Blood Sport (redux)

Pretend you’d been traveling on a business trip …

(All I can say is… stop now. Stop!)

Convinced you’re lost, laying there in that Amazonian outpost — covered by a mosquito net — the masses of mosquitoes, a deluge through the open windows. All that keeps you from complete ruination is the scrim of heavenly white fabric — as shear as your head feels, as empty of answers on how to get back. Your stomach roils with an invasion that can’t be stopped.

The stomach virus eats away at you from the inside, gnawing at the stuff of life within — at the hole in your heart glued over with spit and spent cartridges.

The siege inside lays waste to you, filling you up with legions of your own dead cells that are conscripted and committed to the front as fast the virus can kill them. And it kills them.

It kills them all.

A malarial waft, an unseen hand spreads hot unguent on your forehead.

Then a thick fetid smell: a melange of upturned earth with carcass of marmoset, and capybara.

(All I can say is… stop. Stop!)

Your time nears conclusion.

What I’m Reading:

You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

— Adam Zagajewski / “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”