a peace of distortion (blooded spilled; possible ending)
I’ll wait for you if you want to meet me at the lot. I’d go back for no reason at all.”
~
The lights are so bright in the lot that you can’t sleep. Can’t concentrate on a single thought long enough to sedate yourself. It’s like you’re swimming in moss. I wrote my mother, “I hope you sleep peacefully. No thoughts. No pain. No final images of life.” And then she was gone. An existence finally vindicated by death. Hurt analyzed through the flawless lens.
~
I’m shivering in the cold—the icy wake of newness. An unexplored sequence. The marvel of all events. A lost treaty towards memory. Stay away from me and I’ll stay away from you.
a sonnet of teeth
In my mind the rats are extinct, buried under years and years of steadily crystalizing pavement. The link between them and myself has long passed from a spiritual one to one that is visceral—a never ending anxiety attack. I would sit in darkness and hear their teeth clinking against brushed aluminum, each rattle louder than the previous. Reminded me of the days that I thought nothing existed. That everything was wound tightly into a perfect, incoherent mass. The universe’s ultimate ego trip.
I lost fifty pounds in the lot. It ground me down. Pummeled my body into a stringy pulp. I became emaciated as the lot started to take a more prominent role in my life. I was a sculpture. The lots finest work.
~
My mother had blonde hair and sang at church. Would stand up with the rest of the parish and bellow out hymns like it was the only thing she fully understood how to do. I used to sit there and watch her. Sit right on while she gave everything to something that I couldn’t believe in.
I learned how to pretend there. How to imagine that I belonged. ”Where is your mother?” people used to ask me while she waited in line for communion. ”Why aren’t you with her?”
a lie’s a lie
“Every so often I was there—fully there, living inside of the world before me, a sunken reality rising to meet its upper half.”
~
I have convinced myself that I am the rapture. That every movement and motion I make is the sculptor of a piece that I do not believe in and can’t control. I would look at the asphalt in a mental silence. Works would appear: a deep red, neon green, or vibrant purple. All of which turned out to be devices designed to grab my attention, all pieces of a puzzle that I could never solve.
I used to scream deeply into the silence like it would understand my desperation. My will to forget and change. But forgetfulness became the enemy. I drifted into places that could not be remembered—the shear cliff fully realized by splattered guts at its base.
~
I waited. Sat. Calculated every piece of the equation. What was missing? Where did the algorithm fail? Why could I remember everything, but not witness it first hand?
It tied me in knots, the lot. I would wake up delirious. Grizzled. Ready to take my first steps of the day and fall. My legs would give out. I would drop to the ground and break every fragile bone in my body—spill into the dirt like the biggest rat you’ve ever seen.
when i ride (a promise)
i haven’t written about the lot in a while because it’s not the same anymore. hasn’t been the same i decided i would leave. live. i used to think that it was some kind of paradise. something lost, hidden behind a new horizon. like i could escape it, the sun reciprocating as well as it could.
i could live in it forever, the lot—nothing would change, it would run on forever. the endless fallout, the sleepless life. a fade mid-verse that would settle and still sing. i looked at the ground for hours. ”welcome to yourself,” it told me.
—
i knew i had to. forever verbal. forever tied in knots. fall on the floor and crumble like a piece of paper that was meant to be saved. the gallery in a phrase.
“in solitude i am real. sick. immediate.”
pink matter
the leaves fall like acorns—broken and complete, immersed in hibernation, like they can’t escape their reality.
i’m lost in this habit like the rats—dead and intuitive, forgotten and splattered, like their favorite colour across a shameless blackness. ”forget about me; forget about everything,”
“wake up and disappear; it’ll be over soon.”
Your brain waves adjust to the place. Like a song you’ve heard a million times. One that you know so well you’ve forgotten why you listen to it. The perfect song is the unavoidable one. The forced one. It sits in your stomach and smolders. Numbs you down to nothing—lifeless, expressionless, fulfilled.
It’s a sea of infertility, the lot. Nothing that grows stays for long. Weeds shrivel and die. Rats peer through cracks and dissolve—piles of naked, disjointed matter. It doesn’t make sense how easily life disappears in the lot. Like its learned to willingly drown itself. A perfectly docile natural disaster.
There are some nights that the lot stinks so bad I want to get up and leave. To never go back. The place has this strange tendency of creeping up into your nostrils and just sitting there—making itself comfortable, furnishing a home with bacteria. It can’t help itself. Kills its prey and sends it off to war.
You never get used to the stench. It’s different every time. Changes. Adapts to us as we try to block it out—always on the move, but always here to stay. Just like me.
-
If you stand still long enough in the lot you’ll disappear. Just like any other line or signpost. Fall right into the spectacle. A place where nothing can matter. Where nothing does matter. One hundred square yards of everything hiding in plain sight.
