SPHERE TWO: HALF DEATHS.
FEAR/CUT/STAB/SHOCK
Image by Danika Furstenberg.
THE SPHERE OF HALF-DEATHS
R: “There is too much of yourself to understand.”
I took it to mean nothing.
Parsing out bones
meant for ornaments,
adorning the person that cannot be.
R: “Abusive. Unidentified assailant.”
Seven horizontal lines on my left arm.
Vertically drawn on soft canvas
draped atop radius bone,
carved by stainless steel.
R: “You’re always doing this.”
There is a well that never runs dry.
It is filled with viscera and rotting cherry,
protruding tibiae and impish crowns. The stench of iron
hangs in the sky, jagged brown dressing the blade.
Brittle specks of glass.
Some days, the well is your body
and your body is the wasteland
that was built to rot. So you carve
initials in stomach lining,
hardly visible, scorched by acid.
(if there is a biodegradable part of you
that could be ingested further
it is in the childhood
that you cannot remember.)
R: “Within yourself, it’s a cut above the rest.”
Start it slow, exorcise the joy.
Internalize the misery, and give it meaning.
Note the graphical improvements to imagery.
You dream morbid dreams about your decrepit body. The miasma
it becomes – shallow pinkish pustule fattened with spit and stripped skin,
you dream about the love you never gave. How many half-deaths
can burst open a dam, flood the body till it has no reason to engage – there
it is, again, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body.
How many half-deaths does it take to love a broken body?
R: “Another open space. Start from there.”
There cannot be complete erasure in a cleaned-out space.
A part of you is always forgotten, always claimed. Be it
the floorboards that linger on the darkened splotch of wine,
or the chipped scraps of paint on the wall from readjusting the couch,
or the strings of cartilage that cannot be swallowed by the vultures.
All sentient beings have an atom that is indivisible and stubborn.
Unable to splinter, unable to be whole again.
R: “Self-harm is no harm. You made it to the end and found yourself starting again.”
This is not the story where you forgive yourself.
And I understand your addiction to anger.
You are cruel enough to know kindness is just as abusive.
Especially when you cannot believe it. This is what the cuts are for.
That is what you sell yourself as you stumble down the well.
The body is a site of memory. It adorns what has happened,
imperfect to every chipped tooth, every cracked fingernail,
every chapped lip and blistered flesh.
Remembering to be kind enough is a cruelty.
How many half-deaths would it take?
R: “Another shuttered space to slice open. You don’t know where to stop.”
If you debase a wall to its fundamental building blocks
you become so unstable that you forget ever having built a li(f)e.
If you show compassion to blight, you memorize to the second
the windfall of grace, the passing sounds of melodrama and sadness.
When all is done, there will be nothing but space. And only then,
do you cry. Do you cry? Do You? Cry.
R: “Romanticism calls it beautiful – the body with too many open spaces.”
You have yet to hit the bottom of the well
but your heart is calm. Gritted teeth ground into white powder.
There is only so much of your mind to destroy
in mistaking the painful for the profound. But still, the well deepens.
R: “Is that what faith is?”
The inescapable feeling of purpose
and the distance – light years and a stone’s throw – needed to know yourself.
R: Is this what faith is?
You have spent the years of your life walking.
No one said you would like what you find.
R: Is this what faith is?
Another half-death. Another prayer, answered.
But the words to the hymnals are wrong.
R: There is nothing of yourself left to care for.
Praise be.
Nothing is as nothing was.