#iipl

Your face is not your face is not your face around the curling carousel it twists in place to take from you and all the tattered stolen souls  whose sense of me is swollen and distended into no(thing).

Round and round and round it goes and (when) it deigns to stop who you might be you cannot know, so touch and feel the skin atop your skull to test the limits and extremities of where this canvas comes to rest, in robbed identity and peeling names that you could swear were never yours.

The music swells through you. The music vomits from you. The music calls a name that through the tears of half-grasped memories seems almost and eternally familiar.

So dance. [Dance to the / beat of the / thump of the / chase of the / still] and plastic horse hooves which cannot break from where they are secured by bolts and glue and eggshell-thin reality that paints a visage of sense almost enough to tell you that the nausea that swells and pushes at the limits of your mind is incorrect.

There’s nothing wrong.

The world in which the carousel will twirl is not the hollow hell you fear; it is the world. Just the world. A world where if you’d wished to have a name it must be stolen, carved and pulled full-bloody from the frame of others who had wished in vain to hold their selfness close.

You want a face? Take it. There are so many here, and those who cannot hold them, well, whoever chose to give them such a gift must take the blame, knowing they could never keep it in a world of so much thieving strangeness.

And soon enough they will forget they ever even had one, rest assured; it’s best to step the dance and keep your face  secured as much as you are ab(le). 

Just. Keep. Running.

Your feet- or are they just the shoes with emptiness within?- will pound upon the creaking wood of carousel-top, or perhaps the only ground there’s ever (been), so struggle not to look behind - though can you trust your eyes to tell you quite what it might be that dogs your steps and see the poor procession of those gory, faceless wretches who have lost possession now of all their treasured wants, identities to those who are now them?

Like you.

You tire of the chase, of course, the fire and all-relentless pace of competition reaching for  a name, identity, and face that has long since worn through all reserves of hard, enduring vigor in you. Yet still you only stay a self while willing on your aching legs that feel like breaking just to keep you forward of the frenzied fray of hazy clawed who-are-(yous).

So run. Just run, and listen to the music of your panicked flight from those who long to take what you have stole from those no longer worth a name.

Ever-onwards-forward on the curling (path) of [merry-go-round] that’s twisted, wound, and spinning in its [harrowing sound] of organ-piping-circus-tunes that [merrily hound] the steps of your escape.

Could you turn a thought and burn your lead on your pursuers, an ankle change a charge now perpendicular to your intended line of best retreat, and stake it all on one last hope, your bruised feet pounding to the edge?

The boundary. Don’t stop the ride, but you still want to get off.

But no, for all the dreams of bounding, leaping off into the great unknown, you see the ring of broken mewling wretches who have shown the sting that comes with such rejection of the truth, so seldom spoken yet inside you all- that there is no way off the merry-go-round.

And so perhaps the twirling round that pushes all who passenger the carousel might help you stay ahead, and so you seize the rough and peeling pole of ancient wooden horse, ignore the sloughing, screaming wood that comes away in clumps, and grip the saddle hard, in hands that should be clean but now have never seen a day they were not caked in glue and slaked with blood of all the robberies existence deems the only way to live.

Ride away. Just ride away.

Up it goes. Down it comes.

Hold [fast to the joy of the rise], despise all thoughts you might descend. And in the end, protest against that fall back down to painted wooden spinning earth, with all the tear-streaked grasping of the mass of gasping, still unnamed oppressed.

Cry to the horse, Go higher! Faster, offer painted apples that you think perhaps it might desire, but the frozen face is still the same, the simple cast of equine terror, framed and caught in wood and plastic bulging eyes of fear.

Its pace remaining as it ever was; it does not care for coming pains as you are torn.

Doesn’t it know who you are? No.

And soon, neither will you. Although to call it “all is lost” is more dramatic, yes, than has been earned. For those upon this carousel who have not been you already, perhaps they know without a memory how good it is to have a face and name.

It’s not the same as what you had when first you climbed the brightly painted stairs, but not the worst who you have been. And as the horse drops through the air into the crowd of eager, waiting thieves you are unbowed and, yes, afraid, but still the music plays, and turns the world upon its gaudy ax(is).

You will be someone again, someday.

The hands and fingers reach and breach the gentle veiled complacency and respite that had just been yours upon your mount’s ascent, and now the wood is bent and bowed as faceless things who long to be a who pull splinters from the rot of screaming saddle and of rid(er).

You, who feels the mask of sharp and (hard) identity begin its gentle fracture into jagged shards of names that you once were.

I’m still Hannah! you try to scream, but are you? No. Perhaps there’s some Veronica as fragments there, or Julian, or Anya, but- no. You feel the last of names and who you might have been be torn away and borne towards new bod(ies). New pages, blank, determined to be peop(le).

The rotten, ragged rush of fetid fingernails that dig and push and reach around the edges of your face until they scrape against the bone in such a rough, scratched tone, that rocks and echoes through the space that was your mind, and when they peel it from you, like [the skin of an orange, the skin of an apple, the skin of a pig, the skin of a child, the skin of a you], then comes the briefest flash that surely now it’s done, so much perhaps the pain will be somewhat lessened.

There’s no way it could hurt as much as you rememb(er).

But it does, and so, of course, you (scream) and scream and curses foul, obscene will tumble garbled over where there once sat other people’s lips or yours now gone and teeth that once shone yellowed ivory a crimson in the flowing sanguine flood.

And as you lie in agonies and fading dreams of personhood, of knowing who you were and what that might have meant, you hear the bitter whispers of recriminating seekers who have found the treasure of their eager dreams, but see, it seems there’s not enough for all.

And so they fall to frantic ter(ror) and conflict, just as vicious as it was when it was bearing down on you. You lie there in the fugue of vivid pain and feel that gentle rain from violence overhead; some fall dead, or close as this place lets you (lie), for- truly thus to die would be too eager an escape, and listen to the ebb and swell of slow, melodic wail that well you know conducts the flowing rhythm laced into this endless, faceless dance.

At last, a victor breaks away in clinging heartfelt terror of his former comrades, sprinting bold and holding to his skull the severed face that was once yours. Willing it to stick as those who notice try to pick themselves back up and give pursuit to close the gap.

Perhaps you should arise and follow on the things that once you had despised but now have joined. You are, of course, a faceless thing as well, and so should quickly match the pace of those who chase the self-same prey.

But now it is too late; they’ve gone. Their chase will not abate until their former friend is ripped apart in turn. And you have learned to wait.

For there are many faces out upon the carousel, and many names that you might be. So bide your time a while and wait the coming of another one whose fate and face might sit upon your grinning carmine skull.