A Window Of My Soul

Nietzsche was right about God. He’s dead, Satan won.

Heaven’s been razed, demons raped the angels. They choked them with their halos and clipped their wings before casting the broken birds down to earth with the rest of us.

Saint Peter was broken upon the rack, Uriel’s flame was doused. The cherubs were roasted on spits until their flesh was dripping off the bone.

Eden’s been plowed to make way for a multi-level parking garage. Every day the concrete wasteland grows, the demons cultivating us like crops until our succulent souls are ready to be plucked for their rapacious appetites.

There’s nothing we can do now, God isn’t coming back. They strung his corpse up over the pearly gates with his dick shoved in his mouth and his skin peeled back like rolled up sleeves.

Beelzebub lords over our trash heaps, our vast fields of filth and decay.

Behemoth feasts on our blubbering flesh and greed, our corpulent icons of indulgence and sluggishness.

Asmodeus delights in our fear and hate, our incessant wars against that which we do not care enough to understand.

We’re nothing but the sinful livestock of hell being fattened up for Satan’s banquet, so eat up.

I just needed some way to get the thrumming pain to go away.

It’s not the life changing events that put someone in the ground, it’s the minor inconveniences that really pull the trigger.

Ingrown toenails, spilling your drink, pants that are too tight, tripping over yourself in front of a pretty stranger. Those are what really kill.

I often think about how if I got in a car accident I would walk out into traffic and cause another just to save myself from an insurance claim.

Call me Ozymandias, king above all kings.

Look upon my empire, this land of quiet dreams.

Gaze upon my subjects, the boundless stars above.

Call me Ozymandias, I am the one true king.

My crown is sky and birdsong, my throne my own two feet.

All my friends have ugly hearts. Sure they’re good looking on the outside, but on the inside it’s all a wreck. I like the ugly hearts. People with pretty hearts are lying.

All my friends have ugly hearts, waterlogged with booze or choked with smoke. Rusted razor blades stuck between the muscle fibers, oily black blood clogging the arteries.

All my friends have ugly hearts, organs filled with runaway sisters and forgotten loves. Rape and death are scalpels which make fine lacerations in their cardiac muscles. It’s the pain that keeps their hearts pumping.

What keeps our hearts from falling apart, so crisscrossed with scars and open wounds? What holds them together? Is it love or tape or just sheer stubborn ignorance?

You speak of the future as though it exists, as if you believe in more than right now.

Don’t you know that the only time is right this second? That tomorrow is just a lie?

Tonight is the only night that we have, the sun may as well explode at sunrise for all I care.

I thought I could love you, thought it would help if we went slow.

It was all a lie. I never learned how to love for more than a week at a time.

We could have been something great, two people remembered only as one.

I could have called you my Helen but now all you are is someone I lost because I know only how to hunt and consume.

I told myself I could learn to love you but I’m just a scavenging beast with nothing but teeth to my name.

That’s all I’ll ever be.

I can still feel where your arms draped around my shoulders, but here I am on the road again.

Her eyes are not grey.

They are shining, smoky gypsum flecked with rusted iron around the warm and welcoming darkness that is her pupil.

The gaps between my fingers ache when she is gone. Without her hand to fill them, what purpose do they serve?

The voids between each digit loom like chasms of loneliness that only she can fill, canyons carved out by her nails such that nothing else will satisfy them except her.

Without her here to hold, why do I have arms? What good are they if I cannot love with them? What good am I?

The devils are picking at my heart, taking the choice cuts for themselves and shredding them apart like tender pulled pork until all that is left for me is a bloody mess with the texture of a pumpkin’s insides.

No corner of my soul belongs only to me anymore. There is always someone else making their home in there, that or a gluttonous devil gnawing away at it that I have to beat away with a broom handle.

Every time I think I’ve found a silent nook of my soul where I can hide away to myself, someone who was already there lights up a bonfire and invites me to sit. I am homeless inside my own body.

Love will not let me sleep. I run from it, that monster that ravages the landscape of my consciousness. It is sharp and spindly, with too many legs and too many eyes. It always finds me and wraps me in its web once more, injecting its venom and sucking out my insides once they’ve liquified into a human soup.

I am huddled in my room, staring out the window at the sky above me that threatens to burst through the glass between us and pull me up into the blue abyss. The sky is a predator and it is going to eat me.

Sometimes I think about how we all tried to dig to China when we were children.

Out on the playground or in our backyards, we sat down alone or with some friends and came to the conclusion that it was time to shovel away our troubles.

We couldn’t even comprehend the length of a mile, much less the thousands of miles of earth beneath our feet. With sticks and fingernails, we scraped at the hard clay which stained the knees of our pants and made our fingers bleed.

But we still sat down to dig, not knowing that the deepest point on earth had only made it seven miles down before petering out. Not knowing that the heat at the core of the earth would be enough to melt our bones.

We talked for hours, she spent the night and we talked until the sun was soon to shine.

She said she’d call me later.

/ləv/

noun

1. When Orpheus took a stroll through the gates of hell with a song upon his lips, begging for his heart to be returned

2. When Eurydice smiled as he looked back over his shoulder, just a moment too soon

I could muster enough manic and unadulterated power within a single one of my teeth to overthrow any godly pantheon in all of human existence if only I had the capacity to sustain myself without the love of others.

It is much too late, the sun will be rising soon. I have an important exam tomorrow. No, it is today. But instead of sleeping I will be writing about something I know nothing about. They always tell you to write what you know, so I write about madness. I write about the hell that I endure on a daily basis. But they are all asleep right now, those bastards who say to write what you know. So while they sleep, I will write about love.

She is in bed next to me, my love. Beneath the thick blankets piled on top of us, she wears nothing. She is not naked because it is sexy, she is naked because we are one. When our skin is pressed against each other, the lines blur until they are no more.

My love sleeps now, her hair in her mouth and her lips parted in a snore. It is not a pretty snore, not a dainty little thing. There is nothing romantic about it. And yet, every laborious breath causes my heart to beat just a little faster.

She has not shaved in a few days, the prickly hairs on her legs digging into my skin with pricks like freezing rain. I wish they would draw blood, would let us be just that minuscule amount closer together.

The nail polish on her fingers is beyond the point that it could be described as peeling and is now into the territory of near defeat. Her hands are not soft, they are dry and scratchy against my bare chest. I would have it no other way.

Her feet are calloused and her toenails scratch against my shins when she shifts in her sleep. I begin to slowly slide out of bed to take a piss, but in her dreaming state my love grabs for my arm and mumbles something that surely was not intelligible. Probably something about being cold.

After a few minutes more in bed, beloved quietly lulled back to sleep, I once again slip from under the covers and into crisp morning air, this time successfully. Once I have relieved myself, I return to find my most precious darling awake and sitting up in bed groggily.

When she yawns she gets a double chin, and her morning breath smells. She is not a thin Italian model, not on the cover of any magazines, but she is the most beautiful woman in the world when she is in bed with me.

I know very little of love, am not romantically advanced. But this is love to me.

The people who read my poems always ask if I’m okay, if I need to talk about it.

Why? The things are gone, they’re on the paper, they aren’t real any more. They’re just writing now, they never even happened to begin with.

Words aren’t real. Once my brains are splattered on the page, it’s just another piece of fiction. Some of it’s based in truth, sure, but it’s all just fiction really.

My father grows slowly, ever creeping his way towards the sun year after year.

He branches out and casts his shadow wide, variegated leaves dancing in the breeze with a symphony of nature.

Every year he grows yet another ring (and gets bigger around). Every spring he trims his beard, but the twigs grow back before too long.

All his life he’s worked with wood, framing houses and laying floors. Day upon day he moves the boards, constructs them into intricate paintings with woodgrain as his brush.

My father is a wooden man, arms and legs made of groaning trunks which refuse to give out despite the weight warping their bow.

He carries us all, my gnarled old man. Upon his back he built a home of planks and nails. Nails inside his flesh, binding us to him.

Toughened bark covers my old man, rough and strong after years of work. He bounces back like yew and stands tall like redwood, indomitable against the storm.

Sometimes I can feel the madness clawing its way back in. I can feel its claws as it drags itself back out of abyssal nothingness and into my head. They dig into the folds of my mind, rip through my thoughts and scatter them to the wind.

Once that corpulent behemoth has squeezed its abhorrent body through the portal from whence it came, its gnarled fingers begin to shovel my brain into its gullet like scrambled eggs.

Its round body presses against the inside of my skull, threatens to burst the sutures in my skull as a melon might press against its container while it grows.

And just when I can feel my orbital bones groaning beneath the weight of my madness’ obesity, an idea comes to me. Something to write.

With nothing but instinct to guide my fingers across the keyboard, a poem wells up from the whispers of the gluttonous fiend that makes its home in my head.

With the last word on the page, the abominable fiend sees its job to be completed and once again slips back through the gate that let it in, much as a slug might slip through a straw.