She says to the doctor that it isn’t so bad that it isn’t so bad as she has heard other people have told her, that it isn’t as bad as he thinks it is, as bad as other people have told him, she should know, she knows when it’s bad and it isn’t this time she swears it on her grave, and the doctor tells her that he doesn’t want to be the one to tell her I told you so, putting flowers on her grave, she says that it isn’t like, that she would tell him if it was she could tell if it was that bad which it isn’t because if it was he’d be able to tell without asking her, and she’d know it if it was that bad, which it wasn’t and he’d know and they wouldn’t have to say anything about it, but it isn’t that bad so she could put her clothes back on, forget about it like he did when it happened, and the doctor says that it isn’t as easy as that and she says, yes it is, forgetting is the easiest thing to do in the world she says to the doctor and her pants are on and she’s out the door like she hadn’t said anything at all, which she swears she had nothing to say about it to begin with. Really, there’s nothing to tell.

The me that you know wrapped around your ribs and I could leave I couldn’t breathe I could shed my skin like those snakes that we were both so afraid of and stare at and wonder how do you get one of those where do you get one and it was in the house always outside of the aquarium always outside of its cage and having found its skin on the corner of the bed one day between your toenails we knew right away that you was out of itself and we were out of our minds. Just a little snake you said. It won’t give up. It wants me dead.
A revelation came to me in the moments when I first woke up. I guess I had been thinking in my dreams of umberto eco although I’ve never had the attention nor the intention to read him but standing over the sink I had been thinking about something he had told me or something that someone who wasn’t him wrote about him and I was all very clear and clear for him I felt something come through in settle and make itself invisible swallowable and learnt. Something about language. Something about language that made it understandable something that set my mind at ease with what I’m doing, with writing and being so clear headed safe and relieved I came and sat here to jot it down before it left me before it became so well learned that it dropped out of articulation. But like everything else it and everything that it brought gone.
All I think about is filling up the page, how to get there. What to write what needs to be said anything to get to the end of it. I don’t want to stick around it’s too hard to stay here to force myself to stay here and pay attention to the moments beside me around me plaguing me at all angles. It isn’t nice here and it isn’t easy. You’d think it would be because breathing is such a simple act of faith. In deep and out there you go. Simple as one plus one but then you realize that one isn’t a number at all, that there’s no such thing as one thing being only itself or time stopping for one thing to be itself and the world shatters into raving maggots crawling shedding fish scales and everything is wet and thick and soft to the touch and my god breathing the easiest thing to do in the world becomes impossible.

an agony to breathe
deliberately
that next breath
but never being enough
to welcome another.
from the unlikeliness
of relieving the pressure
from behind the eyes,
to be scream
(wiring of metal slivers)
sweaty hands
over the neck,
to push my tears
roughly beneath
the skull,
the cranium,
the lacking.
my lip dry and never
twisted round enough
to lessen this tongue.
wanting to hear
teeth cracking the one eye
that could
never find itself
abrasive enough
to tear itself
through the lashes
thrown upon scars
(like bent skewers)
to pierce,
the tension
to make itself
that one “I”.
never forget
looking
for attachment to
the confined self
to say, grinding against skin
within myself,
but quite uncomfortable
to say
“within this skin”
however,
to skin these eyes
this hand is
being swallowed.