Sky Saw (6 page)

Nor did I want what hands I had been given

When I slept I dreamt only ever of the Cone

The years went on like that for years

Sometimes what a year was would change in midst of counting

A month would pass and it’d been a week

An hour did it’s thing and it’d been twenty

The space of air outside my mother often filled with dogs

Or it would fill with larvae or with flowers

Some days other men or sounds of men

Inch by inch I watched the years that were not years sludge along under motor oil and ash

What white of wide machines among me scratching rooms and windows into all my eyes

Our hole of god

I heard the evenings counting down

What had been and always be had not yet happened

Inside the house my mother hung long reams of paper, which rats would rip down to use for dens

There were the walls we had repainted

One fresh coat for every layer of our flesh

For weeks while we were sleeping the skin would become costumes, helmets, rings on fingers, fat sacs, gloves and gowns, by lengths destroyed, unveiled

In these guises we would walk around and feel the world

Inside the fold I learned to read by staring at an afghan my mother’s mother hemmed from old clothes in her rivulets of sweat

The grunt of something peeling

Dadmeat

Money

I was already very old

I learned to write by pinching gristle in the cortex of my face to kill the instant as it happened

For each face I held for hours some nights there were several other faces I would feel behind the one I knew is mine

I did an eating in me

I shat me out again

I made out of my shit another chest

I made my skull inside the mother

I called it
me

Then I forgot

I learned to read again the new tongues by counting money where it was placed against our frame

We were laid upon white tables

My mom and I and anybody else at all I had not ruined

I learned to laugh by buying land

The land outside my forming body was named by hours full of light

I loved this light’s age, from this distance

I did not need another way

I had just only pieced together my cerebrum and the gorehouses of my wanting one night when in the blood someone reached and took me by my arm

My joint slipped from its socket

The arm inside my arm went numb

Among me on the air my mother screamed as if she’d hit her head against some low ceiling

As if what was coming out was not how she’d expected or intended

And what was all this white foam

Why the putty on her nostrils

In the color of the Cone

It had always been this way already

I did not want to come out of her either

I was miles long and so was she

I knew all of what had been done in the Cone’s name and in my name by me and all the other men, where a man is also any woman, any summer, any inch

I did not want to see the me who I’d already been always awaiting

What one of me I’d let touch and rub my buttons in the middle of my grossness

I tried to use my nails, full grown already, to claw my way back to where I’d hid

Her soft tunnels streaked with rip and all those rooms there

It did not work

At least at last I left my itch imprinted on her insides, a gluey stamp on our last life

When I came out fully finally I found my mother held inside an axis above the floor

Her gut still hung fat once I had emerged as with me in it

All the bruises on her face

We did not touch

There was an air there cogitating

It is like this even now

Even now, I mean, there is still something here about the gleam about me I do not like

And still again

One thing about my birthing fingers is they came equipped with rings

No gems, just bands of plastic

When I make them spin they burn

My veins bulged as if hiding something solid in them

Look out the window

Who is there

Who is it inside me I can’t quite feel

As when my mother eats a sandwich—no bread no butter—dust

I can’t keep myself from snatching at it, after more growth

I can’t restrain the tremor in my life

My even longer nails now making marks to match the ones set inside her

Sets in sets of parallels unsized

My mother in the evenings walks room to room with her eyes closed, a necklace painted on her neck, a blistered dictionary

This house runs in all directions from itself

I can feel the walls tug in the kitchen, all air so stung with thinking, neon white

The night cut brighter now than wherever you are

And the dawns are even worse

I do not want to go on making more of me in my own mind

I have not in some time eaten dinner or laughed a little

Hang on, there’s someone else that wants to talk

Hi

I am the child inside the child

I have another child inside me

That child has another child inside that child with another child inside it also

I also am the mother and the father also and I also am the child around my child and etc.

I’m exactly like the Cone but very different

Like you but different

So

So inside one of all these children, in their lining, the lining of the lining, there is a cyst

The cyst is made of cells of skins of other bodies in other years before my mind before I died

Before all of anyone forever

Inside the cyst there is a tumor & inside the tumor there is a clasp

The clasp will scream and rattle when you touch it—
it is yours too
—it speaks a voice of many men

The men are hungry, as you are hungry

Do not be afraid

Undo the clasp

The fold will open

Blood will be singing in the tone

The sun inside the sun will bow

Fold your arms into a gesture you remember

Move into the fold

The manner of your movement once in the there again depends on several factors I don’t have the compassion to explain

Regardless, you will enter, and you will see the day

You will begin

Inside the fold locate the fold again

This other fold can open also

Move into this fold, too, when you find it

If you find it

And I believe you will

Though you are relatively young

And this might go on for many hours, or even winters

Ages of dead sun

By now you will feel a great exhaustion

Something screaming in your wads for our life

Inside the fold inside the fold you will see someone is waiting

Many of us

Endless people without their face

People you held known once, all of them stuttered

Soon there will be more

Person 811 had gone so far into the fold of other air now he could see no way going back. He remembered the mirrored room and all the buzzing. He remembered putting his head one certain way against one mirror, in which his face there reddened, and then grew—the distance between him and himself there coming closer—
what was this looming
—and how as he came to touch his head against the mirror, he’d moved his eyes straight through his eyes. He even remembered the hot compressed feeling like something punched to tattoo flesh that seemed to metastasize all through his body each time while inside his eyes he blinked him through.

What he did not remember was how he’d lost his way. From the mirrored room he’d come into a color: unprismatic, globbing, old. As he’d moved forward, sideways or simply down, the color seemed to change. When the room went hyper-red the air was liquid and he had to swim to save his
breath. He’d slashed his thin arms through the lukewarm potion. He’d kicked until he found a wall—a flat clear wall that spread in all directions.

Through the wall he saw a child—someone standing just outside the plastic skewed with eyes large as fifty fathers—eyes that grew into other space—rooms where he could see people he knew and had known, growing, eating, making fuck. He felt his body try to shout out through the pane to make it open, to thread himself into this once familiar air, but then the holes making the child’s eyes had blinked and fleshed in and moved away. In the place his voice had been inside him, then the water moved to fill his skin. The father felt caverns crumple in him. He felt his lungs expand. As he gasped the slipping liquid he found himself lodged in creamy whir—the blue of blues set ringed in more eyes—he felt them itch. The eyes were looking at a fire. A horrid burning, miles and miles, clot and cinder sticking to his wetness. He felt some massive eyelash cragged at his slits, his him in he here. The eye flipped shut and again open.

BLINK

The sound the blinking made inside him came like someone sawing on the air, like metal melting into metal—though on the outside of his body, had someone been there who could hear it, it sounded like no sound.

The color changed again—his person with it. He spun around. There were all these versions of him crowded around, as far as he could see, some
slouched, some sick or burning. They were all looking straight on into his mind, teeming hard for clear transparence in the ways he had seen himself become, ways in.

He put his hands over his face and screamed for someone to come swimming up into himself and make him move, to fill his body with fresh flesh.

BLINK

He appeared inside a barking dog—
this was the dog he’d heard out his house for every year he lived, every year, no matter which house, the same barking, the same evenings.
In the dog he moved through its body as its barking, moved out of himself to hover over the dog’s skin, where he could see through saw not far-off window his own body sitting there inside the light, and just as his body began turning to look at him,
his twin eyes spinning,
He (in the barking) turned back to air and became inhaled into the same dog body once again.

BLINK

He burned inside the cracking meat on the black pan hot as some summer
—a summer made of sound, in which the whole world had took to spinning faster, throwing bodies off it into no light
—in the meat his body began releasing liquids he had had once imagined gone forever—sweat and
shit and spittle, semen, tears—and with these his flesh was basted, charring his flesh into new flesh, into flesh he could not recognize himself in, though he could smell the frying of his panic, and he could sense the searing down into him of what he had been, and what he’d wanted to be, what he’d done. The blackened body was then eaten, administered into another body, flooded through a bloodstream, through certain organs, which transferred his person into heat—as heat he vibrated in vocal cords of the voice the body carried, which sounded like his own fully, he heard himself saying his name—

BLINK

He appeared in the background flat of a famous painting on a wall in room inside a mall somewhere now mostly buried under earth, buried and still there, the blood of all the past and future shoppers holding him in its pigments waiting to be painted in or painted over there again.

BLINK

Nothing.

He was so soft.

BLINK

Hundreds of thousands of bodies copulating in piles of flour, candy, cash, grinding rinds and stumps of self against the next couple in the series splayed unwinding on a mask of sand and dirt spread wider than his eye could manage, there at their center, bellies bulging, and above them all at once, the shrieking field.

BLINK

He appeared in a billion forms of glass—in mason jars slick with men’s spit, standing over the father’s childhood bed as he lay sleeping—in the carved décor of some crushed carousel, its cracked crank music dead and waiting—in compacted eons of old light—glass in telescopic rifle lenses used to kill—glass in someone’s window flat and breathing, through which the person on the other side could not see. Each inch of glass refracted other of him into fifty and into each of those again, splitting hard down through his centers, and his centers’ centers, and the mink of days becoming something held. A hard rub in the teething. Him growing young