Soulless ravaging food in the beforelife. Before I had that bright little center of a star that can power an entire hospital. Before I had a mind. Before I had eyes. Before there was anything to see, only warm blood rushing around me, massaging me relentlessly, shaping my basic nerve responses. I am a wave, the moon is my mother. I am rocking before ever knowing a cradle, a chair, a set of loving arms. I know animal terror—one who cannot be explained out of it—because I have no words.
There is no sense of crime and the radio man says you will never leave your room the radio man says death will come with two seconds' notice and the radio man says nothing you do can be undone and the radio man says you will not be able to control it and the radio man says your pleasure will be your downfall and the radio man is screaming. Screaming to Tokyo.
And the radio man says you will put your hands around the neck and the radio man says you will wring it like a washcloth the radio man says mistakes are compulsory and the radio man says love it while you can because it will be gone away away away gone gone and gone forever and you will not be involved in its plan—one comma out of place and the system will collapse it is engineering of the body the spirit the mind the electricity the soul the brain and your throat can be crushed by the pressure it takes me to tie a knot—death bow around your fetal little neck.
A master knows oblivion—it is the only true philosophy. It can't be mastered learned known or owned—only followed. Only submitted to. Only pleased with a bow on a knee on concrete dirt regulation sand a bed of nails some medieval stretcher kit will take you from five-six to five-ten and you can finally model Gucci for the crowd. I am trapped in a vial inside a womb and I suspect the womb belongs to me. It could be my mother—but I suspect the womb belongs to me. And I have flushed my cornea down the highest slide at the water park and that is a projection of the daily photos of my life, right there on the plastic of the slide.
Sometimes the slide drops out, scoops a curve from the sky where there is no splash pool beneath me, only concrete that burns my feet, cuts them throughout the day, like walking on a stove, my soles are redder and redder every step I take.
And it is a maze with no kid blinders, I am subject to every worry in the book, to whether I will ever escape to whether escaping will be an improvement. I don't know what came before or what will come after—only suspicions, delusions—they rule my world. And everything I say is wrong: if I make a statement, it will hit and miss, always a backwash poisoning my relationships with fecal spots along the wall.
There is a terror in everything that doesn't happen—I am always worrying it will. What does happen—even if torture—at least is known, but I am prisoner to an imagination as deep as Asia, as wide as the ocean.
It gets in the way.
And all I have—
—all I have—
—is an intuition strong as Fischer's, before there was anything known as a central banking giant—global anteaters who if you can't slide this slide, have no skill at all.
People rubbing the sticks together, sparking it, releasing their juice. People at a room party in the tenth grade, we split off in doubles and triples found closets to union in, lying on the floor with my mouth on your cock and your hand on my cunt. You pressed me so hard it hurt to pee afterward, year later knocking on my window but I had another visitor and decided to turn you away. People went drinking at the diner you threw a piece of food over my head and it landed on some geriatrics, they were trying a meal but our youthfulness got in the way we took precedence it was our world now and only time for them to die. Work constantly. Every tick is a universe—deliver it forward. My project may fail but when they excavate me (carefully, with brushes and gentle breaths) someone will find my wall, replete with dried fish who are truly the brine specimens of the age: dark, flaky blood skin, eyes dried out of their heads, fingernails intact, sharp like diamonds, a brief history of gastric input showing their first and last meals consisted of Cheetos and dog food and the occasional sour apple Jolly Rancher.
I press myself forward solid like a box—cardboard folded for recycling—in a colon or a cunt I cannot tell but my nails are sharp like diamonds, scraping the walls of my mother's tube on the way to the water park. Red turns blue. A maxim (your last) will leave you at the breeding process—for nothing (of the mind) remains. Kid, I snipped your cord in practice classes in my dreams. It was mine to take you through the first 16 years—mine to homeschool you into a man the girls would kill to be with—but you stand upright in a frame—two sheets of glass, a chemical slide—and the only ones who will see you will see you through a microscope. They will count your cells. Bury your DNA. Snip snip here and snip snip there to bring us both down to the most famous case of murder-life in human history this is real this is real but no amount of screaming will make you think it so—if I clipped your cord and took a swim with you in amniocentesis, not even then would you believe.