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