interval

the depth of the void, the bottomless pit

too young to be singing the blues

Look at me, I am an improvised song. I am writing you in a state of fever. I am writing to you from the hot, pulsing center of being. I do not want to explain this to you, to explain is to tame, and I refuse to tame what beats so wild in me.

I am horrified at the sight of how my heart inflates, how the translucent cartilage of my ear turns red with the sudden, violent rush of blood, how the eyes are always twin, bloodshot.

Listen, with your skin next to mine, close enough to feel the heat from my bone. I cannot preserve what's not there, or speak of what i never saw as myself. To speak of the pit is already to be outside of it, but I am in it at all times, i carry it like a bastard child.

There is a pit, boundless, in the dark of the chest. It has a dream unlived, unwanted, now repulsed. There lives suspended in its own embryo, a dangling chandelier, a throbbing spectacle with rose golden chains and blush jewels, refracting an enflamed trail of thought.

I am infinitely complex and conscious, but at my center there is only a raw, pulsing it, a neutral life force. I cannot touch it but I can smell it, and when I do so, I smell lilacs, fresh under morning dew, as enigmatic as a shy bud, as youthful as a burgeoning one.

Unpreserved and tactile, morose and corroded stays it. It is needy. Until you push flowers down your throat, flowers of blue and red, and feel your insides bleed purple, until then you'll glance outside the window with nothing but a velvet void behind the socket of your eyes and a destitute tongue falling short on words.

To cut open yourself is to reveal what is ugly, reveal the squirming truth that breeds inside. The stains on your face and the scars on your fingers only show themselves in times of vanity.

Cut out the small, timid self that wants to be safe. Destroy the pit, and what is left? A scarcity? A hollowed-out shell, dry and whistling in the wind like an empty reed? A quiet, respectable death while still breathing?

Or do you embrace the eternity of it? Fill the abyss until it overflows, until it drowns you, until it buries you beneath an unbearable, magnificent abundance that crushes your bones with the sheer, terrifying weight of existing right now, in this unrepeatable second.

I choose the abundance. I choose to bleed. I am writing to you from the exact middle of things, worst of times, on the verge of surmounting to nothing.

an engine made of dew,

a wet stone singing in the dark.

no name, no mother, no tomorrow —

only the thick, red shock

of blooming.

i am the lilac

and the mouth that eats it.

i am the bruise

before the skin is hit.

[Nothing, only because I'm everything]