I come into the house and there is snow. Beyond the house it’s snowing, too. The snow is cinder and skin. It rains forever and has rained forever.
I close my eyes and open my eyes and the man I was once is there before me, not anyone I know by name but someone crushed between the sum. His body is made of all the bodies having been consumed into a single flesh. He is translucent. He stands craned with his arms above his head and eyes wide open, so much skin he has no features. The mass of his body is wet with blood pouring through his openings.
The blood runs off of his body into the ground, caking layers that lick beneath my feet and hide the world. I realize I am bleeding too, gore from each pore of me erupting off to match the other man. I see my arms are raised like his; our skins are knitting, while beneath them congregate the rub of days I can’t remember living.
The world breathes with us. And the days. The screws and bolts turn in their sleeves. Blood pours in from the window and the sockets. It pours in from the speakers in the walls also, through any gap it can imagine.
Today above us all the stars are bleeding, and the sun’s face, and the planets. Birds raining blood and the idea of god. And the corridors removed of destination. The age of the earth gathers packed in and still pouring hot and on inside itself all at once and never-ending.
I close my eyes and at the same time feel the eyes of all the bodies around me open and behind the skin there is no lens.
I fear I am not ending or beginning, but that I am.
I remember believing you could remember things about the days that surrounded your whole life and became carried in the place where you were meant to live forever in you.
I remember how the teeth fell from my mouth. They were beaten from me, or I lost them growing older. What’s the difference. I remember how where the teeth fell out more teeth came in behind them. And behind those teeth, more blood, and behind that, any memory.
I remember remembering I folded up a forest and I ate it. I’d chewed the dirt out from between the roots and felt it grow out in the long locks of my hair.
I come into the house and who is there. I ask the question and the sound goes bang along the back side of my face and ricochets inside me and redoubles and makes splitting, the words raining back through me down in mirror-sound, beating out my shape from the inside. Each time I ask again I’ve become older and the words have gone slipped in what they mean, no world of what they were remaining.
I remember a watch I found burnt in some dirt that had no hands. I carried the watch thereafter faceup in my palm, never releasing or relaxing, never using the little strap. The leather of the watch’s band was so bright in direct sun you could hardly stand to look anywhere else, even to read the time.
I remember there are more things I cannot remember than things I can remember, though I can’t remember any of those now, or what about me makes me think that what I’ve just said now is true or ever could be.
I come into the house and it is full of every instrument, the guitars and the pianos, cymbals, amps; all the chords and their strings unstrung at one end from their tuning pegs and tied to something at the center of my mind, underneath which awaits something I have never seen and will never see.
I know I can’t remember how inside this house to get from room to room; or I can’t remember where the next room is, even seeing me go there ahead of me before I get into it; or I can’t remember what the room is for, why there are walls between this room and this last one as the condition is the same; or I don’t want to move; or I am already there before I’m there even ahead of me already in my bloated body; or I have never moved at all, at any point in all the time I felt me moving.
I can’t remember I do not remember typing that last sentence and then deleting it from there and then retyping it again without the memory of having typed it or realizing ever before that all of this was going on. I can’t remember how I fear this may be the case with everything I’ve ever said here, and what of it.