linseed oil

it is always a scent, the more heavy and lingering, the deeper the memory ruptured.

i lay on my back, collapsed over the side of my bed with my head almost touching the floor. i let the blood rush in until i can hear nothing but my spinning heart. i stare vaguely at the shadows cast on my wall and press my palms flat to the cold oak floor. that goddamn old shadow box comes into focus like a stranger passing on a dark road. i close my eyes and fill my dead lungs with dank and humid air. the tears follow one another over my forehead and into my loose hair.

the news of the dead. always the same astonishment. the same sinking regret. the same question "why?" laying unanswered between the bodies.

my heart is still spinning. can you feel this?

his heavy dark brows clutch his eye sockets. his smile is rabid. i wish to taste his fever, i want it to rise in my upside down skull and boil the rot out of my belly. i want to vomit and chop what is left of your mania into a dust fine enough to be absorbed again through the skin and lungs.

i sit up fast. now i am all spinning.

i have turned into a something less that a wisher; a prayer. i pray for what is rotting and putrid. i have become a monk devoted to ego, asking for its judgement, begging for its rapture. i have alarmed myself to sin and embraced it with a choke hold. i have sought liberation and found myself tying myself naked to a stop sign, save the splintering rope tied about my waist. i have been there, here, for months, years. my body is crawling away from itself. my muscles have slipped from my tyrant bones, and my bones have managed to escape as well. my teeth have chewed through my mouth, and my tongue laps and twists, screaming violently like a trapped sea monster through the gaping holes left. i possess not a cell of what i was. i am drooling like a mad dog, frothing, gurgling, spitting profanities, praying to be beaten and choked, to be pushed in front of death to see alive.

everything is still, lucid. my life is calm and is as simple as the tides.

can you feel this?