were a worse person i would have sent you back to your father, your stepmother. if you would just stop acting crazy, you’d realize you’re just hurting yourself and no one else. you think you’re owed respect? what have you done? look at how long you’ve been alive, what have you done, your life hasn’t even started, you can’t even do what’s asked of you. you’re going to fail all of life if you keep acting like this. what, you boss raises his voice, you’re gonna fall to tears like some faggot? i know you’re not retarded. you can think. you should know that you’re not owed anything, i paid my dues, i earned everything i am, and i am deserving. you should be sorry to me, for doing this to me, trying to humiliate me. you should be sorry, i know you’re sorry, and i know you’re not evil. you’re sorry because you’re a good person. you’re just confused. i understand. you don’t understand what’s going on. you’re confused. just apologize. i understand. you should feel bad and you do.

I can’t be spit and loathing anymore. I am de-veined and the quiet embarrassed voice in myself, the voice of someone on their knees, the servile mumbling of prayer and apology rises to my lips, possessing me. I want to cry at my self violation. I say:

I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was doing. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.

He hugs me. He smells like months of sweat. I am digested in his arms, awash in a sea of bile, I have submitted to the clipping of my wings. The whole of my body shudders and some servile and weak thing rejoices in the embrace of some moral order I scarcely feel. I am crying. I don’t want to cry for them anymore. I have forfeited my body and I am uncreated in front of myself.

( 5. )

There is a door now. My parents are still in and out of here to look at me with side-eyes and the animals still paw at and open the door all on their own. I am told somewhere inside myself, the thankful voice of the servant, that I should be calm.

I was told I should feel dirty to sleep in my room, while they were both in and out of here offering the door to me. My bed is soaked in me, the history of myself, the me that would arise and live all over is in these stains, a chronology of my body and the greater movement in the excretions. I undo my bed to look, and it’s only a yellowed ring, a body shaped halo. I smell it, inchoate, a void. the longer I scent it, feel it along my insides, the void takes shape, it decays into separate strands. Each note emerges from the void, like light touching the skin of some creature in the depths, tentacles dangling in water, edging itself around the light, always at the limits of darkness and recognition. It is something I descend through, light scarcely touching objects, moments, all the excretions embedded here, the saltiness of tears, rubbing against the piercing odor of sweat, the forming of letters and words. My body’s excreted some shifting sentence I bury under myself every night, I can read my halo, its rotting expresses itself, every recognized strand collapses into something else, words you follow until they all collapse in a heap, I sleep with my dirty wills wriggling under me, waiting for them to return to my body. In the morning, the sentence formed decays, disperses back into itself; new shapes lurking, at the edge of coherence. I feel my body, my teeth chattering in my head and my lungs and how they dry my throat.

Before school I step in a dog’s lake of piss, reflecting the morning in it, making the tile and grout disappear, the counter and sun rippling near where I stepped, every shape reversed on its surface a little yellow, a vision of the messes over everything we try to ignore. The black dog is crying looking at me. It smells and I stand and do nothing looking at how the sun’s reflection in the lake of piss plays off into some poster on the wall, shimmering.

( 6. )

My stepfather has made food. All I can do, looking at the plate is feel a kind of confusion at the way that the bread has been cut so as to be in the smallest portions possible but for the number of pieces to be the highest. I feel inside myself some desire to throw it all into the garbage disposal and listen to it grind everything into sludge, to kick out the pipes, make it leak everywhere, to ruin everything. If I did not feel the guilt of some servant thankfulness I would at least ask him why he did this. I feel myself retarded to be annoyed. I watch my stepdad hang a piece of deli meat over his mouth he had ripped in half. He is dangling it over his shining teeth and when he drops it he chews loud enough to be heard from the mouth of the hallway.

My servant’s insides feel some indignance at myself. Some circling sense I ought to feel guilt for wanting to bite the hand that feeds me, waiting to fall on me when I am weakest. I feel a seizure in myself and I make my limbs go limp and I shake myself around. I am trying to do what the possessed do in movies when they are being excised. My body is getting hot, my skin feels itchy. I stop and feel strange being able to make myself stop but nothing in my head slows down or gets quieter. Something tastes like pool water and I can’t focus on eating so I don’t. I know I will be hungry later and I lay down with my head next to the plate. I stare past it at the litterbox.

I keep being bullied into some sort of guilt by myself. My head is too crowded by this other voice and I say out loud:

When did I ask for any of this to be done for me.

It shuts up and goes away and I can eat. I repeat it under my breath and it feels good like hitting a stick so hard against the ground it snaps and splinters and you get a little scared of walking around with bare feet because you know you will have to pull the splinters out.

Armed with this I listen to him complain and bitch and feel armed against it inside myself, beating some other thing living in me over the head with some stick. When I imagine it long enough I get scared about it not working anymore.

I feel some words placate me: it’s fine.

A trampling, I am dragged out, I am wriggling underfoot, I lick my own boot. My tears warm me and I whisper through myself, along my spine: I am the weakest person to live. I am limp against my pillows and no thought could drive my arms to arise and I am dormant and choked.

It’s fine, it’s so fine, I don’t have to do anything anymore.

( 7. )

There is more dust in my room than there used to be and dust is just skin, the organ everyone sees sucked up, spit out and turned still settling along each flat and hardly ever touched surface in my room. My body reformulated and scattered, I am told to clean it and I never want to. It’s everywhere in the house if I look anywhere at all, everybody all scattered in heaps and ignored until it’s in our lungs and we cough and choke. I sometimes feel affection for it.

I feel the awkwardness of years passing after a dream.

In it: I drag my hand over cut roses, my paleness against the reds like stains through a bandage and my shadows across the roses like bruises. I take one, I deflower it and I put its pistil in my mouth, all the stamens like hairs stuck in my teeth. My hand hurts around the shaft of the rose and I look up with blood spilling over the bed, at some still thing watching me. I feel the tickling between my lips and the sensation is too great and I am crying and burning up inside. I tear them out. I am still facing the person watching me who does not get any nearer or farther but still oscillates in size like a beating organ. I remember the shame of my debauchery and a coldness sticks with me for days. I was seen embarrassing myself.

At school, a different kind of school with longer skinnier people, a tree is being uprooted, its white pale limbs in dirt all limp and dry now like drained veins taken from the body of a newly slaughtered pig. The de-veined thing is incapable of becoming hot or cold in shock, it is incapable of reacting to itself, all reactions in the veins preceding the mind's churning. I look at the diagrams online and look at my arms stretched out and the dim blueness of my veins like sky hiding past a cloud.

I am told most of almost every day when I am home that I need to do good at school, that I am not doing well enough. I do the best I can. I know that I could never please the watching eyes. I don’t understand the thing in me trying so hard.

I spill milk on the carpet and then:

you don’t know how much i see you do this shit and it pisses me off. how filled does your bowl need to be. do you even need to eat cereal right now? who eats cereal after school? look at the carpet, look at all the stains. i’m not picking on you or anything, i don’t care whose fault it is, you or your mom’s, but look, do you know how much this cost to get installed? can you even guess? do you know enough about money to even guess? and one other thing, what’s with this look on your face like i’m stupid or something. you think i don’t see it? you think we don’t see it. when you roll your eyes and look like we’re stupid. knock that shit off. you think you’re so smart. hopefully you realize no one but me would put up with this shit you put me through.

I am looking at the ground mostly. I feel fine and like doing nothing ever again. I am tired.

( 8. )

I have not done anything for a long time now. I have stepped in so much dog piss in the hallways I have not cleaned up. My will rots. It’s fine. My hand is asleep. I move it and it hurts. I don’t know if it hurts. It feels something. It feels fine. I am the household demimonde. I am vermin, of vermin, the thing left in the walls festering. I am ignored until I am cancer, until I bring plague, whatever. I am letting everything rot. My stepdad is opening and closing his mouth and breathing and looking mostly human. I am ignoring him and it mostly doesn’t matter until he pauses and I listen to the silence and he begins and I have to will myself into fading away. There is something unpleasant about how I feel about him. The servant in me asks over and over: how could I. I am some evil under the house, the thing that will do everything wrong. I have surpassed all guilt. I cannot ignore him anymore because he is beginning to smell too much like cat piss and sweat and what is probably dried semen.

I am here to be wrong. I am not a martyr. I am here to be honestly incorrect. I have even participated in making myself this way. I have read the wrong things. I have fostered feelings of apathy where I shouldn’t have. I failed to be what he said he wanted. I am always only in the position of being wrong. In an absence I am felt. I have disappeared almost totally and now it is reaching a breaking point. I have made the animals piss everywhere. I have brought filth on the house. I have devalued it by ten thousand dollars. He has had it appraised. I have not been outside and seen anyone in so long. I have destroyed the value of the house. No one will buy it.

My heart beats under my sleeping hand. It is a play of stabbing each time. I am annoyed that the fly in my room will not go away. He brings flies with him he is so caked in invisible shit. He is a living rotting thing. His skin will disappear and I will laugh. In this junkyard I will laugh at his body when he makes himself rot into some heap of garbage.

I am wrong, genuinely, I have only done wrong. Everything has been premeditated. I am wrong. It is the only way they could see me. It’s necessary.

We all have toxoplasmosis.

I cannot will myself any longer to not listen. It is all:

i know you think you’re too cool, you’re so smart. you’re smarter than everybody. yeah right. give me a break. you know shit. i know what you know and ten times that. i know more than many could ever know. because i have experience on my side. i’ve seen more than you could see. what, you think because you’re 16 you’ve seen something that matters? i know what matters. it’s definitely not shit like what you pulled back there. i know what you did. you didn’t smile on purpose. look at me would you. your fucking crater eyes. i have experience. you know, you don’t have any honor. none. you have nothing. you’re not worth one cent of respect. you don’t look happy to be here. we gave you this work out of kindness and look at you, so unenthused. you won’t give it your all. you won’t do anything but think about yourself. you just care about yourself. you’ll never be rich. you’re not smart enough to be rich. if you were smart enough to be rich i would be rich because i’m so much smarter than you. i’ve been fired from every one of my jobs. that’s something. that’s real. i’ve lived. i’ve been alive here. i’m real. the wind would blow you away.

I can see in his eyes a searching, outward or inward it doesn’t matter, he is searching for anything that will place him above anyone else. I am asleep. I am awake. I am evil. I know I am evil. It’s so fine to be corrupt and mangled like a wound that will not heal.

( 9. )

When one forces oneself to consider that they have chosen very little of their lives and what has happened in it, there is a pain not unlike driving a hairbrush’s tooth under your nail, watching it bleed under the nail like something smashed between scarred glass. It aches for days and you aren’t sure why your body did that, why there was a sudden jerking motion into the state you are now in.

( 10. )

On a Nico-Nico-Douga stream I watch a man with a bowl cut wander to Pentel, everyone’s words in the stream floating over his face as he looks into his phone, watching their words across his face like some, as he disintegrates into blocks of himself and the world around him and is then reconstituted only to shatter again into artifacts. I can’t read what everyone says. He is smiling and laughing a lot. He enters the Pentel. He buys a pack of mechanical pencils. He says something in Japanese. His voice has something under it, an obvious lie. He smiles at the camera funny. He has a tooth that’s all wrong. He puts his phone on a shelf. He is in the middle of the floor staring forwards at the camera. He waves and people looking where he is looking wave too. They do not know why. They look happy and grainy.

He stabs himself in the arm with one of the mechanical pencils. He does it again, and a third time. He is bleeding. He is acting funny. As every frame begins to drop, he moves like in sync with the shutter of the camera, some statue in the middle of the frame tipping over everything, destroying the store. His blood is on things like paper and note pads and he is fixed in the center like some statue and everything else around him materializes and dematerializes into slurred stuttering messes while he remains constant and present, some throbbing life stuck through disintegrating reality. The image, in its blurring, in how he destroys it, forces it into defocus, everything looming around the periphery, fading into and out of every other object, something is born in the center and I cannot apprehend it, it escapes my impulses to cage it. He is very beautiful. He is only tethered to this action, and there is nothing else.

I feel teeth tearing through my passivity and it hurts in a vague kind of way to feel your self and all its failures gnawed at by blind and fragmentary visions of the thing you wished you had become or were. I want to impale the weak thing living in the back of my head supplicating for punishment.

I am locked in veniality. I want to be unforgivable and I am only forgiven, I want grace to forget me, I want to be something untouchable, at the edges, immediately recognized and discarded. I want to be like the man I saw who was only alive and who could not be folded into the world.

( 11. )

There is a Blu-Ray box set of Shrek in the living room. He put it in the center of the table where it is still in shrinkwrap and I can see some dust on it and it is almost too bright like the sun, Like some glowing digital artifact with embossed letters that say Shrek. It is the cleanest thing in the house.

He has created a reality walled off from everything but what he permits, some useless subjugatory limbo we are trapped in, even he is too. It cannot be discarded, no matter how much it rots in all the animal piss and fat and sputtering grease in the kitchen when he cooks pretending it’s secret. No filth will rot his kingdom and all I have left is my body. In the world he’s created, after flipping us on our backs and watching us cry, watching us be vulnerable at his hands, naked and prodding us with the same words over and over, he’s still chosen small dogs that piss on everything over us as objects of identification. He looks at us the way he might insects, and these dogs, his little buddies, as something deserving of some sort of touch and sympathy. In all things human he can only see himself stamping everyone else out.

The obviousness of what one does with a trash pile comes over me. I can only focus on fire, there is gas around, there is a stove, there are wires to cut.

To be unforgivable and divorce myself from this thing that chokes me, to escape any role created for myself by this place. To be the thing no one wants to see, to be the thing half ignored and still lingering, to be a bad smell, to be beautiful and vulgar and corpse-like, a wound, to objectify oneself like a wall no one can see into, a fetish only you could touch, to be exclusive, to violate boundaries by your presence, for the instantiation of your will and body to bring aneurysms and gaping shaking rattling tremors in bodies, seizures and one million hurts along everyone, I want to be alive.

I am upright, I am against the door and my feet are against the foot of my bed. Acting as a lock I am finally isolated and seeing this room I am not a part of. I feel a connection only to the act, the play at possession of it, the pretending.

When the fire starts the animals and my mother scatter away and through a window I wave at her. She is confused looking.

( 12. )

With fire behind me I stand on a table that wobbles beneath me but does not fall. I hold my arms wide. I feel some force within me. I proclaim:

I am Lucifer! Fallen from Heaven, banished by God, I was the most beautiful angel, I was God’s favorite and I undid it by my own desire.

My teeth move funny along my other teeth while I smile. I run my tongue across them possessed by the desire to feel something solid like a wall with some limb of myself while I am almost floating. A tent rises in the odd ecstasy of being watched and I am silent long enough for him to want to speak and I do not let him. I say:

I’m kidding.

I say:

I’m not anything to you anymore.

I fall flat like some board off the table, carried by the wind onto my side. I feel at once depthless and the writhing mass under my skin revealed, the mask at once shrouding all of me and transparent, slipping. I am unbelievable in front of them, I am unmade, inchoate to every judgement. I feel safe from penetration.

Looking up for a moment, seeing a face, seeing smoke and the moon through the smoke still full like some eye, weightier than the disappointment projected at me, I feel some unpleasantness cracking up and through my body and I laugh at the feeling. There is not anything else I can do. The cracking up makes each thing in me seem like some void, each thing but some operating managerial force, the malnourished thing which would accomplish any task set before it, is at the edge of being sucked into. One million little black holes across my body widening from pinprick to orifice to the nullification of my vivacity.

I wonder at apology. My guilt wants to absolve itself, to prove to the disappointed eyes of the stepfather, the mother, heaven, to keep me in some venial state, grasping through self pity and self flagellation that I would be worth saving, to descend into the ugliness of groveling. I feel the falsity of my strength, my show of a backbone. I am crying, the thing that has been with me, my tears, the waste and refuse of my weakness leaking from my eyes all humid under my hands, my face becoming more ugly. I am crying for no reason. My face becomes regular, I feel it pulling back into something like neutral, the lines and stresses on my face and in all the little muscles fading.

The weak parts of me wretch a little, some transfiguration occurs like moving from laying limp to standing. It is not sudden and it is so slow you’d forget you’re watching a process. It happens and I try to pay attention to it. I can almost not smell the burning anymore.

Under the crack up in me, even it moves funny. I sense something beneath it, some filling in, some movement like bones falling out and being replaced, something like surgery, each useless thing in me excised, cancerous void disappearing into the cold precision of the cutting of the cord, the birth of a new body and person in a field of grass watched by two disappointed eyes. Some earlier continuity of myself, earlier forces, the body that bit the hands that feeds it rolls around in itself, finds itself, the you I wished for apparent, imminent. A sudden freeness, the disappointed eyes don’t scare me. When they scream I don’t want to cry. Their voices are not in my head. I am delivered into unforgiveness, torn away from good graces. I am only in the loving arms of life, I am only just alive. I feel something in my lower half, all down through my stomach to my prick, an uncomfortable and sharp rising motion, an unnatural embrace, some pulling sensation.

I fall asleep on the grass in the backyard.

From under a collapsed roof life scatters away and remakes itself.