two weeks with my only tethers to this mortal coil, my progeny, my shattered soul made whole

managed to make it home, the roiling mass of tentacles, the curling ball of sorrow like acid etching the back of my throat before collapsing in a heap

it is quiet now

no noise to muffle the frantic screams echoing through my skull, no buffer from the intrinsic icy self hatred

like nails across a chalkboard, or, fittingly for me, the movement of dry flour across the bottom of the skillet

i am constantly trying to better myself for them, made sausage gravy for breakfast for my rasion d’être, good at following instructions to a certain point, cook the sausage over mid high temps, slowly add flour until it is all soaked up, a meat roux, but the last of the third cup sent shivers down my spine

that is what it is like now

emptiness

now it is a fragmentary scent floating in the still air

have you ever broken down at the thought of sausage gravy

become a mess

had a manic evening last night, as the realization that my two weeks of importance was drawing to close

the thought of two weeks as a hermit, cut off from societal obligations, a wounded bear in a cave surrounded by the vestigal remnants

great for creativity, certain aspects of something i have been writing came into focus, the razor sharp gleam of mania igniting the flow

a small glimmer to latch onto as sleep fought and i tossed and turned until i realized it was dawn and slowly hobbled to the kitchen to prepare their feast

but with every rise, so shall too come a precipitous fall

tumbling through the air like a suicidal penguin, grasping too late the nature of flightlessness, of feathers shaped for swimming and surviving frigid waters not soaring through the steel gray skies

ever the dreamer until the ground comes spiralling up, the last thing to go through my mind my fractured femur and good intentions

loss of faculties, mental and physical, deadened limbs, structural abnormalities

mutated from black as tar sin into a shade, an illusionary image of man, a rock em sock em robot, head sprung from one too many uppercuts, self inflicted or not

until all that is left is reverberating words and ceaseless depressionary tactics

like a detainee on four days with no sleep and the death metal screams of chris barnes on repeat, exhaustion and an unwillingness to give in and name names, stubbornly refusing to give in, instead give life to the fragmented constructs

loathing, a layer of lingering lecherous malignancy, a hardened shell of litigious lacerations, latency between limb and luminescence

an onslaught of l words, lurching, leaping, lessening, leaving, leeching, lethargy, leprosy

wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

can’t find my tootsie roll center, the candy layer salted and tasting of raw sewage and aluminum foil being chewed and sparking on my fillings, chemical burns

chewing thermometers to get that mercurial feeling of living not surviving

not mere existence

my inner turmoil feels like being pulled in a taffy stretcher

fuck you for turning this incessant itch into sweetened similes

burnt oil drips from my tear ducts as i scream with no mouth into the polished metal of this razor clutched so tightly my fingers seemed engorged like a sausage casing

and the hint of sage wafts into unwilling nostrils

and the silence beats me like the stretched skin of a kettle drum

two weeks

i can do this

his birthday is friday, and i gave him two weeks of birthday celebration but cannot hold him tightly on his day

every hug the last eight year old hug these arms will ever feel

and i didn’t cry

not until i got home and locked the door

not until the loneliness like a lead lined apron draped itself unasked over my shaking shoulders

as i fell to my knees and damned the world for spinning too fast

one million, three hundred and eighty two thousand, four hundred seconds not enough

never enough

just five more

five more desperately clutched seconds to breath them in, to absorb as much,

to super glue the pieces so they aren’t so sharp, grating underneath the skin

empty pleas, spit into the eye of an unheeding void