from the collection of: p. botte

I will show you what I mean.

(There is a darkness that hovers in the corner until I’ve had enough.  Enough fasting.  Enough avoidance.  Enough silence.  And then the darkness expands.)

I will show you what I mean.

(The words still play behind my eyes.  But they play closer to the surface and their play is less play and more castigation.)

I will show you.  I will show you soon.  I will show you now.

The darkness that hovers bleeds over the floor, bleeds out of the corner until half the room looks as if it were in the corner and then as if the whole of the room was a part of the corner.  We are all in the corner.  We are all cornered.  Mass of all condensed into a corner of existence.  Density that sucks the air out of your lungs.  Density that drags the blood to a halt in every corridor of the body, every veined passageway.  I know not why things stop when faced with the blunt weight, but they do.  But they do.  But.  They do.

And now I am showing you.

The room becomes your dream, your dream becomes the room.  Desire and death mingle at the tip of a tongue in such a way that your eyeballs nearly lap up the lustrous insinuations.  Insinuations.  Sinew.  Corded up and knocked down.  Swallowed by the dark.  And you have become your own dream.  It is you of whom you are terrified.  It is you that loves you.  It is you that is the tumbling face of the cliff and you who dresses yourself up in fecal farce.

I know you.  And you, of course, know me.

Thank you and good night.