“Blueshift”

And this time

I dig deep into my heart

To dredge up black bitterness

Oily, and tainting.

Coating everything it touches

With a metallic tang

Like the air in a stale room

So unpleasant it won’t let you forget

And the tiny-stilted shivers of fear rest on your skin,

Thankfully stilled

Laid carefully over you like paper-mache-

To cover with neglect and time.

Shreds of damp newspaper,

Forgotten bandages

Like elephant skin

Sodden and falling to pieces

If you move.

And the skeletons are scratching

Against the sunlit walls again,

up in the attic.

An eerie, airy noise, like distant traffic

Or a redox

Of packed-in grainy echoes in a box

Rebounding off the floor;

Like the silence in the theatre

After the final chords

When the ghosts of notes

Fall fragilely and are drowned

In the torrent of clapping.

There is nothing that this is like.

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ENTRY #????

I’ve spent so much time perfecting this keep that now I am locked in. So much time defending that I’ve forgotten to question if there’s anything there any more, what I’m for. I’m not for anything, only against. Just negative space that I defend with everything in me, without knowing why. The right to exist for a questionable, vague life too complex to be worth comprehending.

I am compacted—if I move from this crunched space I will break, I cannot re-expand. One way trip, splicing up two-by-fours just to be able to breathe, frantically painting myself into a corner. Who cares about artistry, I’m just trying to get away from the advancing tide. First two feet, then one foot on the ground, hiked up against the corner. Like being inside a letter box, a papered cubbyhole—all the walls covered in writing, signed in blue blood. Footnotes upon footnotes to be read by scholars after those in the Tower are executed. Whose bones lie?

Definitely all your fault. Like a typewriter without the inky finger-staining ribbon, no punched-out stars. It leaves no mark, just a clickety-clack symphony. All your