In your dreams, as you languish suspended in containment, you reach with long arms dark like shriveled kitestrings or shadowed trees and scythe down the herds whole. In your dreams you lie still on the eternal mudflats and watch dark streams billow furtively into the gaping maw of earth's end, and the fated gauntlet of the world's ambition flings from the abyss and skids across the steady downward trough of those rivers, sailing upon the glistering carpet, and finds its way into your domain. You are sinew and bone, whatever feckless remains cast from your being, cast into the darkness, the gentle drone of existence within the lead box capitulated by the klaxons' dreadful yawp, rushing through steel corridors, the labcoats scampering from their burrows, and under you they shall melt until their eyes are rid of all hesitation.
Your father was a gravedigger. Your mother was ill and scarcely saw the light of day. You grew shrewd and small under the constant bickering. Father made you work young, just as he had. He walked with a hunch like a great black bear who bore no likeness to the son below its feet. Every month lent new bodies from the lake. All of them workers. All their cadavers stained purple and brown and peagreen from the waters. Before your thirteenth, father never permitted you to look them in the eye.
In the hobble of your youth you counted ramshackle rungs of clay and the dusty vases and the crosses that mother kept about the walls of that old house, and in your youngling years you looked and saw the black water rushing down the stormdrain, the hideous stark gray soup skittering coldly into the ground's incestuous burrow, borne with the striae of the dark fluid like cobwebs or gashes, and beneath the maelstrom you had eyes for the bulging current that no other man or child could chance behold as you did. You made your perch above the drain on the front doorsteps and you would simply watch before mother called for chores or for supper. The fetid syrup. Given the chance you would take it in all at once and wallow in it. The kids at school called you pig or mud boy but never dared to touch you. But you wished they would. You yearned for the chance.
At the graveyard you spied the dog that lapped at the brown bubbling waters making rivulets on the rows; you watched it come each day to the place where you had once left it jerky scraps to eat upon a ragged cardboard piece. You went out the gates and looked upon the animal and made your approach, startling the dog into fleeing. You looked to where it had buried its snout in the ferns and saw the avian carcass which it ate at.
You were thin in those days. In your sleepless nights you would balance upon your banister and peer darkly out the window, and your marble eyes took in the white pustules of light gawping from the streetlamps. One night you sat still on your covers, curled in them like a snake among rabbits, and you heard the gently careening yowl of police sirens rising from the streets below as trunks of smoke grew from the chimneys. You heard the clash of pigiron on the curbs. In those days you were all but bone and flesh and your form was like the branch of some greater tree of Yggdrasil sprouting from the world's dark primordial core. In the night you took your scarf and your coat and tiptoed past mother's sleeping body; you descended upon the street whereupon the car's twisted carcass was laid bare for you to behold under the vastly fading glower of the streetlamp it hit. The policemen made their steady approach as you peered inside, and you gazed upon that twisted carcass until they took you away.
You are a leper forever teething at the gates of human stipulation. You are an emperor scowering darklands unclaimed as you crouch in the black hole that marked your first grave. You play our throats like guttural lutes and all around you the song of our kind suffering sings to you for another day. As I die under you, your hands filtering through the velvet flesh of my throat, my chest, my stomach, your hands unfolding like a bowl before me and presenting to my eyes rattling about in the acid precipice of your embrace, and you hold me in your hands, you hold little pieces of me made dark and shriveled and mummified by your touch. You lap me up. Use me up. The waning screams of my colleagues are nothing in my ears as the acid bludgeons my senses, like baptizing rains bulleting through my body and molting it into another kind of rancor. Blissful hypnagogia. You hold me under you and your legions as I slowly send for the primal cascade.
And you will remain submerged, an instrument to the black water, as you take my life.
