A veil drops down like any old shroud — any old coat found in any old musty closet — talking the language of stitches and fabric and irretrievable time.

My flesh is sewn tight with the same old needle, the same conversation lacing its rhythms through epidermis, dermis, muscle, bone — a sanguinary pact sealed with dead sea drops steaming in crystalline rivulets up into the summer sun (so light does peek thru desolated blanket after all) I think I thought.

Otherness. Lumens of awareness and feeling of distance juxtaposed — repulsion polaric like any old magnet pair wrastling their volatile way across ten dimensions exploding exponential contention — nothing to see here. With this light switch flipped, all the chores checklist-crossed-off and we with our contrary motions — that same partial understated (due to lack of proximity) and somewhat sinister harmony crowing gracklike, glinting its wild eyes out from embodied obsidian, omnidirectionally. [Sorry, do not shoot the messenger; chute the following. I'll bring the ladder.]

A filter flits. Crown dream time world love gore of being numbers crunch collide no events occur outside this now everything nexus of be-all end-all know-all know-naught pretention clutches plunges scrabbles along the duntunnel falling forever scenes pass too quick for memory faces fade features fry boil shake into digital noise ecstatic beauty jewelfacets of pain jailing trapping keeping joy holding it tight too close strangling thoughtrachea oneself against otherself. Veiled, masked, cloaked, muzzled made one. A filter flits.

...

Some time later a stasis takes hold of me (hated claws of stability, iron changelessness and paradoxical decay of physical oxidation.) Days or minutes or centuries pass. Seasons — so many climatic fads, bizarre and childish compressions of ever-shifting sentiment coalescing into provocative protective garb donned peafowlike against acid precipitation in the planetary public. Paparazzi preen. Morning comes too soon.

Night doesn't come as it should but glows skeletal: eerie with aquamarine artifice. Where are the stained stars like so many shattered fragments of stained glass? In a sullied muddied cosmos infantile contradictions jockey for position; dialectical abominations creep up — so many weeds slinking through the semiorganic crevices of the city's decrepit body. (They claim magma is far beneath, a seething ocean. Proportionally, however, soon under the skin gives way you see it easily — discovered when the former is shed serpentine by a cobbled-together infrastructure dropping like dwindling polar ice into liquid nothing below.)

Where am I to be found in this sea of ideological inanity? How may I see myself in these underwater cavepaintings of crude, vaguely human anguishes and brief shimmers of sunlight filtered through terrifying kilometers of saline void?