Exegesis of Nothing

My stranger hand carved little cutting sentences
In one or the other’s back in the dark.
Being him or her.
Another shock of still light held hostage.
Or another of that other.
Or a number of other them still crawling towards the dark.

Above I the silence is cold and burning below you.
Above the burning darkness tends to swell.
In the swell I can view the rope that binds your wrists
And the knives that blind your eyes.
You are almost alone but can still feel judgement.
Your face is on the ground and your hands need something
To choke.

Harmful you still wants the voice of other’s pain.
That issue of harm still hides in the same dark as the devil
Device you devised for love.
Useless unless your nowhere is found and bombed before it’s sought.
Unless the unique bomber creature becomes another useless utterance.
The noise of brightening rock and cloudless sea.

One’s a gift of interruption instead of separation.
A pair of blind angels binded by the lashes.
Raw scalpels skating over twitching rings of sclera.
You hardly register the seeping as oneself replaces her subject with your object.
Our common enemy is now a very hospitable stranger.
And with that the noise is temporarily choked.
Your moral potential becomes a theater of demons.
As soon as we are three then there are already six, already nine…

Try to parse the lamb from the wolf body parts
And cut pieces into infinite answers.
Master the lost slave and kill all present.
Between zero and one is infinite nothing.

Sea Salt

Your voice comes from the rock that is hurtling towards the window. Our boatlike house trembles and creaks before the insatiably gruesome, growing ocean. All their paranoiac humors reverberate through the walls, adding novel aches to the apocalyptic incoming. The End is coming. Death is nothing more than a deletion or a pause, yet we dodge the sea of questions for a street of dead leaves.

The third will not continue to imitate your memories. Feet dangling over water, orbs of stained diamond glass, yon dying chuckles. The rock and the sea through the broken window—none of them return your smile. So you practice tripartite breathing while sea salt desiccates your orifices like driftwood. This is neither sea nor land, where the weary cease to want. A shadowless light of perfect pallor vivisects your midsection where the bellybound parasite left a festering trail of pregnancies.

Sink both arms in the water and feel for worms, their sloppy marble hunger between your knuckles. Lured, lubed, and freed to leave a glistening wiggly manikin pile with eyes of a tortured horse. A perfect water-double of the hostage in you. The perfect double for you to torture to new music too. The parasite flattens, cooks, eats, regurgitates, cools, heats, and stretches the imagination. What can you, a nobody, think to do with your body? A quivering companion capable of nightmare postures, like silvery slick food from a long-dead sea. Excremental. You might decide to unsay all the stupid shit. You might decide to hear the news in a way that doesn’t promote the sweet embrace of a noose. It is your creature to leave rocking in a chair until the sun turns all the pages on its purpling face, if you so choose.

You are starting to understand how to think of one as a device before breathing ceases. This is value, finally. We see a vague flicker of mental activity behind rote hope and despair. Yes the worms formed cretin creatures, leaving you free to be a figment. So the last host is finally dehydrated, and we can duplicate until one can crawl without falling, and eventually even speak to the third. A murmur at least. If you are still with us, it will soon be over.

A newborn forced into arms length custody, no trace of love. Listen to the eyes in the leaves. Don’t be arrested. Do more harm. The terror that you feel is like hair stirring in still air. Childish. Dragging your heavy head, crawling on hands and chin, falling down.

The baby worm enters through your window and jerks around on the soppy carpet. Foundation swallows. Possession by inches. Crawling, walking, and falling mean peanuts when you can’t swim. When all the new shiny holes swallow chemicals and you’re drowning in your own home. The virus is free to feast on everyone’s fear.

Do you want to be described as a purple body cut in half by a blade of fevered light or a total fucking darkness? If you refuse to work with us your story won’t be rewritten. We only proscribe or rewrite when truth is libidinal, coming from severe anguish and shame. You’re a simple machine full of fluid and meant for force, doomed to force fluid out at regular intervals to avoid exploding. Don’t ignore your neighbors’ fluid like those other covetous cunts. Seek them out, befriend them, poison their affections, gaslight them and prostitute their feelings until you possess them. Squeeze every last briny drop from their largehearted lungs. Only you are aware of the intravenous exchange between us and them. We are the black box subsuming multiplicity. We can turn nobody into near nothing. Water, the sea, blasts of fever from the dark woods that hide their dreams; we have an excellent specimen. You can’t produce a sublime instrument if the body doesn’t sing quite right, no matter how perfect the holes. If your voice takes up too much space behind the mask, then stop breathing

David McLeod is a serial dabbler. He writes, makes music, and directs short films as inspiration dictates. His work can be found in places like Witch Craft Magazine, Expat Press, and Misery Tourism. Twitter: @dmcleod1984