i don’t recall what happened after

before is crystal clear though

it was a smile, a kind word, a compliment said not for one in return

after? mystery

before? easy

it began with a seed taking root within my guts, roots spreading from my now wobbly knees, past my sweaty palms, across my desert like tongue, through vascular innocence and threading around nervous endings

but beginnings

it began when my eyes grew confused, when my brain found the haunting beauty incomprehensible in scope

it made no sense this sense of sensing something beyond sense, sensual in design, screaming across suddenly bared disbelief

burning to death in ice, freezing to death in magma, drowning in silently lucid dreams of sand and salty spray

it took three or four more instances of this disconnected reality to realize the fluttering wings of magpies, of ravens, of crows, filling my intestines

was an emotional digression, repression, depression

my cyborg heart contracts with ursine ignobility, baring all to the erstwhile misapprehension

this was before

before the words fell out in unspoken reverie

she understood before i did, made it inconsequential before the consequences could manifest

so that after was present, present was past, before became forever, now just a myth

she said it wasn’t what it was because simple denial is simpler than complex acceptance of simple fact

i didn’t understand any of it

just dreamt of before because after was too complicated for my broken mind to comprehend

that was then

i am trapped in the after mathematics of it all

scribbling equations until sensory deprivation makes sense, deprives scents, reprieves sex, denies the sects of sensual binary despair
0110100101100111010011110101011001000101011110010100111101010101