The second time. It’s an IUD lodged in your gluttonous craw pregnant with poison. A cinderblock in your cervix turning you into a paperweight. Sue indigestion and tied hands to the indolent signpost, its home the traffic island. Time-lapse. Blur of lights. Buzzsaw infantry of quizzical punctuation party to membrane arson. Rush to the sink to throw up again, but this time be sure not to get any pearls of vomit entangled in your halo. Vision, lurch back to the old stomping grounds of the skin stretched over mismatched cheekbones in a glass. Pore over the loving recreation in burnt hemispheres with those grimy opera glasses. Permission to deflect rays of light around the linoleum granted. Then push off and float across wind-swept plains of crumpled tissues and little orange space vessels with their white caps bestrewn floorwards to nebulous mass of bedding. Scratch with tongue. The dry taste.
Metallic zephyrs playing supercollider tag with cirrus clouds of red pinpricks set to an effervescent, smirking ragtime zip that skips and loops points offstage; the giant petulantly banging his balled-up fists on walkmen. To this: does it look forward? Orientation pornography for a dedicated cartographer (he punched the clock until it was lying on the floor bleeding and it wasn’t moving anymore and then he
hunched himself fetally and cried to himself that it was unfair, nobody had ever been given any choice over the matter and it all had come to this) that gnawed at the nervous system secretively and et the man’s innards and spat out the gristle and bone through his own mouth. His wife and children never knew. And when the birds started singing, it was all gone. Forever.
