My Story / Your Story (an inexquisite corpse)

Mine

I am nothing but decay. A vessel for soft and hard drinking. A Celsius. An Ascent. Grain alcohol. The descent of man — an ascendancy of brimstone and vitriol. This is the time of peak pique — so let’s picket the piquant pissants. I’m embroiled in ecstatic ego. My right hand is frozen, and I’m going away for the last time. It’s like something from another world — and I lost myself out there. 

Monochromatic. Color drained. Gray. Damp. Drizzly.

I’m going away for the last time. 

And you say: there’s more opportunity for death — it’s insatiable. 

I’m waiting for a foot of snow. There’s a big dip in the jet stream. A bowling ball of cold air on the way. At our doorstep. We could get into the car and drive west into the void. We could stay and open the door to oblivion. We’ll never dry out again. 

You say: will it ever be the same?

I: I’m going away for the last time. 

Vignetting at the peripheries of vision now. I’ll make glue from this horse. I’ll make dog food. I promise.

I: Do you ever get the feeling you’re in a linear narrative version of Last Year at Marienbad?

Now you!

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Yours

You say nothing this time. Only the sound of wind pressing its forehead against the window. It’s all static and soft rupture, like a station losing signal, like language attenuating and refusing to carry weight.

My mouth tastes of mist and metal. This mettle. The lights outside have bled into one another — sodium halos — vapors smeared across the wet pavement. Movement. This moment I want to speak but I am a ruin, a half-erased inscription in the fogged glass. A shard of knife edge in deep grass. 

The world narrows, tunnels. Everything pulls toward its center — the eye of the storm, the stream of a singular point where thought collapses into weather. Whether you like it or not.

You riddle my shoulder. It’s already cold.

“Then I’ll go for the last time,” you whisper, though it sounds more like mercy than dismissal. Abysmal and dismal at once. Filled with inert gas.

So I do. Decide. To do nothing further than the necessary.

And as I step out, the snow begins — not in flakes but in the fine, endless, ash of a nuclear winter — each particle a quiet ending. Each ending a half-life too long. The sky folds itself shut behind me. A pin prick. More a kick than a prick.

The horizon erases its own name. “You mean, you’ll render my fear? You hydrolitic cur.” Again, you say nothing.

“This is more like an episode of Bewitched projected  backwards. And I wonder…”

«¡Ahora tu!»

What I’m Reading:

Being asked to explain a poem is like being asked to explain an explanation.

— Carrie Hunter / “…and so History Constantly Dwindles”